Boo-Hooray is pleased to present our nineteenth catalog, dedicated to Situationism.

Active between 1957–1972, the Situationist International (SI) was a group of avant-garde artists and theorists who set out to disrupt the hegemony of capitalism and consumerism in postwar Europe by reimagining the systems that govern everyday life. Heavily influenced by Marx’s critique of capitalism, the Situationists were concerned with breaking free from the routines and social norms imposed by capitalist society. The ultimate goal of the Situtationists was to encourage the proletariat to step into their role as active subjects, rather than passive objects of history. Central to this project is the notion of the spectacle, which builds upon Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. The spectacle, commonly understood as the alluring images of mass media, conceals and distracts us from the oppressive nature of capitalism. Guy Debord writes in his highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”