BASEL.- The Museum Tinguely will be showing through August 5, 2007, an extensive exhibition developed in cooperation with the Centraal Museum Utrecht on one of the least known yet most influential (anti)art movements of the post war era: the Situationist International (SI).

The last of the international avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, which was centred in Paris, existed from 1957 to 1972 with a total of seventy-two European, American, and North African members at various times. The guiding figure of the SI was Guy-Ernest Debord (1931�94), the exhibition is organized around his biography.

The SI�s revolutionary program included the elimination of all forms of representation: the undermining of all authority, the destruction of all symbols of power, the elimination of art (even that of the Classical avant-garde) and all other forms of cultural spectacle, the regaining of the reality of life that had been expropriated by a society of consumption and commodities�in short, the struggle against late capitalist dispossession.

The rejection of the conventional intellectual discourse, its political radicalness, and also, quite simply, its limited number of members have contributed to the relative obscurity of Guy Debord and the SI outside France. As a consequence, the historical significance of the SI, which operated at the points of intersection between art and politics, is difficult to comprehend even today.

At the same time�not least as a result of the strong influence the SI�s radical critique of society had on the student revolts�Situationist ideas were widely disseminated and left traces internationally in art, politics, architecture, and pop culture that can be followed right up to the present. Their methods can be found in Fluxus, punk, performance, and in the actions of the opponents of globalism in the twenty-first century.

The exhibition is structured chronologically and is divided into eight sections that illuminate the development of the predecessors and forerunners of the SI, such as the Lettrists and CoBrA through the intense collaboration of theorists and artists in the 1960s to the student unrest of 1968, which was powerfully influenced by the SI. Finally, it follows the traces of individual �members� after they were expelled by Debord.

All the sections are bracketed by Debord�s later film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni of 1978, in which he looks back, in idealizing retrospective, on the great days of the SI.