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The graffiti of the French student and worker uprising of May 1968, capturing participatory politics in action.Graffiti itself became a form of freedom.-Julien Besançon, The Walls Have the FloorFifty years ago, in 1968, barricades were erected in the streets of Paris for the first time since the Paris Commune of nearly one hundred years before. The events of May 1968 began with student protests against the Vietnam War and American imperialism, expanded to rebellion over student living conditions and resistance to capitalist consumerism. An uprising at the Sorbonne was followed by wildcat strikes across France, uniting students and workers and bringing the country's economy to a halt. There have been many accounts of these events. This book tells the story in a different way, through the graffiti inscribed by protestors as they protested.The graffiti collected here is by turns poetic, punning, hopeful, sarcastic, and crude. It quotes poets as often as it does political thinkers. Many wrote \"I have nothing to write,\" signaling not their naiveté but their desire to participate. Other anonymous declarations included \"Prohibiting prohibited\"; \"The dream is reality\"; \"The walls have ears. Your ears have walls\"; \"Exaggeration is the beginning of invention\"; \"Comrades, you're nitpicking\"; \"You don't beg for the right to live, you take it\"; and \"I came/I saw/I believed.\" A meeting is called at the Grand Amphitheater of the Sorbonne: \"Agenda: the worldwide revolution.\" This was interactive, participatory politics before Twitter and Facebook.Although the revolution of May 1968 didn't topple the government (Charles de Gaulle fled the country, only to return; in June, his party won a resounding electoral mandate), it made history. In The Walls Have the Floor, Julien Besançon collected traces of this history before the walls were painted over, and published this collection in July 1968 even as the paint was drying. Read today, the graffiti of 1968 captures, in a way no conventional history can, the defining spontaneity of the events.

How culture became a field of struggle over meaning in France: the appropriation of elements from advertising, journalism, and other sources to serve political ends in art, film, and the activities of the French left, culminating in the upheavals of May 1968.

Tom McDonough finds Andrzej Wróblewski’s dialectical canvases in suspension between multiple post-War futures.

Unless you are Polish, you might be forgiven for never having heard of painter Andrzej Wróblewski, despite the fact that, in his home country, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding, or perhaps on account of, his brutally curtailed career--he died in 1957, just shy of the age of 30--Wróblewski has attained the status of a national icon. With a mere ten years of active painting, spanning the decade of his twenties, he is a Polish \"peintre maudit,\" surrounded by a mythology as legendary as that of those better-known accursed artists of the 1950s, Jackson Pollock and Wols. His early death, which left his aesthetic project unfinished, has allowed him to remain a kind of cipher in the national imagination, a symbol of the unfulfilled promises of the years following the end of the Second World War and, rightly or wrongly, of resistance to the cultural and political impositions of the communist regime and the Soviet Union. A long list of exhibitions and publications in Poland, stretching from the time of his death to the present, attests to this status and the tenacity of the myth. OA

Tom McDonough places Janice Kerbel’s drama for stage lights,Kill the Workers!, within the history of radical theatre.

Drawing on the late Guy Debord and his reception in the 1980s, the legacy of the Situationist International can be traced in the practices of the Tiqqun collective and Claire Fontaine. Debord's spectacle thesis was deployed as one of the key terms in the critical analyses published in the two issues of \"Tiqqun\", most notably in the theory of the Young Girl published in its first issue, in 1999. The Young Girl is by no means intended as a gender specific term. It does not refer only to women, but is rather a cipher for the construction of a fungible post-Fordist subject within a commodified and image-based late capitalist order. As the group explicates the concept, the Young Girl answers the need for a total commodification of life in all its aspects, the need to ensure nothing remains outside the commodity form in what is still called, somewhat euphemistically, human relations. Meanwhile, Claire Fontaine, a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004, taking its name from a popular brand of French school notebooks, is not so much a practice of detournement of individual objects as of the position of the artist as a whole. As such, it has precedents within neo-Situationist milieus. As suggested in a work such as \"The True Artist\", this practice is deeply engaged with a contemporary history of appropriation, or rather it is a practice built on the ruins of this history.

McDonough discusses the symbolism of a city in flames in art, architectural drawings, and in reality. He notes in particular how accounts of burning cities imply a critique of modernity and urbanism, if not stated outright.