This is a beginning book list. I’ve annotated works that were easy to annotate but have read these so far. The real nitty-gritty will lie in absorbing, processing and reflecting the work of Claire Bishop (2012) and the many minor critiques of her approach in other work in this list but most notably in McKee (2016). Bishop uses theory from Rancière, but, I think that she, in a way I haven’t been able to articulate coherently yet, misrepresents that great thinker in a way that redeems art-history at the expenses of any thought about political action.
My favourite quotation at the moment comes in one of the latter’s essays in ‘Dissensus’.
Rancière (2010: 177) puzzles about why the word ‘resistance’ remains fashionable when so many others have become the opposite: terms such as revolt, revolution, proletariat, classes, emancipation, etc.:
“No longer is it seen as such a good thing to want to change the world and make it more just. But this is exactly the point, since the lexical homonymy of the word ‘resistance’ is also ambivalent on the practical level: to resist is to adopt the posture of someone who stands opposed to the order of things, but simultaneously avoids the risks involved with trying to overturn that order.”
Although acquaintance with academia from the margins doesn’t qualify me, this is very much what I feel about that ‘army’ of academics who play with Althusser, or other left, feminist & queer theory but have never wanted that much to change or tried to even apply the sequelae of such theories to anything but their verbal discourse. Sorry – that sounds more bitter than I intended.
References:
Primary
Abidor, M. (2018) ‘May Made Me: An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France’ London, Pluto Press.
See https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2019/04/02/some-ideas-about-may-1968-from-abidor-m-2018/
Debord G. (2012) (2nd ed. trans. & ed. Knabb, K.). The Society of the Spectacle Eastbourne, Soul Bay Press Ltd.
Feenburg, A. & Freedman, J. (2001) When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968, New York, State University of New York Press.
Fišera, V. (Ed.) (1978) Writing on the Wall May 1968: A documentary anthology London, Allison & Busby.
Kugelberg, J. with Vermès, P. (Eds.) (2011) Beauty is in the Street: A Visual Record of the May ’68 Paris Uprising London, Four Corners Books Ltd.
Rohan, M. (1988) Paris ’68: Graffiti, posters, newspapers and poems of the events of May 1968 London, Impact Books.
Secondary
Adams, H. (1978) Art of the Sixties Oxford, Phaidon Press Ltd. – not useful.
Antoine, E. (2016) ‘Art and Poetics Around May ‘68’ in Critique d’art [Online] Automne 2008, Online since January 2012. DOI: 10.4000/critiquedart.784 Available at: http://critiquedart.revues.org/784 (Accessed 06/04/19).
Ball, D. (2010) ‘The Tracts of May’ in French Politics, Culture & Society 28 (1) 77-91. doi:10.3167/fpcs.2010.280105 Available at: http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=858ae21b-1bfb-48a6-8596-36a9c2ea0226%40sessionmgr4006&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=a9h&AN=49033301 (Accessed 04/04/19).
BBC (2019) ‘Atelier Populaire: French protest art found in English castle’ in BBC News (Online) Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-47134468 (Accessed 04/04/19).
Denis Dobson, a rich socialist-empathising publisher who bought Brancepeth Castle in County Durham stored there large quantities of printed work from May 1968 in Paris whose reprinting was authorised by Atelier members and intended for a book that the movement’s members felt was sympathetic to them. These were re-found by his son, Oliver, following Dobson’s death. Interesting comments about AP’s attitude to galleries. They had intended to sell early posters to a gallery to fund a workers’ strike: ‘They realised, forget galleries, we need to put these messages on the walls’ quoting Dr Gillian Jein, ‘French expert’. See https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/staff/profile/gillianjein.html#background
Bishop, C. (Ed.) (2006) Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art London & Cambridge, MA, Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd & The MIT Press.
Bishop, C. (Ed.) (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship London & New York, Verso (references to Kindle ed. – uses Loc. Numbers not pages).
https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2019/04/13/working-notes-on-bishop-2012-artificial-hells/
Crow, T. (1996) The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent 1995-69 London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd.
Copy of pp 150f. with analysis of satiric play in a word poster and a summary of relationship of the art produced to history that is rather gnomic: “From the later 1950s forward, artists could rightly claim to have provided important opportunities to rehearse the attitudes that came into play during the rebellions of 1968 but little that was genuinely new in art followed from it.” (150)
I find this very interesting syntactically. To what does ‘it’ refer – the opportunities given by art or their rehearsal in 1968. In effect the syntactic confusion is mimetic of Crow’s total transformation of the transitions in time covered to a void into which art-history (equating with the evolution of ‘novelty’) disappears – let down by an inadequate politics! Or what else might it mean?
Crowley, D. (1998) ‘Protest and Propaganda: The Propaganda Poster’ in Timmers, M. (Ed.) The Power of the Poster London, V & A Publications, pp. 100-145.
Deals with Paris ’68 under the heading ‘Counter-Culture’ on p.134. The specific section is pp.138-40, with illustration of SS Poster on p. 39.
Describes Atelier Populaire as an ‘anarchist but well-organized studio’. Its posters :
Functioned as counter-propaganda to contest hostile reports in the media and President de Gaulle’s attempts to discredit the students. One underground pamphlet published in London reported:
Mural propaganda… has become a mass activity, part and parcel of the Revolution’s method of self-expression. The walls of the Latin Quarter are the depository of a new rationality … ‘long live communication, down with telecommunication’, … p.138.
‘simple, single-colour screen-prints, stencils and lithography.’ P. 139 The crudity of method and material was part of politics and a deliberate contrast to media sophistication.
‘And unlike much propaganda which operates by confirming received opinion or at least by exploiting popular prejudices, these posters, appearing overnight on the streets of the French capital were unsettling and questioning. An Expressionist image of a girl hurling a brick, captioned ‘La Beauté est dans la rue’, could not be interpreted as a political statement by any traditional view of politics.
French posters had a contingency and immediacy because they were produced in response to events rapidly unfolding in Paris. In fact, the Atelier Populaire published a book of their posters in 1969 to encourage other activists to follow their example and produce posters in response to local circumstances’. P. 139. *Publ. was in 1969.
Deaton, C. (2013) ‘ The Memory of May ’68: The Ironic Interruption and Democratic Commitment of the Atelier Populaire’ in Design Issues (MIT Press) 29 (2), 29-41. Available at: https://www-jstor-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/stable/24266992?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents (Accessed 18/04/19)
This is a necessary but disappointing article. The latter because its take on May ’68 is in large part anecdotal, told in narratives without clear historical evidence and peddling myths elsewhere exploded (about the paradoxical role in 1968 of women & gay men in the light of 70s political-personal politics 40).However, it does take the poster art seriously and attempts analysis often at the level of the literary content but not always. It uses the concept of irony and ‘ironic acts of diversion’ (29, 35) in its former role. It characterises the processes of political posters in themes of ‘ironic interruption’ (responding to contemporary acts, including speech acts) and dialectical work in which history is read as a continuously present struggle (summary presentation 30). More on ‘revolutionary interruption (32, 34). Used to analyse ‘Chienlit’ and other De Gaulle posters on pp. 35-6.
. There is an excellent (mythical?) story of the transformation of artistic production and consumption cycles into political (31-32), which you find used even less well evidenced in other accounts so best to use tis I think – the story of the posters on the way to the gallery being ripped from the students’ hands as a political gesture. It makes the point that the ontology of the posters is determined by their ‘use’ not anything intrinsic or mystical in the ‘artistic process’. Dialectical analysis of ‘matraque’ icon p. 37f, esp. CRS/SS poster (38). Compare to Bishop’s political temporising in the name of art.
There is a good account of seriography (silkscreen printing) and its economic rationale v. earliest papers on quality paper in Beaux Artes stock (33). The process of content democratic decision-making and the incoherence of direct democracy (its ‘illusory coherence’) is on p. 34.
Hanley, D.L. & Ker, A.P. (1989) ‘Introduction : Elusive May – The Paradox of a Moment in History’ in Hanley, D.L. & Ker, A.P. (Eds.) May ’68: Coming of Age Basingstoke, The Macmillan Press Ltd.
This anthology as a whole contains much that was to become the attitude to, or academic consensus on, May ’68 for some decades. As the title suggests the hegemonic readings attribute the events to generational issues and these are very thoroughly rationalised in their motivation and simultaneously undermined by Ross (2002). Necessary to know of this selection though because of its influence on academics and right-leaning historians that sometimes takes on the attitude of reason.
Henry, J. (2012) ‘Straight to Hells’ in The New Inquiry October 11 2012 Available at: https://thenewinquiry.com/straight-to-hells/ (Accessed 07/04/19)
Reviews the career and thought of Claire Bishop.
Hewison, R. (1986) Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960-75 London, Methuen London Ltd.
Some useful pages (155-159) copied on the reflective prequel of May ’68 in the Shoreditch ‘Anti-University’ which would ‘destroy the bastardised meanings of “student”, “teacher” and “course”‘. It would ‘do away with artificial splits and divisions between disciplines and art forms and between theory and action’ (cited p. 155). associated with R.D. Laing, david Cooper, juliet Mitchell etc. Opened in Feb. 1968. It was virtually destroyed by copycat occupation in April – July 1968.
The May-Day Manifesto in 1967 with Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson (Iris Murdoch) created the New Left. see Charles Widgery (p. 158 cited) on the ‘new sense of what was possible’.. New empowerment and refusal of passivity.
Johnson, R. (1972) The French Communist Party versus the Students: Revolutionary Politics in May-June 1968 New Haven & London, Yale University Press.
Klanten, R., Hübner, Bieber, A., Alonzo, P. & Jansen, G. (Eds.) (2011) Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism Berlin, Die Gestalten Verlag GmbH & Co.
Lawson-Tancred, J. (2018) ‘The Art of Protest: Mai 68’ in PORT Magazine May 15 2018. Available at: http://www.port-magazine.com/art-photography/mai-68-a-graphic-uprising/ (Accessed 21/03/19).
Reviews a 50-year commemoration in the Mayfair gallery of Steve Lazarides. Raises the question: ‘Can we consider these protest posters art?’
Loewe, S. (2015) ‘When Protest Becomes Art: The Contradictory Transformations of the Occupy Movement at Documenta 13 and Berlin Biennale 7’ in Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 1, 185-203. Available at: http://field-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FIELD-01-Loewe-WhenProtestBecomesArt.pdf (Accessed 04/04/19).
Interesting precisely because of the ‘risk of co-optation’ posed by the Berlin Biennale 7’s offer to members of Occupy Berlin and Occupy Museums New York to ‘occupy’ part of its 2012 exhibition space. Counter-strategies were used but ‘the aesthetic transformation of political content harmed Occupy more than it actually benefitted it’. They failed to see that an art exhibition per se ‘had its own set of rules that actively opposed the movement’s goals.’ (199). See the example related to Documenta 13 on p. 195. They were seen as continuing a purely artistic tradition represented by the work of Joseph Beuys (192). This is a useful essay to set against Bishop and her version of Rancière. But what of the latter’s own words?
McKee, Y. (2016) Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition London & New York, Verso (references to Kindle ed. – uses Loc. Numbers not pages).
This book was selected for use when I thought my topic would be the Occupy movement but I left that behind when I realised, partly through McKee’s book, the dependence of the occupy Movement on artists – in a way that was skeletally-structural rather than a contributory strand as in Paris ’68. But there are useful moments:
- Consideration of Rancière L267, Uses the term ‘partition of the sensible’ to describe effects of the ‘reinvention of documentary’ by The Otolith Group, Walid Raad. These artists avoided appeals to the ‘putative certainties of photographic self-evidence.’
Why? ‘Partition of the sensible’ refers to ‘the distribution of what is seeable, hearable, and sayable as legitimately political in a given social order. Rancière understands politics as the opening of a void of possibility in the partition of the sensible wherein new political subjects emerge in excess of the “police principle” that strives to maintain the fixed roles, positions, and identities on which the functioning of the state depends.’
- On Claire Bishop (L274f). Attack on Bourriaud for the deposition of art in its aim merely for an “immanent experience of togetherness and community”. Art remains rigidly autonomous and aimed at exposing the false comforts of a merely spectatorship art. She attributes this to Rancière. L288, the ‘politics of aesthetics’.
Sums up Bishop in this relevant way for me. (L288)
Bishop’s project stands as a rigorous tonic for those who would posit art as an agent of naïve consensus, harmony, or identification, and it upholds an argument for the political import of the sensory forms of art. And yet, despite her interest in political conflict – and indeed the Rancièrean figure of “the police” – Bishop seldom addressed art embedded in social movements that would involve actually confronting the police as forces of state violence, as opposed to isolated artistic gestures in the space of the gallery or public art commission. (ends c. L295).
Miles, M. (2015) Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art London, Pluto Press.
There is a discussion of Bishop’s (2012) contention cited 168f. that participatory art challenged the commodification of art by delegating its social and political functions to participant co-creators of an artistically defined situated piece of relational art. This differs he suggests from the creation of enacted revolutions that created their own oppositional culture, foreshadowing revolutionary change to social practices such as communal caring and cooperative learning and creativity. He includes May 68 as evidence as that as well as Occupy in 2011 (170f.).
Murphy, K. D. & O’Driscoll, S. (2015) ‘The Art/History of Resistance: Visual Ephemera in Public Space’ in Space and Culture 18(4) 328-357, DOI: 10.1177/1206331215596490. Available at: (Accessed 04/04/19).
Papastergiadis, N. & Esche, C. (2014) ‘Assemblies in Art and Politics: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’ in Theory, Culture & Society 31 (7/8) 27-41. DOI: 10.1177/0263276413476559 Available at: (Accessed 04/04/19).
Rancière, J. (2010) (ed & trans Corcaran, S.) Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics London & New York, Bloomsbury Academic
Reynolds, C. (2011) Memories of May ’68: France’s Convenient Consensus Cardiff, University of Wales Press, Available as ebook at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=819281 (Accessed 04/04/19).
Ross, C. (2013) ‘Occupy Collecting’ in History Workshop Journal 75, 236-246. DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbs049 Available at: (Accessed 21/03/19).
This article emanates from the Museum of London and relates to how and why museums across the globe became collectors of contemporary protest art. Focused on Occupy art from 2011-12, it raises issues that obviously apply to what it means to turn the artefacts of social and political protest into collectables available to ‘the public’. This is particularly poignant because the motivation for collection is described as ‘largely curator-led’ (241). Criticised by the Union movement that protest artefact collecting was biased to ‘quirky, cryptic and home-made placards’ rather than artefacts of the established Labour movement which were in the event more numerous (p.243):
The only response to the charge that the Museum has been seduced by the fashionable and frivolous ‘street-tweets’ is: yes, we probably have. Museums deal with material culture, and even history museums have an ‘art and design’ bias in that we are interested in what things look like. We also tend to gravitate towards what looks and feels new: what made this 2011 demonstration look and feel different from the predecessor protests.
Ross, Kristin (2002) May ’68 and its Afterlives Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press. Available as ebook at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=496636 (Accessed 04/04/19).
https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2019/04/11/ross-kristin-2002-may-68-and-its-afterlives-university-of-chicago-press/
Rubin, A.J. (2018) ‘Printing a Revolution: The Posters of Paris ‘68’ in The New York Times, May 4th 2018. Available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/arts/design/may-1968-paris.html (Accessed 06/04/19)
This good resource reviews the posters in Phillipe Artières Beaux-Art de Paris show of the posters called ‘A Clash of Images’ set up to commemorate the 50th anniversary of May ’68.The commentary by a ‘professor of contemporary art’ is instructive of the way art-history (‘necessarily’?) distances itself from political identifications.
Siegelbaum, S. (2012) ‘The Riddle of May ’68: Collectivity and Protest in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture’ in Oxford Art Journal 35 (1), 53-73. Available at: https://www-jstor-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/stable/41415641?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents (Accessed 18/04/19)
This excellent article plots some of the many tangled positions held both by ad hoc groups and individuals with regard to messages about art and its relation to capitalism and the ‘status quo’ in the 1960s. It is by far the most scholarly and comprehensive take on this I have read – much more manifestly informed than Bishop (2012) for instance. The main subject is a group and its fractured sub-sets in the 60s and named in the title and how they formed a position on art aligned with Althusser, that fed into but did not go all the way to explicitly proclaim the ‘supersession of art’, a view held by SI (70). The key protagonists dealt with are Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michael Parmentier & Niele Toroni who Buchloch (2008 – The Group that was Not One) cited 57 as having ‘staged the most radical critique of the neo-avant-garde on the road to spectacularization’.
They did however take from Pour Marx (68) the notion that all institutions and forms were ideological outside of Marxist science, that art was an ‘invisible prison’ that thought itself a temple to freedom, the nature of which was entirely imaginary (69). Art could not be political other than in the imaginary and then best in exposing its own contradictions (71). The ‘avant-garde’ movement in particular (Duchamp in particular) became suspected of promoting an idea of the artist as ‘already free’. (64)
This fed into their rejection of the notion of individual creation and the practice of not signing works and a simultaneous antagonism to artistic function (especially aesthetics and formalism 69) as ‘objectively reactionary’ (59(, a disavowal of the identity of the artist (We are not Painters 57), but, at the same time an alignment with the PCF position for an accessible rather than elite formalist art (also 59). They outwardly championed figurative art (57ff., 62, 65, 69).
The paper shares with others its invocation of the work of Atelier Populaire and a refusal to analyse its works as such, perhaps in sympathy with AP’s rejection of art. There is a sense of the historical link to AP (61f.). However there is an excellent brief summary about the AP position on poster production and criteria and process of content / form selection (72).
Soar, K. & Trmlett, P.-F. (2017) ‘Protest-objects: bricolage, performance and counter-archaeology’ in World Archaeology 49 (3) 423-434, DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2017.1350600 Available at: (Accessed 21/03/19).
This looks useful potentially because of the definitions of the notion of ‘performance’ as a means creating both ‘the epistemological realm of meaning and truth’ and ‘social reality’ in the ‘ontological realm’ (429).
Wardle-Aldam, D. (2018) ‘How May 1968 Changed the Way we View Protests’ in Artsy.net May 14th 2018 1.15p.m. Available at: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-1968-paris-changed-way-view-protests (Accessed 06/04/19)
This article is a good resource for contemporary photographs (of throwing pavé, for instance). Although worth checking there appears to be eye-witness record.
Willsher, K. (2018) ‘Spirit of ’68 bows to market forces as rebel icons go on sale’ in The Guardian (online) Sat. 5 May 2018. Available at: (Accessed 21/03/19).
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