We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 68

– Carl Williams

Against Pairing

Drawing Matter generously responded to my request to loan two items from their collection to be used as realia in an exhibition of May 1968 posters at Tank Magazine’s showroom on Great Portland Street. The items (DMC 2465 and 2302) are both lithographs in black and red, and take the form of a Spanish Civil War era anarchist poster-map of street fighting on 19 July 1936, and a folding map of a reimagined Paris from 1957 by Situationist Guy Debord entitled ‘Guide Psychogeographique de Paris. Discours sur les Passions de l’Amour’.

I was invited to write 15 lines on them as a ‘pair’. Rather predictably for me perhaps, I bridled against this. The twinning is inherent in their style, layout and intent as they’re both in black and red—the colours of the anarcho-syndicalist ‘Confederacíon Nacional del Trabajo’ (CNT)—and most intriguingly they both have a multiplicity of red arrows. The Spanish map utilises the arrows to show the liberation of the city against fascist forces by CNT, the ultra-leftist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and assault troops and civil guards who remained loyal to the Republic.

Debord’s uses red arrows to show a city liberated by the imagination and feet of the individual in urban Paris ‘drifting’ where s/he may—a red slap in the face to Baron Haussman’s massive urban renewal programme. Of course, Debord resided, drank, caroused, argued and fomented trouble on Paris’s Left Bank—which, with its narrow streets and higgledy-piggledy layout, was the traditional home of the frondeist, the revolutionary mob, the outsider and bohemian. It was also where the student movement of May–June 1968 essentially grew out of and amongst which Debord and his cadres, the Conseil pour le maintien des occupations (CMDO), tried to direct the passion of the students into a revolutionary seizure of power by any means necessary.

We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 68 is on display at TANK until 31 May.