Asger Jorn
Encyclopedia
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA
COBRA (avant-garde movement)
COBRA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen , Brussels , Amsterdam .-History:...

 and the Situationist International. He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen.

The largest collection of Asger Jorn's works—including his major work Stalingrad—can be seen in the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg
Museum Jorn, Silkeborg
Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, is a Danish Art museum located in beautiful surroundings by Gudenåen in Silkeborg, Denmark....

, Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

.

Early life

He was the second oldest of six children, an elder brother to Jørgen Nash
Jørgen Nash
Jørgen Nash was a Danish artist, writer and central proponent of situationism. He was born in Vejrum, Jutland, Denmark, baptized Jørgen Axel Jørgensen, the brother of Asger Jorn. He later changed his family name from Jørgensen to Nash. He was married three times and has six children...

. Both his parents were teachers. His father, Lars Peter Jørgensen, was a fundamentalist Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 who died when Asger was 12 years old in a car crash. His mother, Maren, née Nielsen, was more liberal but nevertheless a deeply committed Christian. This early heavy Christian influence had a negative effect on Asger who began progressively to inwardly rebel against it, and more generally against other forms of authority.

In 1929, aged 15, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

 although he made a recovery from it after spending 3 months on the west coast of Jutland. By the age of 16 he was influenced by Nicolai Grundtvig, and although he had already started to paint, Asger enrolled in the Vinthers Seminarium, a teacher training college in Silkeborg
Silkeborg
Silkeborg is a city in central Denmark. Located in Silkeborg municipality in Jutland, the city has a population of 42,724 . The development of Silkeborg as a modern city may be traced to the foundation of the paper mill by Michael Drewsen on the Gudenaa in 1844...

 where he paid particular attention to a course in Nineteenth century Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

n thought. Also at about this time Jorn became the subject of a number of oil paintings by the painter Martin Kaalund-Jørgensen, which encouraged Jorn to try his hand in this medium.

Early career

When he graduated from college in 1935, the principal wrote a reference for him which said that he had attained 'an extraordinary rich personal development and maturity' - especially because of his wide reading in areas outside the topics required for his studies. While at College he joined the small Silkeborg branch of the Danish Communist Party and came under the direct influence of the syndicalist Christian Christensen, with whom he became close friends and who, Jorn was to later write, was to become a second father to him.

In 1936 he traveled (on a BSA
Birmingham Small Arms Company
This article is not about Gamo subsidiary BSA Guns Limited of Armoury Road, Small Heath, Birmingham B11 2PP or BSA Company or its successors....

 motorbike he had scraped together enough money to buy) to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 to become a student of Kandinsky. However when he discovered that Kandinsky was in straitened circumstances, barely able to sell his own paintings, Jorn decided to join Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...

's Académie Contemporaine; it was during this period that he turned away from figurative painting and turned to abstract art. In 1937 he joined Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...

 in working on the Palais des Temps Noveaux at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. He returned again to Denmark in the summer of 1937. He again traveled to Paris in the summer of 1938, before returning to Denmark, traveling to Løkken
Løkken
Løkken may refer to the following locations:*Løkken-Vrå, a former municipality in Denmark, Now part of Hjørring.*Løkken a small sea side town in that municipality*Løkken Verk, a village in Norway....

, Silkeborg
Silkeborg
Silkeborg is a city in central Denmark. Located in Silkeborg municipality in Jutland, the city has a population of 42,724 . The development of Silkeborg as a modern city may be traced to the foundation of the paper mill by Michael Drewsen on the Gudenaa in 1844...

 and Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

.

From 1937 to 1942, he studied at the Art Academy in Copenhagen.

World War II

The occupation of Denmark by Nazi Germany was a time of deep crisis for Jorn, who had been deeply inculcated with pacifism, initially sinking him into deep depression. He subsequently became an active communist resistant
Resistance movement
A resistance movement is a group or collection of individual groups, dedicated to opposing an invader in an occupied country or the government of a sovereign state. It may seek to achieve its objects through either the use of nonviolent resistance or the use of armed force...

. During the war he also co-founded with the architect Robert Dahlmann Olsen the underground art group, Helhesten or "hell-horse," and was a contributor to its journal. In 1941, he wrote the key theoretical essay, "Intimate Banalities," published in Helhesten, which claimed that the future of art was kitsch and praised amateur landscape paintings as "the best art today." He was also the first person to translate Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

 into Danish.

Post-war

After the war, he complained that opportunities for critical thinking within the context of the communist arena had been curtailed by what he characterised as a centralised bourgeois political control. Finding this unacceptable, he broke with the Danish Communist Party, although he did not hand in his membership until the mid 1960s and remained committed philosophically to a revision of the marxist analysis of capitalism from the point of view of the artist.

He traveled again to France where he was a founding member of COBRA
COBRA (avant-garde movement)
COBRA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen , Brussels , Amsterdam .-History:...

 (a European avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

 art movement
Art movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

), and edited monographs of the Bibliothèque Cobra.

He returned, impoverished and seriously ill of tuberculosis, to Silkeborg in 1951 and resumed work in the ceramics field in 1953. The following year he traveled to Albisola in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 where he became involved with an offshoot of COBRA, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus
International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus
The International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus was a small European avant-garde artistic tendency that arose out of the breakup of COBRA, and was initiated by contact between former COBRA member Asger Jorn and Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo of the Nuclear Art Movement.-Timeline:*December 1953:...

.

Situationist International

In 1954 he met Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...

, who was to became a close friend. The two men collaborated on two artist's books, Fin de Copenhagen (1957) and Mémoires
Mémoires
Mémoires is an artist's book made by the Danish artist Asger Jorn in collaboration with the French artist and theorist Guy Debord...

(1959), along with prints, and forewords to each other's work.
He participated in the conference that led to the merger of COBRA, the Lettriste Internationale, and London Psychogeographical Association
London Psychogeographical Association
The London Psychogeographical Association is an organisation devoted to psychogeography. The LPA is perhaps best understood in the context of psychogeographical praxis.-London Psychogeographical Institute:...

 to form the Situationist International in 1957. Here he applied his scientific and mathematical knowledge drawn from Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science...

 and Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in...

 to develop his situlogical technique. Jorn never believed in a conception of the Situationist ideas as exclusively artistic and separated from political involvement. He was at the root and at the core of the Situationist International project, fully sharing the revolutionary intentions with Debord. The Situationist general principles were an attack on the capitalist exploitation and degradation of the life of people, and solution of alternative life experiences, construction of situations, unitary urbanism, psychogeography, with the union of play, freedom and critical thinking. Such general principles were applied by Jorn to painting.

In 1961 he friendly quit his activity in the SI, still fully supporting its contents and goals, and keeping to financially support it, but believing that the new strategy of the SI was little effective.

He went on to found the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism
Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism
The Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism is a non-profit cultural institute based in Denmark.It was founded in 1961 by the Danish artist Asger Jorn, Peter Glob and Werner Jacobsen from the National Museum of Denmark and Holger Arbman of the University of Lund, Sweden, after Jorn left...

 in Silkeborg
Silkeborg
Silkeborg is a city in central Denmark. Located in Silkeborg municipality in Jutland, the city has a population of 42,724 . The development of Silkeborg as a modern city may be traced to the foundation of the paper mill by Michael Drewsen on the Gudenaa in 1844...

 and contributed material to the Situationist Times
Situationist Times
The Situationist Times ran to six issues edited and published by Jacqueline de Jong between May 1962 and December 1964 in Hengelo , Copenhagen and Paris, in editions of between 1,000-2,000....

. Later, he donated a museum for modern art to the Danish town of Silkeborg
Silkeborg
Silkeborg is a city in central Denmark. Located in Silkeborg municipality in Jutland, the city has a population of 42,724 . The development of Silkeborg as a modern city may be traced to the foundation of the paper mill by Michael Drewsen on the Gudenaa in 1844...

, near where he grew up. He was to remain close to Debord, however, and continued to fund Situationist publications.

His philosophical system Triolectics was given a practical manifestation through the development of three sided football
Three sided football
Three-sided football is a variation of football with three teams instead of the usual two. It was devised by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn to explain his notion of triolectics, his refinement on the Marxian concept of dialectics, as well as to disrupt one's everyday idea of football...

.

Later years

His first American solo exhibition was at the Lefebre Gallery in 1962. After 1966, Jorn continued to produce oil paintings while traveling throughout Europe collecting images with photographer Gerard Francesci for his vast archive of "10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art". He traveled extensively, to Cuba, England, and the far east. Jorn traveled to the United States for the first and only time in 1970, for a gallery opening at Lefebre Gallery. He had earlier asserted that he refused to travel to a country that made visitors sign a statement maintaining that they were not communists.

In 1964, he was awarded a Guggenheim Award including a generous cash prize, by an international jury assembled by Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from the 1960s. In the 1950s he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US...

. The following day Jorn sent this telegram to the president of the Guggenheim, Harry F. Guggenheim:
GO TO HELL BASTARD--STOP--REFUSE PRIZE--STOP--NEVER ASKED FOR IT--STOP--AGAINST ALL DECENCY MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY--STOP--I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME.


During the course of his artistic career he produced over 2500 paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, sculptures, artist's books, collages, décollages, and collaborative tapestries.

He died in Aarhus
Aarhus
Aarhus or Århus is the second-largest city in Denmark. The principal port of Denmark, Aarhus is on the east side of the peninsula of Jutland in the geographical center of Denmark...

, Denmark on 1 May 1973. He is buried in Grötlingbo, on the island of Gotland in Sweden.

Luck and Chance: Dagger and Guitar (1952)

The first edition of Luck and Chance was Jorn's first published book, issued privately to subscribers in 1952. It was written at the Silkeborg Sanatorium during his convalescence from a serious attack of tuberculosis aggravated by malnutrition and scurvy. Later in the process, it also became intended as a doctoral dissertation which was refused by a professor of philosophy at Copenhagen University. It is, amongst other things, a critique of Kierkegaard's triad of aesthetic, ethical and religious stages, and of his definition of truth. Another powerful influence appears to be present in ghostly form : Friedrich Nietzsche. It is one of the most fundamental texts to understand Jorn's undertaking of "a reconstruction of philosophy from the point of view of an artist".

Internationale Situationniste (1957-1961)

  • Originality and Magnitude (on Isou's System) (1960), article in Internationale Situationiste No. 4.
  • Open Creation and its Enemies (1960), article in Internationale Situationiste No. 5.
  • Pataphysics, A Religion in the Making (1961), article in Internationale Situationiste No. 6.

Value and Economy

Critique of Political Economy and the Exploitation of the Unique (1961)

This book consists of two parts. The first is a concise critique of the apparent contradictions in Marx's Das Kapital which Jorn uses to prepare the ground for a discussion of how the work of "the creative elite" can have "value" in any future society aligned on communist principles. This was originally published in French in 1959 by the Internationale Situationniste and is the most straightforward and least discursive of all of Jorn's texts, probably because Guy Debord had a hand in the editing. The second part is a long polemic against contemporaneous Russian revisionism and the failed attempt by Denmark and Britain to join the Common Market, before coming to Jorn's main proposal, an economically independent international "creative elite" adopting typical Scandinavian institutions to realize "artistic value" for the greater universal good. He also attempts to reconcile the unique and individual position of the "creative elite" with his socialist principles. The second part alternates between objective and subjective modes.

The Natural Order (1962)

If this is a critique of Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in...

's theory of complementarity
Complementarity (physics)
In physics, complementarity is a basic principle of quantum theory proposed by Niels Bohr, closely identified with the Copenhagen interpretation, and refers to effects such as the wave–particle duality...

, then it is also to just the same high degree a critique of that dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...

, that I in my earliest youth took to my heart and perceived to be the only acceptable principle for thought.
(Asger Jorn)

Signes gravés sur les églises de l'Eure et du Calvados (1964)

Jorn had noticed some graffiti scratched into the porch at the church in Damville
Damville
Damville is a commune in the Eure Department in the Haute-Normandie region in northern France.-Population:-History:Damville was important for its situation on the Norman border.The fortress of Damville was built in 1035...

 during a visit in 1946. Having noticed similar scratchings in Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

 at the cathedrals in Ribe
Ribe
Ribe , the oldest extant Danish town, is in southwest Jutland and has a population of 8,192 . Until 1 January 2007, it was the seat of both the surrounding municipality, and county...

, Lund
Lund
-Main sights:During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the town was the seat of the archbishop, many churches and monasteries were built. At its peak, Lund had 27 churches, but most of them were demolished as result of the Reformation in 1536. Several medieval buildings remain, including Lund...

, and Trondheim
Trondheim
Trondheim , historically, Nidaros and Trondhjem, is a city and municipality in Sør-Trøndelag county, Norway. With a population of 173,486, it is the third most populous municipality and city in the country, although the fourth largest metropolitan area. It is the administrative centre of...

, Jorn decided to study the phenomenon. He was able to make a trip to Normandy in 1961 with Franceschi. They were able to record a number of such markings in Eure
Eure
Eure is a department in the north of France named after the river Eure.- History :Eure is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790...

 and Calvados
Calvados
The French department of Calvados is part of the region of Basse-Normandie in Normandy. It takes its name from a cluster of rocks off the English Channel coast...

, but not elsewhere.

See also

  • Art of Denmark
    Art of Denmark
    Danish art goes back thousands of years with significant artifacts from the 2nd millennium BC, such as the Trundholm sun chariot. Art from modern Denmark forms part of the art of the Nordic Bronze Age, and then Norse and Viking art...

  • List of Danish painters
  • Members of the Situationist International
    Members of the Situationist International
    List of people that, at different times, have been members of the Situationist International:-Belgian Section :*Walter Korun*Attila Kotányi*Rudi Renson*Jan Stijbosch*Raoul Vaneigem*Maurice Wyckaert-Dutch Section :*Anton Alberts*Armando*Constant...

  • Museum Jorn, Silkeborg
    Museum Jorn, Silkeborg
    Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, is a Danish Art museum located in beautiful surroundings by Gudenåen in Silkeborg, Denmark....

  • Tachisme
    Tachisme
    Tachisme is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK