The Situationist Offensive in Scandinavia
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
Abstract
The Situationist International was a radical avant-garde group founded in 1957 aimed at reviving the inter-war avant-garde project of integrating art and life in a revolution- ised society. The group, which existed until 1972, went through a series of splits that had to do with the question of art and the ability of the individual art work to contrib- ute to the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society. For instance, Asger Jorn left the group in the early 1960s because Jorn’s institutional success was considered to be a problem for the situationists’ revolutionary project of subverting all existing institutions.
The Situationist International, the small self-declared post-political and post- artistic avant-garde group that existed from 1957 to 1972, when it was dissolved by its leading figure Guy Debord and the Italian member Gianfranco Sanguinetti, churned out a remarkable amount of work that sought to critique not only cultural production but also political economy, the mass media, film and urbanity in post-war consumer societies. The group relentlessly castigated present-day art and society through texts, tracts, films, posters, collages and would-be revolutionary everyday behaviour, transgressing the borders erected in bourgeois capitalist society in its search for a non-alienated existence.1 Several Scandinavian artists participated at various times in these heteroge- neous experiments. Through Asger Jorn, an internationally recognised artist by the end of the 1950s, the Situationist project gained foothold in Scandinavia, and particularly Denmark. Several Scandinavian artists became members of the situationist organisation, including the Swedish painter Hardy Strid, the Danish painter J.V. Martin, the Danish poet Peter Laugesen and Jorn’s younger brother, the writer and artist Jørgen Nash.
1 Before the 1989 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, there was no wider reception of the activities of the Situationist International. Although a few studies had been published in the 1970s and 1980s, it was only after 1989 that the situationists became the object of more lasting academic and mainstream attention. For recent analyses of the Situationist International see, for instance, Bolt 2004a, Danesi 2008, Ford 2005 and Wark 2008.
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Jorn played an important role: he co-founded the organisation after getting into contact with the small Parisian-based International Lettrist group led by Guy Debord. After the break-up of Cobra and attempts to create different groups such as Mouvement pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste, Jorn was intent on establish- ing a new project.2 A shared interest in the revolutionary role of modern art and a dismissive attitude towards more or less all contemporary art and architecture brought Jorn and Debord together. In the initial period of the group, during which revolutionary artists from several European countries came together, Jorn played a key role as both practising artist and theorist. As a situationist, he continued his Cobra and post-Cobra experiments with gestural, figurative expressionism through the so-called modifications, where he painted on sec- ond-hand canvases by anonymous painters, putting the situationist détourne- ment technique to use. By using already existing objects, giving them a new meaning, he intended to critique the art institution and its notion of originality, and also to propagate kitsch as a kind of genuine popular art. Apart from his continued search for an alternative plasticity, Jorn participated in the editing of the situationist journal, Internationale situationniste, and wrote two books of situationist essays: Pour la Forme (For Form, 1958) and Critique de l’economie politique (Critique of Economic Policy, 1960). In these he outlined his idiosyn- cratic theory about art as a kind of surplus value or luxury, able to pave the way for a new world beyond sterile, dull modern society (Jorn 1958 and 1960). In addition to these activities Jorn constantly brought in new members he wanted to throw into the situationist maelstrom, to see what might happen when French ultra-leftists, Italian pharmacists, Dutch architects, Danish poets and German painters got together, discussing and trying to put into practice the revolutionary upheaval of art and politics. Initially the Situationist International was involved in a thoroughgoing re-conceptualisation of art as a critical and ludic activity often taking place outside the artistic institutions, activities that would at once negate and produce art. Within a few years, how- ever, a shift occurred within the situationist organisation from an exploration of an extended experimental artistic or architectural practice towards a cri- tique of all spheres of commodity capitalism. In this process Jorn gradually withdrew from the group; he left in 1961, and Debord increasingly took control of the situationist organisation. The different situationist tendencies manifested themselves most visibly during a conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1961.3 One faction, encompass- ing Debord, the Hungarian member Attila Kotányi and the Belgian member
2 For a discussion of Jorn’s involvement in the Situationist International see Kurczynski 2005. 3 A report about the conference is published under the title “La cinquième conférence de l’ I.S. à Göteborg” in Internationale situationniste 7, 1962: 25–31.