ASGER JORN
Writings on Art and Architecture
Guy Debord and Asger Jorn were the key co-founders of the Situationist
International. Despite significant differences in style and personality, the two
were close collaborators at that time and remained close personal friends until Jorn’s death
in 1973, long after Jorn had left the SI (he resigned from it in 1961).
One of the first projects of the newly formed SI was the publication of a large
French-language collection of Jorn’s texts from the immediately preceding
period: Pour la Forme: ébauche d’une méthodologie
des arts (1958). As Jorn explained in his introductory
“Notice,” the texts collected in that book reflected the evolution of his
experiments and encounters among radical avant-garde currents following
the dissolution of the Cobra group (1948-1951) and leading up to the
formation of the SI in 1957. Pour la Forme was reprinted by
Éditions Allia (2001) and
is still in print, but up till now very few of Jorn’s
writings have been available in English.
Now, at long last, there is a comprehensive English-language collection of
Jorn’s writings:
Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art
and Architecture, 1938-1958 (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011, edited by Ruth Baumeister). Most of
this new collection consists of
articles translated from the Danish and Swedish by Paul Larkin,
but it also includes four articles from Pour la Forme translated from
the French by Ken Knabb. These latter four articles are also online at this
website:
Notice (1958)
1. Image and Form (1954)
2. Form and Structure (1956)
3. Against Functionalism (1957)
4. The Situationists and Automation (1958)
These articles provide a taste of the richness and liveliness of Jorn’s ideas and explorations. I encourage you to get Baumeister’s book if you are interested in further exploring this provocative yet genial pioneer of the interface between cultural and political radicalism.
Excerpts from Ruth Baumeister (ed.), Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, 1938-1958 (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011).