Interview with Asger Jorn scholar Karen Kurczynski

Karen Kurczynski is a Lecturer in modern art history at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Kurczynski wrote her doctorate on 'Jorn: Beyond Expressionism: Asger Jorn and the European Avant-Garde, 1941-1961' (2005). Her contributions on Jorn also include the publications 'Ironic gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism' in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context edited by Joan Marter (2007) and 'Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn's "modifications"' (2008) in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics.

Q. What led to your interest in Jorn?

A. I got interested in Jorn through learning about the Situationist International, and realizing Jorn was completely understudied in that context because he was known as a painter. I began my dissertation as a study of Jorn's Situationist period only, but expanded it to cover the Helhesten period to the SI when I went to Denmark and realized how fascinating and understudied Jorn's full development was. My first paper on Jorn was a paper on Mémoires and Fin de Copenhague for a seminar at Columbia University on postwar European art with Benjamin Buchloh.

Q. In your dissertation you address several misconceptions about Jorn: that he was a figurative painter, that his work was overly expressive of inner emotions (i.e. too expressionistic), that his Modifications have been labelled as part of the Situationist International's rejection of painting, and that he was too concerned with Scandinavian myths. Why do you think an artist who worked so hard to disseminate his ideas and collaborated with so many other great minds and artists ended up being so misunderstood?

A. I think Jorn was misunderstood for several reasons:

1. He was Danish, from a small marginalized country, working in France and Italy and largely an outsider in those artistic contexts; for socio-political reasons he was never taken as seriously as French postwar artists - all Cobra artists were marginalized in the French art world to some degree.

2. His painting became very popular in the wake of the massive popularity of Abstract Expressionism and Informel, and was simplistically lumped together with those styles (or with a third so-called "Cobra style" of playful monsters) without consideration of his political or theoretical contributions or the complexity of the work itself.

3. He contradicted himself constantly in his writing and in his artwork. This contradiction hasn't been recognized as a major contribution of his work in itself; rather it has led people to characterize him simplistically as an expressionist painter without recognizing the irony in much of his painting, etc.

4. In a way there are no misunderstandings, only different understandings. Today we are ready to see Jorn in a different way; in the 1950s he seemed less central because the art world was structured differently, based on a few limited centers, relegating everything else to the periphery; and in the 50s the dominance of the ideas of authentic personal expression were the filter through which Jorn's painting was seen. Today, with the more relativized role of painting in the art world, the rise of subcultural expression in painting and drawing, the plethora of strategies that could be called "modification," and the predominance of conceptual and multi-media strategies we see his work very differently and he seems much more significant.

Q. You mention that Jorn criticised Sartre's conception of painting as an act. We know how important Sartre was in the immediate post-war years, particularly in Parisian circles. In fact if we start to add up the number of artistic movements and institutions Jorn spoke out against we almost get the idea that Jorn's project was perhaps too ambitious for just one individual. Is the "misunderstanding" a case of his "opponents" being too big (Existentialism, Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, museums and art fairs) or was his message simply too nuanced or too complex to be pigeonholed?

A. It is both and more. The mainstream is always too big for critique to succeed in its attacks - today it is the neo-pop styles of the YBAs, for example, and artists like Koons whose work is the mainstream of global capitalist art market-dominated culture. Critics are everywhere but their voices are always marginalized. Jorn's message was diluted because it wasn't just in one medium (say, philosophy or painting or artist's books) but it spanned several. In his painting specifically, I see a critique embodied in much of his work (not all of it!) which was not recognized in certain contexts at the time because it depended on irony and pastiche which are relatively subtle and dependent on understanding intention and context. However the perceptive critics of his work - like Michel Ragon or Alloway - saw what was going on in his work already in the 1950s. It just did not get the recognition the American or French artists got.

Q. You write that "We are now in a position to recognise Jorn's deliberate conflation of avant-garde and kitsch as a prescient counter to Greenbergian modernism." (p. 39). With regard to Jorn's ideas on kitsch, how important a voice was Jorn in his own day (particularly prior to the Situationist International) - i.e. did his ideas on kitsch garner an audience?

A. His ideas garnered an audience among those he knew and in the art world and popular press in Scandinavia since he published there from the 1940s onward. But as far as I can tell his influence in France and Italy was less extensive because he remained something of an outsider there throughout his life. But I would like to know more about this myself--there is a lot more research to be done on exactly this question. His ideas on kitsch garnered the broadest influence via his artwork itself, though his paintings got a lot more press and collectors than the Modifications or the artist's books. Lawrence Alloway did publish "Intimate Banalities" in English in the 1964 Guggenheim International catalog, but I have yet to find direct evidence of American artists influenced by this.

Q. To what extent did Jorn's work anticipate the Situationist International?

A. Jorn's work anticipated the SI primarily in his critique of advertising and the mass media and his critique of functionalism beginning in his writing of the mid-1940s. He recognized the insidious nature of advertising and its potential effects on the human psyche as well as the importance of integrating art, architecture, and everyday experience already in that decade. He also anticipated the SI by placing such a strong emphasis on theory and the artist's role as amateur, critic, philosopher, and activist. His interest in art was a major difference with the SI's ultimate rejection of it; but the foundational interest in art within the SI (and into the 1960s after the so-called rejection of art) is also frequently underestimated.

Q. In connection with Jorn's work on the Golden Horns you write: "In anticipation of postmodern artistic methods, Jorn asserts through his project that the artist can be a collector and framer of images in addition to a creator of them.", (Dissertation p.343). If we also include Jorn's other projects and techniques ('Modifications',  'Disfigurations', graffiti, unfinished figures, doodling, Fin de Copenhague) and compare them to the techniques of artists active in Jorn's own time, can he be said to be ahead of his time, a sort of proto-postmodernist, or would that be going too far?

A. I don't think it's an exaggeration to call Jorn a proto-postmodernist. I wouldn't necessarily describe him as "ahead" of his time because that implies the old trajectory of the avant-garde as leading the rest of society into the future; rather I see him as a particularly insightful critic of his own time whose ideas and methods in many ways anticipate 1970s postmodernism: the critique of originality, the fascination with kitsch, the idea of collecting as creation, etc. However, he also maintains interests that directly contradict those ideas, such as his abiding interest in singular markmaking.

Q. A fundamental aspect of Jorn's work is his mistrust of the artist's authenticity, his belief that it was simply not possible for the artist to break free as a heroic individual. Did Jorn's work of the 1950s, in regard to his ideas on the authenticity of the artist, anticipate post-structuralism?

A. I believe Jorn's ideas of artistic expression do anticipate post-structuralism, because he locates subjectivity in specific situations in space and time rather than inside the individual subject, and in his theory and his work conceives of subjectivity as constantly shifting, contradictory, explicitly defined by a social and political context, and as inauthentic, explicitly countering the existentialist, informel, and abstract expressionist emphases on authenticity.

Q. One of the reasons you think Jorn is so interesting is that his historical engagement spanned two generations of artists: the Informel and Abstract Expressionist artists with their devotion to painting as an apolitical avant-garde, and the and conceptual art and Situationist artists with their rejection of painting as a reified and socially compromised activity. Can Jorn's work in art historical terms be read as a bridge between Informel / Abstract Expressionism and the Situationist International / conceptual art?

A. Maybe. I don't know if it's fruitful to conceptualize a bridge between movements so entirely opposed. Maybe Jorn presents more accurately a third possibility. Jorn's work produced in the context of the SI (only a small amount of work including Fin de Copenhague, Mémoires, some collaborative paintings, the Modifications, and some theoretical writing) is also directly Situationist itself. But of course certain aspects of his work are shared with these movements - in some ways Abstract Expressionism also re-conceives subjectivity as situational, for example (in Pollock's case most explicitly).

Q. Finally, what is your next Jorn project?

A. My next Jorn project is a kitsch essay which will come out in 2010: "Asger Jorn, Popular Art, and the Kitsch-Avant-Garde," Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Monica Kjellman-Chapin. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming 2010.