Situating the Danish artist Asger Jorn’s work in an international, post-World War II context, Karen Kurczynski offers an account of the essential phases of this prolific artist’s career, and addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and collaborations. The study reframes our understanding of the 1950s, and foregrounds the idea that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social and political impact.
A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements - yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study corrects that imbalance, offering a synthetic account of the essential phases of this prolific artist?s career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists' groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn's work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics. Kurczynski engages with issues of interest to twenty-first-century artists and scholars, highlighting Jorn's proposition that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social impact. Perhaps most significantly, this study foregrounds Jorn's assertion that creativity is crucial to subjectivity itself in our increasingly mediated 'Society of the Spectacle.'
First published in 1998, this volume is a study of Asger Jorn’s attempt to formulate the ‘first complete revision of the existing philosophical system’ from the standpoint of the artist in the period 1961-67. The Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-73), painter, draughtsman, potter and sculptor, was one of the most prominent figures of his generation in Europe. His characteristic paintings were spontaneous, using energetic brushstrokes, splashing and spotting with a wide-ranging palette. Jorn’s eclectic intellect absorbed an astonishing range of influences and involved him in many causes, including an ambitious programme to re-publish, with commentary, material vital to Scandinavian cultural history. He was also a founder member of Cobra (1948-51) and subsequently several other international groupings, which coalesced in 1957 in the setting-up of the Situationist International with French and Italian writers and artists. Fascinated by the philosophical debate on the position of the artist in contemporary life and the artist’s relationship to the past, Jorn broke with the Situationist International in 1961 over the issue of whether an artist is an instigator of cultural change or only an instrument of political change. For the next four years, he committed himself to ‘a first complete revision of the existing philosophical system’ with the intention of placing the artist at the centre. Many of his ideas were first tried out in French in various Situationist publications and have since stirred considerable debate. His much more comprehensive texts in Danish of 1961-67 have never been made available in English. In Comparative Vandalism, Peter Shield offers the first detailed study of Jorn’s revision of modern philosophy, exploring the origins and formulation of his ideas. The book includes colour and black and white reproductions chosen from his mature work to illustrate the connection between his writing and painting.
This book offers a concise overview of the diverse accomplishments of Danish artist Asger Jorn. The book comprises over 75 images of Jorn’s work, each with complete provenance, exhibition and literature history. A comprehensive biography of the artist is also included, along with photographs and other archival material.
No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.
"The Danish artist Asger Jorn is primarily known as a painter who was active in the Hst, Cobra and the Situationist International groups. The numerous leaflets, exhibition catalogues, interviews, articles and books he wrote throughout his entire career attest to his vast literary output and his urge to provoke debate at all social levels."--Back cover.
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.
Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark, commemorates the 50th anniversary of Le Corbusier's passing with an exhibition and an academic conference. The coinciding book will reflect both, the exhibition's content and the results of the conference. Le Corbusier (1887-1965) aimed for nothing less than changing the world and therefore called out for a revolution in architecture and society. His thinking and sometimes megalomaniac ideas have been, and remain to the present day, highly influential for architects around the world. This new book for the first time investigates in detail Le Corbusier's reception in Scandinavia, in Denmark in particular. The book's focal point is the connection between the Danish experimental expressionist artist Asger Jorn (1914-73) and Le Corbsuier. As a young student of art in Paris, Asger Jorn collaborated with Le Corbusier on the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the 1937 Paris World Exposition. The young Jorn was fascinated by architecture--the most public form of art--in general and also followed closely Le Corbusiers building activities and his book publications. The book opens with four essays providing a survey of Le Corbusier as an artist architect. Further contributions examine Le Corbusiers influence on Asger Jorn and the younger artist's initial admiration for and later critique of the famous architect. They discuss Jorns position towards Le Corbusier in theory, and also look at relationships in both men's artistic practice, e.g. in poetry, book production, tapestry, etc. Another four essays deal withLe Corbusier's traces in Danish architecture and urbanism, his intellectual reception in Scandinavia, parallels between Le Corbusier and Jorn Utzon, and a comparison of the Arhus Brutalism and Le Corbusier. The book also features reprints of texts by Asger Jorn and an especially commissioned photo essay by the German experimental film director Heinz Emigholz of Asger Jorns Aarhus Mural and Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye.
A comprehensive catalogue of the exhibition Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings on view at Petzel Gallery in New York from March 5th to April 13th, 2019. With texts written and edited by the curators as well as reprinted articles on the subjects of détournement, vandalism, and the relationship between modifications and appropriation art in the late 1970s. If you have old paintings, do not despair. Retain your memories but detourn them so that they correspond with your era. Why reject the old, if one can modernize it? —Asger Jorn Published on the occasion of the exhibition Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings at Petzel Gallery in New York (March 5 – April 13, 2019) – this historical group show of over 30 prominent international artists investigates multifarious appropriation methods situated in the context of the first thrift store paintings altered by Danish artist Asger Jorn. Spanning from the mid-1960s to the flourishing techniques of the 1980s, up to the present day. In Paris, 1959, Asger Jorn exhibits a group of paintings at the prominent Galerie Rive Gauche. Not only has he re-worked these found paintings with his own brush, modifying their respective surfaces, but he also writes a text describing his technique as a recovery of certain iconographic archetypes. Instead of making a mockery of these kitsch paintings, he articulates some of their inherent folk-art values. The exhibition is not well received. However, it has since become legendary. Jorn’s modifications have long been a neglected chapter in the Danish artist’s biography. Yet from today’s perspective these high/low hermaphrodites are recognized by keen-eyed viewers as mirrors reflecting the historicity of modern painting. Such “Modifications” are a painterly version of “détournement,” a Situationist technique, described in 1956 by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman as the systematic revaluation of “prefabricated aesthetic products.” For Jorn, who co-founded and financially supported the Situationist International, the 1959 Galerie Rive Gauche exhibition, showcased his implementation of a fundamental aesthetic critique in which he appropriates a relatively discredited artistic source as “his” own material, then applies his iconography, and his language to that particular prefabricated model. Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modification Paintings features works by Enrico Baj, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Vidya Gastaldon, Wade Guyton/Stephen Prina, Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Lee Krasner, Albert Oehlen, Francis Picabia, Stephen Prina, R.H. Quaytman, Arnulf Rainer, Julian Schnabel, Jim Shaw, Gedi Sibony, Alexis Smith, Daniel Spoerri, John Stezaker, Betty Tompkins, and David Wojnarowicz.
