DEBORD, Guy, Jaqueline DE JONG, and Asger JORN. Hands Off Alexander Trocchi. Pairs: International Situationiste. 1960.
Broadside; 272 x 210 mm, fine.
First edition of this broadside drawing attention to the imprisonment of writer Alexander Trocchi, interred in a New York prison on drug charges.
This broadside was produced subsequent to The Resolution of the Fourth Conference of the Situationalist International Concerning the Imprisonment of Alexander Trocchi, at which Guy Debord, Jacqueline de Jong and Asger Jorn came together to explore potential avenues for the iconic Scottish author's release. This broadside is specifically orientated towards fellow artists and intellectuals to enact support for Trocchi's status as an artist himself, with the text concluding; "Those who would refuse to do this now will be judged guilty themselves when the judgement of the history of ideas will no longer allow one to question the importance of the artistic innovation of which Trocchi has been to a great respect responsible".
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization consisting of a web of social revolutionaries from avant-garde artists to revolutionary intellectuals and radical political theorists.
Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish writer who moved from Paris to New York in the late 1950's, where his expeirmentation with drugs took hold. During his time of imprisonment, he wrote the cult classic Cain’s Book which relays his sexual misfortunes and riotous heroin antics during his time living on the Hudson River.
As mentioned in the broadside, in the late 1940s, Trocchi was responsible for editing the Parisian literary journal Merlin, which promoted the avant-garde works of Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre and whom "unanimously expressed their solidarity" to his freedom cause. It was during this time in Paris that Trocchi's own writing career blossomed thanks to the influence of Maurice Girodias’s infamous Olympia Press. His early erotic fiction was banned in several countries.
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