The Most Dangerous Game

Edited by Wolfgang Scheppe
Merve, 2018

Vol. 1: Dokumente, 908 pages, German
400 illustrations
ISBN 978-3-96273-017-8
Vol. 2: Werke, 88 pages, German
60 color illustrations
ISBN 978-3-96273-018-5
Price: €24

Available at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and at bookstores, mail order buying / postal shopping via the Webshop

The Most Dangerous Game documents the activities of the Situationist International (S.I.), who, from 1957 until 1972, offered a fundamental critique of a society subject to the rule of commodity. The title recalls, on the one hand, the revolutionary earnestness with which the S.I. radicalized the conflicts of the post-war era, while, on the other hand, emphasizing the element of play that characterized all their diverse activities. In two volumes, the publication follows the Situationist’s break with art in 1962 up to and including the May 1968 uprising in France, in which the S.I. played an essential part. Although the revolt was stifled, bourgeois society modernized, appropriating the themes of the insurgent youth and subjugating all areas of life – even sexuality – to capitalist ends and exploitation. At the time, the S.I. thus clearly recognized this escalation of the consumerist society as the subject of criticism of a revolutionary movement.

Volume 1 reconstructs the Bibliothèque Situationniste de Silkeborg in its entirety for the first time, which the movement’s co-founder Guy Debord drafted in outline with the painter Asger Jorn in 1959 for the latter’s museum in Denmark but never carried out. Based on the research library of the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice.

Volume 2 is an illustrated book depicting The Archive of Last Images, which for the first time shows the works of all of the artists active during the initial S.I. period.

Texts: Wolfgang Scheppe, Roberto Ohrt
Image editor: Eleonora Sovrani

With reproductions of documents and artworks by:
Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Armando, Enrico Baj, Conrad Bakker, CoBrA, Constant, Corneille, Guy Debord, Erwin Eisch, Ansgar Elde, Farfa, Lothar Fischer, Internationale Lettriste, Internationale Situationniste, Isidore Isou, Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, Laboratorio Sperimentale, Uwe Lausen, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Giors Melanotte, Eva Renée Nele, Erik Nyholm, Panamarenko, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Hans Platschek, Heimrad Prem, Ralph Rumney, Piero Simondo, Gruppe SPUR, Gretel Stadler, Hardy Strid, Helmut Sturm, Maurice Wyckaert, Hans-Peter Zimmer among other