Pinot-Gallizio's ‘Industrial Painting’: Towards a Surplus of Life

Abstract

The contention of this article is that the Italian Situationist Giuseppe PinotGallizio's experimental practice called 'Industrial Painting' offered (and perhaps still offers) an exemplary model of how collective and mechanised forms of mass cultural production can be transformed into a mode of revolutionary life praxis. By 'revolutionary life praxis', I understand a project to abolish self-alienation through forms of creative activity or labour, aimed at radically transforming both the objective and subjective conditions of a particular historical situation, characterised, according to Guy Debord, as the moment at which 'the commodity completes its colonization of social life'.' The Situationists' name for such a revolutionary process of total social transformation was 'unitary urbanism', and it is in relation to this process that my critical analysis of Gallizio's practice of Industrial Painting is developed. 'Unitary urbanism' was defined in the first issue of the Situationists' journal, internationale situationniste, of 1958, as follows: 'the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques in working towards the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with experiments (experiences) in behaviour'.2 It was understood that when this theory of 'unitary urbanism' was put into practice, specifically within the context of the urban environment, it would provide a means to subvert and transform the poverty of social experience that existed under the reified conditions of a late capitalist society, renamed by the Situationists as the 'society of the spectacle'. 3 Unitary urbanism's strategic re-modulation of social space was intended to expand the imaginative realm of its inhabitants, which in turn would enable them to challenge what the Situationists called the mental disease of banalisation whereby everyone 'is hypnotized by production and conveniences sewage systems, elevator, bathroom, washing-machine'. 4 The sociopolitical purchase behind this project of unitary urbanism lay not in the merely distracting or escapist aspects of redecorating and reconstructing city spaces, but in its ability, ideally, to liberate authentic emotional sensibilities as characterised by aspects of play, love, and adventure, aspects of behaviour repressed by the spectacle's process of everyday banalisation the Situationists' byword for the expansion of the commodity form to all spheres of life.s In Situationist theory, the word 'spectacle' represented the expansion of generalised reification as it now took on an imagistic form, in which real social relations had been reduced to their abstract representation, that is, to an image or spectacle. As Debord clarified, paraphrasing Marx's characterisation of commodity fetishism 'the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images'.6 This suggests that an alteration of the images mediating everyday social relations could act as a catalyst to convert the spectacle's alienated condition more generally. 1. See thesis 42 in Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books: NY, 1995), p. 29. The preface to this section of the book entitled 'The