Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 00:35:34 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: SI
To: avant-garde-AT-world.std.com


On Sun, 15 May 1994, Michael Current wrote:

> So how is Nancy, anyway?

Asger Jorn was a Danish artist who got involved with the SI in about 1955.
In 1961 he resigned from the SI when his career as a painter began to get
in the way of his politics, but he continued to support the SI
financially, usually by giving Debord paintings for resale. His museum has
a big collection of SI memorabilia and I believe, though I may be wrong,
that Debord has added to the files there (Jorn died I think in the
1970's). 

He's kind of a wonderfully itinerant figure in the post-war Euro art
world. He worked on an underground mag in Denmark called something like
Helhenstehn--"horse of hell"--during the last years of Nazi occupation,
and after the war was involved w/Revolutionary Surrealism and then helped
found CoBra. Then went to Italy to make ceramics & tried to set up
something called MIBI (Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus) in protest at
the tight-assed revival of the original Bauhaus. 

The Debord maps with colored splats are a collaborative effort between
Debord & Jorn, and the detourned painting of the girl in a communion dress
with a mustache and graffiti reading "l'avant-garde se rend pas" is also
by Jorn. His painting style is expressionist crossed with art brut, and he
was very engaged by what is now called outsider art, revising surrealism's
unconscious by trying to politicize it with a social, collective base. (To
this end he was continually getting involved in collaborations, writing
manifestos, starting groups, etc.) Also involved in Scandinavian
archaeology, and wrote polemmics. Most of his painting is dreadful,
really; actually alot of the CoBrA work is dreadful. But these artists
were up to a number of things: decentering the art world (from Paris to
the marginalized boonies), maintaining a cosmopolitan mobility, asserting
the social function of art, establishing experimental communities and
trying, at least rhetorically, to expand the definition of "artist." 

There is a not-very-useful essay in the Wollen catalog of the SI art 
tour, "on the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment..." 
published by MIT Press, and there are a couple of worshipful monographs.

So who's Nancy?

-fido