The Consul

Artist Ralph Rumney's (1934-2002) oral history The Consul is an important, if slight, document that makes an engaging addition to our knowledge about the avant-garde's most extreme faction (along with its companion volume Jean-Michel Mension's The Tribe). The Situationist International (SI) certainly needs contributions to its history that lie outside those carved by its dominating leading lights Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Rumney, interviewed at length before (by Alan Woods) in the entertaining The Map Is Not the Territory, was a founding member, and the only British representative, of the SI (Andrew Hussey's flawed but competent biography of Debord, The Game of War, is probably the best place to start for an overview) and has spent a lifetime drinking and drifting, and rejecting the world, in the best psychogeographical fashion. The Consul, beautifully presented with host of photographs of Rumney, his art and his companions, is a languorous, absorbing and affecting ramble through Rumney's life, which, whilst hardly being ground-breaking, gives a further roundness and insight into a most invigorating, radical and challenging group of artists. --George Bowman