MAI 1968 NOW
MAI 1968 NOW, letterpress printed artist’s book, cover and first page
Throwback Thursday
In this post I am revisiting an artist’s book I completed in March 2016 – but started thinking about in 2012, and started actually printing in 2014. It was a long time in the making! The slogans from the Paris uprising of May 1968 are as fresh as they ever were… and my plan was to reinterpret some of my favourites for the present day.
On the inside back cover of the book I printed: ‘The Paris uprising of May 1968 was the moment that philosophy and political theory took to the streets. Situationist International inspired graffiti appeared all over Paris – often directly quoting Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem – providing a (frequently wry) critique of society and advanced capitalism.
Although the unrest was soon dispelled the ideas were much more difficult to destroy, and now seem oddly prescient. For example in Society of the Spectacle (1967) Guy Debord wrote that we had become passive consumers of our own lives – through media and advertising – and that “all that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. Sound familiar?
And these ideas keep resurfacing – fuelling the development of punk in the 1970s, and more recently Adbusters and the Occupy movement. Cynicism and boredom can only lead to a deadening acceptance. It’s time to “Yell! Create! Look in front of you!”’
(Almost) all the letterpress printed postcards in the book MAI 1968 NOW
I printed the book as a series of post-bound, perforated postcards, with the idea that people could buy the book and tear out the postcards to send to others. In the event of course, no one wanted to destroy their book so people often bought their favourites as individual postcards as well. Ironically, the postcard ‘The more you consume the less you live’ with the letterpress printed rule barcode over the emoji eyes was often the first to sell out. Other popular postcards were ‘Those who lack imagination can not imagine what is lacking’ (which gave my collection of wood letter and metal Os a workout), and ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible’ (probably the only time I’ll use the Madonna Ronde curlicues without irony).
The only slogan I didn’t translate, was ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’ as it really works best in French – though it meant adding a linocut diacritic to the ‘e’. To the person who suggested that a photopolymer plate of an iPhone would have been so much easier than making the outline using letterpress borders (with one corner missing), brass rule, and an upper and lowercase gill sans ‘O’, I say, ‘Mate. You’re missing the whole point here.’ Also, ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible!’
… Then the referendum happened and I lost my taste for political slogans. But this work still makes me smile. I really appreciate a good activist sign on a protest rally, and it looks as though we’re going to need the creative exuberance of the Situationists more than ever over the next few years.
The book and postcards have sold out now, but it’s going to be on show at the ‘B for Book’ exhibition at the Frankenstein Press, Bristol, 28 June - 19 July, 2024.