Jacqueline de Jong & The Situationist Times

“The Situationist Times” was a magazine edited and published by the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (born 1939) during the years 1962–67. In her early twenties, de Jong joined the Situationist International, a revolutionary avant-garde movement that included leading figures such as the French writer and filmmaker Guy Debord and the Danish artist Asger Jorn.

The first issue in 1962

In a meeting of the central committee of the Situationist International in Brussels in 1961, de Jong proposed the publication of a magazine in English called “The Situationist Times”, to accompany the movement’s French bulletin “Internationale Situationniste”. By the time the first issue appeared in 1962, however, de Jong had been excluded from the Situationist International and transformed the magazine project beyond all recognition.

A playful cultural magazine

In its multilingual, trans-disciplinary and cross-cultural exuberance, “The Situationist Times” challenged not only the notion of what it means to be a situationist, but also traditional understandings of culture in the broader sense and of how culture is created, formatted and shared.

Unpublished material

The exhibition invites the visitor to explore “The Situationist Times” in all its maze-like knots and controversies. Accompanied by Jacqueline de Jong, who tells the history of the magazine’s creation in a series of recent video clips, one can browse original editions or navigate the whole body of work through a digital interface developed by the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism. In addition, the show unfolds the material that de Jong assembled in the early 1970s in collaboration with Hans Brinkman. They intended to use this collection for a seventh, unrealized issue of “The Situationist Times”, which was to be devoted to the game of pinball. This until recently forgotten material is exhibited alongside selected works by Jacqueline de Jong dealing with pinball.