Utopian Image: Politics & Posters

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UTOPIAN IMAGE: Politics & Posters

Atelier Populaire, We Are All Undesirables, poster, screenprint, 1968

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n early May 2008, as the European along the spine so that the hand-printed posters could be removed and mounted media recalled the demonstrations that took place on the streets of Paris on the wall. The book was also on sale at 40 years earlier, a telling display could Paul Smith shops in Leeds, Paris, New be seen in the window of the Paul Smith York and Los Angeles. fashion shop in Floral Street, London. The commodification of these revoluTo celebrate the anniversary, Smith — tionary images was a possibility that an enthusiast for all forms of popular participants in the Atelier Populaire, which began at the École des Beaux-Arts culture — was showing a screen-printed poster produced by the Atelier Populaire, in Paris, both anticipated and rejected, in support of the protests by French stu- refusing to put the posters on sale either dents and workers, mounted on a jagged during or after les événements. As they explained in 1969: slab of concrete. Inside, shoppers could buy an exclusive, hand-covered, hard- Their rightful place is in the centers of back album, priced at £1,200 ($1,800) conflict, that is to say in the streets and on and limited to just 68 copies, consisting the walls of the factories. of 40 of the most powerful posters then To use them for decorative purposes, to on show at the nearby Hayward Gallery display them in bourgeois places of culture in an exhibition titled “May 68: Street or consider them as objects of aesthetic Posters from the Paris Rebellion.” The interest is to impair both their function soft white recycled pages were perforated and their effect. . . .

Rick Poynor | Essays

Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an “outside” observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the ruling class. [1] Yet 40 years later, the Atelier Populaire’s fears have come to pass, for what could be more bourgeois than a shop selling expensive trendy clothes? How many Paul Smith customers who saw the displays, let alone bought the album, would perceive these utopian images as anything other than attractively “edgy” decorative objects utterly divorced from political struggle? From the perspective of anyone involved in that struggle, could Paul Smith’s incongruous act of an international fashion brand be seen as anything other than a sign of the May uprising’s total failure? Nor was the


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