I've discovered an online text of Stewart Home's The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrism to Class War that Kez referred to when commenting on my earlier post on Lettrism and the Situationist International.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, ST, Adelaide CBD, 2007

I was attracted to Lettrism because of the role of the letter in the image which connects it with contemporary street culture work. Homes, in the Introduction to his Assault on Culture, gives us some of the cultural/political context of Lettrism as a part, and critique of, the pre-war European avant garde.

He says that:

From these pre-war [avant garde] movements the essential features of twentieth-century Utopianism become apparent. The partisans of this tradition aim not just at the integration of art and life, but of all human activities. They have a critique of social separation and a concept of totality. From the 1920s onwards Utopians were conscious of belonging to a tradition that stretched back at least as far as Dada and Futurism...while the movements I am writing about situated themselves in opposition to consumer capitalism, they also emerged out of societies based on such a mode of organisation and thus do not entirely escape the logic of the market place. This is particularly obvious in relation to the obsession many of them display over the concept of innovation, which reflects perfectly the waste inherent in a society based on planned obsolescence.

If early Lettriste activity was centred on sound poetry, the emphasis soon shifted to visual production. Here, letters were seen to form the basic unit from which works should be created. The resulting forms, which resemble concrete poetry, typify lettriste literary endeavours. From these there grew a Lettriste 'painting', in which, once again, the letter would be the basic subject of aesthetic contemplation.