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.