Gil J. Wolman

Gil Joseph Wolman (Paris, 1929 – Paris, 1995) was a French artist. His work encompassed painting, poetry and film-making. He was a member of Isidore Isou's avant garde Letterist movement in the early 1950s, then becoming a central figure in the Letterist International, the group which would subsequently develop (without Wolman himself) into the Situationist International.

Wolman joined the Letterists in 1950, although he quit the group only two years later. His first published work appeared in the 1950 first issue of their journal Ur, where his 'Introduction to Wolman' would set the scene for later creations: "In the beginning, there was Wolman"! While still in the group, Wolman would make two major contributions. First, in sound poetry, he devised the notion of the 'megapneume': while lettrism was based upon the letter, megapneumes were based upon the breath. Second, in film, he produced L'Anticoncept, the work for which he is now primarily remembered. The film was shown for the first time on 11 February 1952 at the 'Avant-Garde 52' cinema club. It consisted of blank illumination projected onto a weather balloon, accompanied by a staccato spoken soundtrack. The film was banned by the French censors on 2 April 1952—when the Letterists visited the Cannes Film Festival the following month, they were forced to restrict the audience to journalists only. The text of the soundtrack was published in the sole issue of the Letterist journal Ion (1952; reprinted Jean-Paul Rocher, 1999), and later reissued in a separate edition augmented with associated texts (Editions Allia, 1994). Ion also included the text of Guy Debord's film Howls for Sade, which was dedicated to Wolman and featured his voice in its own soundtrack.

In June 1952, Wolman and Debord formed the Letterist International, which, with Jean-Louis Brau and Serge Berna, would officially split from the main group that December. Wolman contributed several texts to the Letterist International's own bulletin, Potlatch; and, with Debord, he co-authored some of its most important texts, published in the Belgian surrealist review Les Lèvres Nues (Naked Lips). These included 'A User's Guide to Détournement' and 'Theory of the Dérive' (both 1956). The term détournement (literally 'diversion') signified the deliberate re-use of plagiarised material for a new and usually subversive purpose. The dérive ('drift') was a process of aimlessly wandering through urban environments in order to map their psychogeography.

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