Gruppe SPUR

Gruppe SPUR was an artistic collaboration formed by the German painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm, and Hans-Peter Zimmer, and the sculptor Lothar Fischer in 1957.

The Spur group was the first German group after the war to reappear on the international plane, to make itself recognized as an equal by the cultural avant-garde of several different countries, in the real artistic experiments of today; whereas the artists and intellectuals currently honored in Germany are only retarded and timid imitators of imported, old ideas.Debord noted that Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries, had another level of intellectual tolerance, that such a trial was, at that moment, unthinkable in Paris or Copenhagen.

"[1] Debord ridiculed that trial to the prosecutions of Baudelaire and Flaubert for pornography and immorality in the 19th century France:[1] For a very long time [thereafter], one could only refer to these [French] judgments as evidence of the scandalous imbecility of the judges.

Jorn, one of the most prominent members of the SI, discovered the SPUR-paintings at a gallery managed by art dealer Otto Van de Loo.

Debord proposes, to bring out the opinion of the Conference, that each person responds in writing to a questionnaire asking if he considers that there are "forces in the society that the SI can count on?

When, a day later, the Spur members present a joint response to the questionnaire, in which they reject the concept of a proletarian revolution, it generates a sharp debate:[4] This very long declaration attacks the tendency in the responses read the day before to count on the existence of a revolutionary proletariat, for the signers strongly doubt the revolutionary capacities of the workers against the bureaucratic institutions that have dominated their movement.

The German section considers that the SI should prepare to realize its program on its own by mobilizing the avant-garde artists, who are placed by the present society in intolerable conditions and can count only on themselves to take over the weapons of conditioning.This position was critiqued by Debord, Nash, Kotányi, and Jorn.

[4] Debord starts to suspect that the Spur members were not understanding and/or agreeing with the situationist ideas and that they were instead using the SI to get success in the art market.

[5] As a consequence, during the Fifth SI Conference held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 28–30 August 1961, Asger Jorn (signing himself as "George Keller") proposed to unify the S.I.

publications in the various countries (including Spur) as a single journal, to be translated in four editions in English, French, German and Swedish.