DAVID BLACK
15 April 2023
Danish painter and sculptor Asger Oluf Jorn died fifty years ago (1 May 1973), aged 59. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International.
Jorn’s work and legacy are not appreciated by everyone in his homeland. Indeed, a report in ArtForum, May 02, 2022, indicates there are some things rotten in the State of Denmark:
‘Danish Situationist Asger Jorn’s iconic 1959 work The Disquieting Duckling was vandalized on April 29 in an attack that was livestreamed by right-wing Facebook page Patrioterne Går Live, which has historically posted anti-Muslim screeds and videos. The widely circulated video seems to show Danish artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard affixing his own likeness to the painting, which was on display at the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark, and then signing his name on the canvas in black permanent marker. “If you’re around,” he wrote on Facebook, “you can go and admire my new work.”’
No thanks. This nutter went beyond such relatively harmless gestures, such as throwing soup at a glass screen. He did irreparable to the painting itself, with glue and a black felt-tip.
Détourned Painting
In an essay entitled Détourned Painting, published in the Exhibition Catalogue of the Galerie Rive Gauche, Namur, in May, 1959, Jorn wrote,
‘Intended for the general public. Reads effortlessly.
Be modern,
collectors, museums.
If you have old paintings,
do not despair.
Retain your memories
but détourn them
so that they correspond with your era.
Why reject the old
if one can modernize it
with a few strokes of the brush?
This casts a bit of contemporaneity
on your old culture.
Be up to date,
and distinguished
at the same time.
Painting is over.
You might as well finish it off.
Détourn.
Long live painting.’
Jorn added a section entitled ‘Intended for connoisseurs. Requires limited attention’:
‘The object, reality, or presence takes on value only as an agent of becoming. But it is impossible to establish a future without a past. The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past. He who possesses the past of a phenomenon also possesses the sources of its becoming. Europe will continue to be the source of modern development. Here, the only problem is to know who should have the right to the sacrifices and to the relinquishments of this past, that is, who will inherit the futurist power. I want to rejuvenate European culture. I begin with art. Our past is full of becoming. One needs only to crack open the shells. Détournement is a game born out of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorize can create new values. And only when there is something to devalorize, that is, an already established value, can one engage in devalorization. It is up to us to devalorize or to be devalorized according to our ability to reinvest in our own culture. There remain only two possibilities for us in Europe: to be sacrificed or to sacrifice. It is up to you to choose between the historical monument and the act that merits it.’
Angelus Dubiosus
Now consider William Blake (1757-1827).
In Apocalypse and Recuperation: Blake and the Maw of Commerce (English Literary History, Spring, 1985, Vol. 52, No. 1), Paul Mann writes:
‘Everything ever published about Blake is true. Not, perhaps, informed, masterful, judicious, cogent, interesting or even necessarily true about Blake, but always true to the material conditions of writing about Blake, always somehow negotiable within the actual economy of that “industry” known as Blake criticism, or criticism, or discourse. The industry’s avowed task of representing” Blake’s truth, often indeed of agreeing with and advocating that truth, is thus mitigated or even undermined by the industry’s concomitant need to maintain itself in existence. The consensually validated revelation of Blake’s truth would put the industry out of business. Blake’s”truth” becomes a currency, a fluctuating exchange value in an economy whose survival depends not only on agreement but on disagreement, discord, dismissals, departures, the continual destruction and reconstruction of each appearance of that truth.’
The following original artwork, a collage détournement of Blake’s Good and Evil Angels, has been presented to The Barbarism of Pure Culture for publication. The artist does not wish to be credited.
FURTHER READING
David Black, The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism: Essays on History, Culture and Dialectical Thought, Part Two ‘Critique of the Situationist Dialectic: Art, Class-Consciousness and Reification’, Lexington Books 2013.
David Black Asger Jorn, Détourned Painting and the Situationists
Asger Jorn has high status today in Denmark – hence his concepts being exploited (“recuperated”) by attention-seeking nothings there. Because two millionaires in Florida paid spectacular amounts of money on Jorn’s paintings as contributions to the “ab-ex” genre (thus financing situationist publications in Paris), he’s now part of the canon. But that doesn’t mean his ideas are understood, or that anyone in the art world – as hypnotised into inertia by the canon/money as ever – is painting anything worthwhile. CoBrA argued that every baby can make Great Art, it should be as freely available as tap water (for parents and primary school teachers, it is!). The same applies to Rap and Punk and poetry: they are NECESSITIES and should be freely available. Their commodification requires elaborate swindles (“the music industry”/”prize-winning poets” etc etc). For a brief while (Termite Club in Leeds 1979-1993), artists acted on Jorn’s principle of devalorisation, producing no singleton art commodity, no money values (both Brotzmann and Wilkinson were capable artists), but instead improvised events (“situations”) which changed people’s lives, though this was interpreted as “music” and led to its professionalisation and ultimate sterility (helped by the exile and deaths of Derek Bailey and Simon H. Fell, the only brains in the scene). The people who understood Jorn’s principle of devalorisation were Malcolm McLaren – hence continuing international relevance of punk (Bad Sam, Disease … too many great bands to name) – Music With My Insane Friend, Psychedelic Bolsheviks, Spoort and AMM All-Stars. If YOU think you’ve got it, by all means get in touch, let’s see what you’re made of, tiddly-push. No candy-ass art “terrorists” need apply.