Detournement

comic

Situationist Comics
In his essay on new forms of Situationist Art, René Viénet discussed how vital comics were as the “only truly popular literature of our century.” He went on to mention how easy it is to give them whole new meaning with simple alterations, but he contended, “In contrast to Pop Art, which breaks comics up into fragments, this method [détournement] aims at restoring to comics their content and importance.” The distinction Viénet makes between the Situationist and the Pop Art treatment of comics is important because artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and others who worked in the Pop Art style essentially used comics as empty signifiers devoid of meaningful narrative, whereas the Situationists used the narrative potential in comics to heighten the anarchic qualities they saw as inherent in the medium. The Situationists were certainly not the first to use comics for political purposes, nor where they even the first to collage together disparate elements as a means to introduce ironic commentary in their comics, but they were the first to articulate how the visual language of comics had the power to undermine the authority of any image no matter how sophisticated.