Jorn thought the aesthetic task was to reignite sensation through experiments in emergent form. His was an aesthetics of accidents, experiments, elaborations rather than purification. He opposed any return to Hellenic idealism and insisted that art needed to keep abreast of the latest developments in the natural sciences. He thought that the evolution of form in any domain took place through dissymmetry. Jorn: “ugliness is no less rare than beauty.”
Jorn was opposed to that strand of modernism that sought only a purification of form and which tended to fetishize the geometric. Nature isn’t a matter of pure forms for Jorn. It is about a play of variations and even monstrosities. Jornian aesthetics does not seek a balance between the disinterested appreciation of Apollonian rigor and the immersive passions of Dionysian play. For Jorn, the tension between the figures of Apollo and Dionysus is actually a class struggle between aristocratic and folk life. Rather than the war on monsters that constitute the mythic life of every ruling class, Jorn is on the side of the monsters. Or as Michele Bernstein says apropos Jorn, “monsters of all lands unite!”
[…]
Art is experimental social practice. Ruling class art is Apollonian and represents the world as made in its own image. What it fears is the alignment of popular power with the forces of nature in an open-ended process, as the capacity to reinvent form, including social and political forms. Art is playful; play is social. To modify Lautréamont: “poetry should be played by all.”
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Jorn saw a way forward in the practices of the Letterist International, perhaps one of the most marginal and inconsequential avant-gardes of the time – at least from the art world’s point of view. A shorthand way of explaining what he saw in them might be to think about the name of the movement they would found together: the Situationist International. It was Sartre who had put the category of situation back into play. In Sartre, the situation was where a free consciousness came up against the inertia of a facticity it could not know about in advance. But in Sartre the situation is given, a stage for an individual encounter. For the situationists, the collaborative and playful labor of the production of situations might yield a renewed consciousness, unknown ambiences and affect, a playful reconstruction of the world.
Thus, the Letterist practices of dérive, potlatch and détournement might point the way forward, to a reinvention of art as collaborative, experimental practice, meant to make new myths, new avatars, a whole way of life. Of course, all of this will be absorbed back into the art world as an archive. As images and concepts to be processed into the making of more of the same. But Jorn wanted more than that. Now that we know that this is the Anthropocene, that things can’t just go on as they are, perhaps we need more than art-world Asger Jorn. We need Jorn the thinker and activist of the materialist attitude to life. Or so I argued in The Beach Beneath the Street.
Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!, McKenzie Wark, September 11, 2016.
Asger Jorn, Conte du Nord (Northern Count) (Modification), 1959. Oil on canvas on found painting. 31.7 x 21.1 inches. via Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modification Paintings, curated by Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt, Petzel, March 5 – April 13, 2019.
Valentin Guerrier.
