I first came across Karen Kurczynski's work on Danish artist Asger Jorn reading her contribution 'Ironic gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism' in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context edited by Joan Marter (2007). That led me to Kurczynski's doctoral thesis Beyond Expressionism: Asger Jorn and the European Avant-Garde, 1941-1961 (2005), a decidedly revisionist work that convincingly challenges the prevalent art historical account of Jorn's work (contact me if you want access to the thesis).

From the periphery of European post-war modernism, Kurczynski places Jorn at the very core of the post-war avant-garde as both a critical voice of and an important counterweight to the leading post-war styles such as Art Informel, Tachism and Lyrical Abstraction. Moreover, because his career spanned three decades (the 40s, 50s and 60s), included long stays in several countries (France, Germany, Italy and Denmark), and involved major theoretical and artistic contributions to a number of movements (Helhesten, Cobra, International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and Situationist International), Jorn offers a unique prism through which to explore post-war modernism.

Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Jorn never solidly positioned himself within one artistic movement. He always broke free of those movements he helped to found, and constantly spoke out against the leading movements of his day. Almost by default he ended up in a group of his own, devoid of any label. Difficult as it is to pigeonhole Jorn, it is nevertheless possible to identify deep-rooted themes and agendas in his work. A virulent opposition to the institutionalisation of art, mistrust of the artist's authenticity, and a belief that art should have a political message and awaken the viewer led Jorn to develop a raw and noisy style where colours, forms and brush strokes fight for survival, and unfinished figures struggle to take form.

Jorn misunderstood

That Jorn was a figurative painter is a general misunderstanding that is echoed in similar misconceptions about the Cobra movement (1948-1952), which he co-founded and which has been denigrated for being little more than a figurative version of American Abstract Expressionism.  However, quite apart from the fact Cobra was founded before the recognition of the American Abstract Expressionist movement in Europe, thus pre-empting any notion of causality, it is obvious just from looking at Jorn's art that his paintings are not figurative. Of course there are figures in his work but, crucially, they are always in the process of figuration, never complete, and so to categorize Jorn's work as figurative would be wrong, just as it would be wrong to describe de Kooning's art as figurative.

By the 1960s Jorn's work had become more fluid and, consequently, less "figurative". Ironically his more fluid paintings attracted the criticism that his work was too expressive of inner emotions, deemed an unoriginal return to the outdated tradition of Expressionism. If there was any European artist who opposed the trace of personality in art, the individual gesture, it was Jorn: for years he had been critical of the individual gesture in Art Informel and Tachism; for years he had opposed the transcendentalism in Lyrical Abstraction.

Although Jorn had always attacked the individual gesture in what was considered to be the European avant-garde, it was the Situationist International platform, a movement Jorn co-founded in 1957, that really spread the idea that Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction had been institutionalised as high modernism and had consequently lost their right to an 'avant-garde' label. Although Jorn was a co-founder and key member of the Situationist International movement, his role has been marginalised in art history. One reason for this is that the Situationists ended up rejecting painting altogether, a position that Jorn could not support and which led to his leaving the movement in 1961. All the same, recent scholarship has considered Jorn's Modifications as part of the Situationist International rejection of painting, a labelling that is simply wrong.

Jorn has also been criticised for being too concerned with Scandinavian myths, implying too local an approach and a lack of a universal perspective. Whilst it is true that Jorn was, indeed, interested in Scandinavian myths, what is generally overlooked is that he was equally interested in myths from other cultures, including classical, Christian and Oceania belief systems. In comparison the American Abstract Expressionists limited their use of mythical influence to the classical and Judaeo-Christian belief systems. It is equally important to stress that Jorn and his Helhesten (1940 - 1944) colleagues' emphasis on mythmaking - the construction of new myths as opposed to the rendition of 'old' ones - was otherwise found only in the emerging American Abstract Expressionists. Furthermore, Jorn was never bound to Denmark. Rather, he lived abroad for most of his working life and his collective approach to art-making meant that he corresponded and collaborated with a wide range of European artists, not to mention the collective endeavours pursued  in the movements like Cobra, Situationist International, and International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.

Jorn and the avant-garde

Jorn was an anarchist at heart and although he sought collaboration with a great number of artists and actively participated in several artistic movements, he made a habit of breaking with the very movements he had helped to form. At the end of the day he found it impossible to commit to claims of absolute truths, whether they came from colleagues, museums or art critics. Writings from his Cobra years for example opposed the notion propagated by art critics that representational images were outdated. Jorn's rejection of artistic truth meant that he instead put more emphasis on the process of art making, always seeking experimental environments in his collaborations. According to Jorn, art died the moment it was institutionalised, be that through a museum or art critic beatifying an artistic movement or a colleague resting on past laurels. It is, then, perhaps not surprising that he turned down an offer to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1962 and rejected the Guggenheim Prize in 1964.

Although Jorn continued with his 'traditional' paintings after 1957, under the aegis of the Situationist International he launched a series of artistic projects that incorporated kitsch in a deliberate attack on the avant-garde (Lyrical Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism) which he believed to have been institutionalised as high modernism. One project was his Modifications where he added grotesque images and abstract splashes of paint to kitschy academic paintings he had bought in flea markets, a deliberate attempt to break the barrier between 'high art' and everyday life. Another project was his "Luxury Paintings", simple drip paintings that parodied Abstract Expressionism, and - as the word 'Luxury' implies - reduced artistic activity to the production of decorative consumer goods meant to be hung above the sofa. True to form, Jorn left the Situationists when its main advocate Guy Debord became increasingly dogmatic, eventually asserting that free artistic agency was impossible. Jorn never lost faith in painting as a media for change.

Both central to Jorn's work and ahead of his time was his rejection of authenticity. To Jorn, an artist's work was conditioned by his circumstances and the society which he was a part of. It was simply not possible for the artist to break free as a heroic individual. In this sense Jorn was more radical than the Abstract Expressionists and the Art Informel artists who did believe in the heroic gesture of the individual free from societal constraints. By negating the 'I' in artistic activity he not only questioned the trustworthiness of the image itself but also shifted the focus of artistic meaning away from the artist and towards the viewer. This is where the notion that his figures never really materialise becomes important. By leaving figures unfinished Jorn deliberately tried to provoke the viewer to interact with and 'finish' the painting, and in so doing he turned the artist-viewer dialogue into a collective activity as opposed to the one-way communication of artists such as Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Mathieu. Jorn's aim was never to instil a particular emotion or sensation in the viewer, nor did he ever claim that his artistic production possessed a universal truth.  What he did seek, though, was to awaken creative forces within the viewer, forces that he believed to be inherent to all people but lost in modern life. His paintings in this respect are best described as starting points for further exploration.

Jorn's stylistic techniques

Already by the early 1950s he employed a whole range of techniques to underscore his project of rejecting the authenticity of the artist and institutionalisation of art. He used simplistic and popular forms resembling children's drawing, graffiti and doodling, at first sight void of academic skills. He deliberately disrupted compositional harmony by positioning forms in an overtly unbalanced way or attacked the notion of aesthetic harmony by violently clashing complimentary colours. Jorn's paintings are like battlefields where colours, forms and brush strokes fight for survival, and where unfinished figures struggle to take form. This noisy and disharmonious aspect of Jorn's work echoes the American generation of artists that came after the Abstract Expressionists, painters like Cy Twombly whose similarly erratic use of the brush evokes graffiti art. Jorn's later work (1960s) generally appears more harmonious and pleasing to the eye; however, although it is indeed more fluid, the battles between colours and forms, and the figures struggling to materialise, are still there.

The monster, or more precisely the "monstrous", is a recurrent theme in Jorn's work.  As his figures are always in a process of figuration there are never really any monsters as such present in Jorn's paintings; it is the viewer who conjures up images of monsters. Jorn was attracted to the monster's under-dog nature, the one who is killed by the hero (e.g. St. George slaying the dragon), a universal theme that - according to Jorn - cut across all mythological systems and symbolised the victory of civilisation over nature and man's instinctive drives. Jorn was not interested in any one myth in particular; none of his work makes reference to any specific myth. Rather, Jorn was interested in the construction of myths, a basic element of human imagination which - just like the creative forces previously mentioned - he believed to be available to all. Jorn believed that we are all fully capable of tearing down institutionalised myth and creating our own myths, a struggle that Jorn wove into his critique of the stifling effect of modern media (e.g. television, film and advertising), which he accused of turning people into docile consumers. The monstrous was meant to awaken the mythmaking element of the viewer's imagination, the instinctive life force within us. This socio-political aspect to Jorn's art was absent among the American 'mythmakers': whereas artists like Newman and Rothko attempted to provoke a spiritual sensation in the viewer, Jorn would settle for nothing less than a revolt against the oppressiveness of modern media.