Détourn or Deform?

"A Maximum of Openness: Jacqueline de Jong in conversation with Karen Kurczynski"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 195

JdJ: ... If you look at it, you can see that I printed it in the smallest font possible so that no one could read it. And it was on purpose. I was already at that moment not very happy with the guys in Drakabygget, mainly Thorsen, I must say. The Drakabygget people were making détournements of articles of mine, such as "Gog and Magog," in their magazine. They even did it with articles by Jorn. You could say there was a degree of faking in what they were doing. One thing that has not been mentioned is that we, the Situationists, always had an anti-copyright declaration in all the magazines. ... Of course it means that everything is permitted, but you don't expect your comrades to deform your texts as they were meant to be serious.

KK: Deform or détourn?

JdJ: Deform, I think. It's a good question.

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn's Artistic Reality

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn
p. 201—quoting directly a "somewhat humorous" passage of Jorn's:

What an artwork represents is quite insignificant. What the artist believes it represents is also insignificant. The effect the artist wanted to achieve is itself without interest. What the observer believes he sees in the artwork is in itself insignificant. The only thing that means something is the objective and real effect the art has exercised on the observer. That is the artistic reality.

Indeed, and it is a reality that usually cannot be known. We simply are (usually) not in a position to say with precision or certainty what the "real effect" is, and there are as many reasons for this as there are people. Hence also countless efforts (mostly therefore misguided) by all these people to ascertain/establish this reality. Jorn may be joking...but I'm not!

KK continues:

This emphasis on material reality, and what it does to the viewer in the moment of viewing, is the opposite of the romantic-Expressionist idea of truth, which implies a preexisting, hidden inner reality to which the external work corresponds. ...Jorn embraced the "superficial" instead, describing art as an encounter with the unknown in which neither lie nor truth exist. He believed in expression, but he also acknowledged that different viewers could interpret it in diverse ways. Jorn openly invited conflicting interpretations by making humor and irony key elements of his aesthetic. He replaced the truth of authentic expression with the reality of materials, setting in motion a play of interpretation.

The escape from this outmoded (and, I have always thought, strictly figurative) usage of "truth" is indeed urgent. One oft-overlooked reason is hinted at here: this notion of "truth" demands/imposes an opposite, the "lie," thereby forming a righteous binary, with all the attendant pitfalls that come with that way of looking at the world. But the affirmation of an equally fraught conception, the "superficial," seems also like a failure, certainly of rhetoric, perhaps of translation, and indeed also of logic (that is, of the same logic enumerated on immediately preceding pages). This usage is successful only in a strictly culturebound way, since "truth" was thought to be "hidden," ostensibly in the depth rather than the surface of works. That being as it is, seems to me that this "encounter with the unknown" elides not just the truth/lie question but certainly also the surface/depth one as well. If the "objective and real effect" of artworks on observers is in fact the only "artistic reality," then both of those toxic binaries are taken care of rather parsimoniously, not for individuals necessarily but certainly for institutions and dialogue among them. Similarly, the previous except re: "artistic reality" did not indicate at all that Jorn in fact "believed in expression" after all (!!) and also/already in the "play of interpretations." That combination is quite proto-postmodern indeed in both fact and folly; but it probably tells us more about the author than about Jorn: the consistency with which his supposed positions are inconsistent throughout the book is tough to parse any other way. Yet another example in conclusion: there are many ways to "[set] in motion a play of interpretation;" in fact there is practically no way not to, according to the bit on "artistic reality." Why then posit "humor and irony" as especially fertile devices for this purpose? Are both not, in fact, just as profoundly culturebound (especially to references) as any work or subject? (See many prior remarks in this notebook re: detournement.)

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn's Distrust of Photography

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...distrust of the prefabricated image in fact led him [Jorn] at first to dismiss—shortsightedly—the artistic and critical potential of photography. Jorn writes that excessive faith in the progress and objectivity of science leads to the view that photography is the best art form, because it is the most objective and realistic. But there is no objective reality even in science, he argues, since it is always tied to the needs and interests of those who fund it. Rather than make art more objective, Jorn argues for the subjectivity of science. Writing in the late 1940s, he warns of the danger of considering photography a substitute for reality, the equivalent of armchair traveling instead of real experience. Jorn argues that the close connection of photography to reality is precisely what makes it the least artistic. He was unable to see the potential of photography as a creative medium because of its associations with impersonal, mass reproduction. Jorn reductively associated photography with the culture industry... While hopelessly limited for any contemporary understanding of photography, these views were typical of the 1950s. (198)

It seems once again that an opportunity has been missed and an opponent talked past rather than hit where it hurts: is "artistic" or "critical" potential really the issue, or is it rather that both potentials are in fact so shockingly vast in relation to the type of agency required that a certain devolution in the latter respect was now simply inevitable? The vast power of representation had in fact been democratized, and this rather directly and drastically cheapened initiative, intent, vision, subjectivity...it is hard to name an "artistic" or "critical" value that was not cheapened this way; that is, for the abundance of those potentials rather than their lack. Photography, in the moment that it was new, was too easy in proportion to the power inhering in it. This is not a denial that photographic skill exists, but rather that it was now both harder to distinguish from the ordinary and more widely dispersed and rather less scarce. Seems to me that these are material questions susceptible to material validation, whereas I cannot imagine successfully teasing out the objectivity/realism/science question raised here (certainly not only on the broadest of strokes painted here). The "substitute for reality" seems equally absurd on the surface, but I think it ultimately has been materially validated; in this case people can tell the difference but even so don't seem to care about the difference. But even here, the given discussion has suddenly shifted entirely to the consumption side of things; nothing is said about initiative, accessibility, technique, etc. as this pertains to creators, whereas it seems to me that the accounts of Jorn's chosen mediums throughout center around creation rather than reception. Continuing on, the word "impersonal" is used; this also demands that creation and reception both be explicitly accounted for; otherwise the impression is that of reactionary bluster rather than considered critique.

Jorn suggests that abstract art addresses our imagination more directly that the "indirect and superficial" art of photography. He writes that "visual art means first and foremost visual effects, and the most elementary, direct visual art is that which effects our power of imagination by means of colors, forms, and direct visual effects." (198)

Now we're talking! But there is again an unsatisfying, overgeneralized aspect betokening another missed opportunity. Is it photography itself which is "indirect," or is the photograph in fact the intermediary begetting an unduly "indirect" response in the subject? Is the problem in fact that the photograph is so direct (or perhaps simply suggests/imposes this conceit whether or not it is true) that the subject's imagination is subdued not for lack of "direct" stimulation but in fact for (the conceit to/impression of) an overabundance of it, thereby constraining the imagination inside thick walls of information rather than inviting it on an open-ended journey guided only by the occasional signpost? This analysis certainly is available re: representation and reproduction, as against abstraction/nonrepresentation and singularity. We may well read "elementary" as "leaves something to the imagination"; of course it is not just photorealism which fails this prescription precisely where nonrepresentation succeeds, but also language properly construed which fails where non-/pre-/supra-linguistic cognition succeeds. This is indeed a role (dare I moralize and say a Function?!) for abstract art and music; yet that aspiration to utilitarianism hits a snag if the ultimate, final, exalted end product of whatever particular process we are talking about remains representational, photorealistic, linguistic, communicative, etc. Seems that those types of thought are necessary, by definition, for any social intercourse at all, hence serial abstractifying exercises can be only a means, never their own ends, and in fact uniquely vulnerable to the conquering dictates of social ends which are contingent rather than absolute.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Abstraction and Inhumanity

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...this renewed interest in painting [in the 1950s] had an important social function as a profound rejection of what critics perceived as the threatening aspects of the spread of mass-media technologies mostly experienced on a screen. (196)

...cultural critics who contrasted the material specificity of painting as the ultimate medium of sensory engagement to the alienating effects of the mass media, despite the media's own claims to collapse distance into televisual "immediacy." (197)

Jorn's interest in gesture was about singularity itself, meaning not an especially talented individual but rather the volatile presence of a subjectivity at a particular moment or in relation to such a specific image. ... Jorn's emphasis on irreproducible singularity turned its back on the ideas of technological progress that the historical avant-garde had believed in so strongly before the war. (197)

In 1962, Jorn wrote that the great inhumanity of both the camps and the bomb was their dehumanization of people as a mass: [quoting Jorn directly] "The threatening thing about the German concentration camps as well as the American Hiroshima explosion lies in no way in the atrocities, which are no worse than those happening in many other places on earth. The shattering thing is their colossal and blind mass effect that makes humanity more and more valueless." (197)

Here, then, is a dissent from mass-ification but NOT from abstraction per se. This seems more lucid than lumping the two together, since the concurrent use of the A-word to denote both (1) nonmaterial intellectual images, and (2) visual representations skewed to the edge of recognizability, inevitably clouds more than it clarifies; and so here we have an excellent demonstration of just what is NOT abstract about so-called Abstract Painting, i.e. its materiality...or at least one could choose to parse "immediacy" and "singularity" of "gesture" this way. Abstract art is itself; here KK gives an account of a moment in history wherein Jorn and others (Adorno is mentioned) would/could not see television as simply being itself, but rather fixated on its ability to REproduce, and on a "mass" scale. I suppose the theory of Medium as Message would hold that TV is an "immediate" experience of TV itself, not merely an uncanny reproduction of other content. There's really no Right Answer to that disjunction, just different ways of looking. But looking in BOTH cases is passive, so the fact that the painterlies also had powerful theories of collective (NOT mass!) artisthood really ought to be acknowledged as a factor here. It unifies their theory, makes it whole, and supports their claims above. Mass communication technologies would not be democratized for decades yet, hence there was no such thing as active/generative participation in either the medium or the message of the new mass culture. Hence when KK subsequently points to Jorn's own use of some modern reproductive techniques in his own ongoing work, it must be borne in mind that the analogy to television (which is the specific example used above) breaks down over the question of activity/generativity; also (more so yet) over the lack of mass access to the network of TVs. (The network, by the way, seems to have since become both the medium and the message; if Jorn et al failed to see this coming, it was because they didn't have to see it coming to know that anyone could paint but not just anyone could broadcast.) And as for "mak[ing] humanity more and more valueless," few developments have contributed more to that process than the networks by which us humans have been forced to learn how many of us there are and how much we all suck. The media theorists carried the day as soon as the mass- became able to generate media content as easily as they could smear fingerpaint; but this has indeed made everyone more interchangeable, hence "valueless," than ever before, and it has not actually brought us either literally or figuratively closer together.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Détournement and Sexual Objectification

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn
p. 186—in an endnote

Baum ["The Sex of the Situationist International", 2008] defends the SI's use of erotic images of women as critical détournements. I would argue that those images fail to accomplish the SI's critical goals, however, because even out of context they continue to function as heterosexist images of the female body as passive object of desire.

Without yet having read Baum's article, I'm predisposed to agree with KK's assessment here. In fact this is quite an excellent test of the theory of détournement which it fails very much because of the exceptionally Spectacular nature of the source material rather than in spite of it. The uniquely loaded question of sexual objectification hence proves less rather than more susceptible to diversion; and in any case, there's nothing stopping the onlooker from simply gawking if that is what they choose or are inclined to do.

There is besides these occasional cameos by objectified women of course plenty of classically male energy baked right into Situationist theory via Debord's fascination with war, his rather direct application of its historical strategies to his practical political projects, and his conception of it as ineluctably two-sided and zero-sum. Hence the feminized, open-ended, festival-esque stagings by Class Wargamers rather soften this aspect of theory to a, debatably, unfaithful degree, though the festival idea was probably more central to Situationist thinking anyway and hence itself poses a possible practical contradiction once the theory is read in a gendered way.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn: Critique Is Secondary, Creation Is Primary

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...the Lettrists stated in 1953, "Oblivion (l'oubli) is our dominant passion." The original term "oubli" signifies at once forgetting, intoxication, and anonymity. (165)

p. 183—excerpt from Jorn

What one expresses through destruction is critique. Critique is a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists. What one expresses through artistic creation is joy of life. Art is primary action in relation to the unknown. The French have brought critique into the revolutionary plan, but if critique also becomes the purpose of creative art, and the creative artist thus a "specialized worker," whose work should only serve the permanent revolution's permanent consumption, then these Situationists have lost any sympathetic contact with the artists who seek to create a joy of life for its own sake, and drive them precisely into the arms of the power elite, which always controls the destructive instruments that can crush the people down, and which always make sure to have a moral excuse to make it all good and thorough.

[from "a 1964 lecture, after the artists and the SI had split"]
[source="unpublished manuscript" in Jorn Museum archive, KK's translation]

KK continues:

Jorn perceived Debord's SI as going too far, so that its claims to destroy art effectively relinquished art entirely to those in power. This self-marginalization would allow art institutions to take control of the group's historicization by default and perpetuate the very apolitical conception of art that the Situationists wanted to overturn.

A Just Say It moment which unfortunately runs aground on a couple of key points. Jorn merely talks past Debord when he threatens a loss of "sympathetic contact" with artists "who seek to create a joy of life for its own sake;" this is certainly true, but Debord had already put forth a powerful theory justifying this total break with art and centering on the ways in which it is not nearly so easy to give the artists the generous benefit of the doubt that Jorn seems inclined to grant them herein. The notion that they will thereby be driven into the waiting arms of power is also rather farfetched and seems to deny these artists agency in their own political affairs. And of course the concept of expression is problematic for all of the usual reasons. Seems to me that a stronger strategy here would be to eschew any consequentializing and attack Debord where he lives, i.e. take his theory apart. What I think we find thereby is that the Marxist obscurantism has led old Guy to a blanket, total, monolithic, teleological interpretation of the situation, especially vis-a-vis the anticipated thrust from fragmentary to unitary life, which reduces the complexity of the situation beyond the point where such reduction is tenable. There seems little difference between the two when it comes to the more immediate issues: releasing human potential from institutional mediation, and thereby freeing this potential to manifest. Beyond that, it's hard to shake the impression that Debord simply had it out for art whereas Jorn had more invested in it; in absence of this there doesn't seem to be any reason that Jorn's "primary action" and "joy of life" could not be reconciled with Debord's unitary, unalienated existence.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn's Critique of Functionalism

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

Jorn argues, "It is a basic weakness of Functionalism that it cannot tolerate the idea of freely creative art." In its worst iterations, Functionalism tended to celebrate standardization and technology for their own sake, imposing its aesthetic on people in a way reminiscent of the classicism it initially opposed. It became the classicism of the machine age. Just as in classical architecture, Functionalism's claims to the democratic ideals of openness and transparency were belied by the way it mirrored the social exclusions of class society through its impersonal monumentality, celebration of technology, and disdain for people's own irrational desires. (110)

As a complete outsider vis-a-vis "architecture," I am struck here (and this is merely the most comprehensive and best articulated of many similar passage throughout the book) by a sneaking suspicion that the very legitimate causes of "freely creative art," "openness and transparency," "irrational desires," etc. are simply irreconcilable with the practice of architecture as a public infrastructure endeavor. Significant compromises in the areas listed are necessary here, even in what we would call a Small Community. You simply can't make everyone happy nor unleash all of them all at once when it comes to designing and building public infrastructure. Now certainly it is MUCH MORE than mere infrastructure; that aspect of the theory is accurate. But these free and irrational impulses need other outlets, that is outlets without the material, monetary, and political weight of an entire community weighing on them. Definitionally, they will not flourish if asked to bear this weight. I'm not aware of an SI-adjacent theorist who explicitly incorporates and absolute, micro-scale localism into their overall theory, but here is an example where anything less than block-by-block autonomy just won't do (and even city blocks are probably too large to thrive under such anarchy).

As for "impersonal monumentality" and "celebration of technology," which supposedly "mirrored the social exclusions of class society," it is fair to expect the psychogeography of such installations to beget feelings of exclusion, but how much do feelings matter here? Once again, we suddenly seem to have fallen quite a long way from "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent," all the way to "Anyone who builds (or achieves anything at all) at "monumental" scale implicitly "excludes" everyone else, which is what the upper "classes" do explicitly." Seems to me at that point that the Millennial generation hardly invented the snowflake phenomenon! The Function- in Functionalism indicates that if a Monumental structure was open to the public unconditionally, any feelings of exclusion were the feeler's problem rather than the builder's. I have to confess that I also find such feelings absurd; but then perhaps I'm not much of a psychogeographer.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Aesthetics Make an Appearance

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

p. 105—on the Statsgymnasium in Aarhus

Rational, ordered, rectilinear, Apollonian, the building stands for everything Asger Jorn critiqued in architecture: geometries so harmonious and restrained that they became almost lifeless; the aesthetic celebration of structure and engineering that rejects almost anything decorative, organic, or irregular.

Here is a quite curious and loaded usage of "aesthetic;" or perhaps it is the usage of "decorative" in opposition to it which is the curiosity. The implication in any case is clearly of self-referentiality, formalism, and the specialist intellect run amok; that is, of a panoply of traits which I at least would consider to comprise one of the foremost ANTI-aesthetics, or perhaps non-aesthetics, as in that which does not engage with the senses in their basest form. Indeed, it seems (not only here) that the classbound conception of Aesthetics per se has gradually overtaken its literal/historical meaning: the word doesn't just denote the highbrow, it is highbrow; there is then no term left (or not one with wide circulation/currency) for the much simpler (but NOT therefore also Lower) question of sensation, perhaps not even for the sensation-intellect synapse, which is where we NEED this word most. Customarily this interface becomes a brick wall; so it is here, to the extent that a yet larger, more glaring slippage of concepts manifests: "aesthetic" opposed to "decorative."

[from a notebook, 2018]

[Now: this note itself is a hot mess in the usage department. I'm sure it was late after work. But you get the idea.]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Functionalism as Totalitarian

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

p. 34—on "collective creativity" and the "open work"

Given the context of Jorn's extra-painterly concerns in the early 1940s, the idea of openness implicit in the indeterminate compositional process also takes on social and political dimensions. Openness to the new would become one of Jorn's central artistic themes. He argues in Held og Hasard that curiosity about the new and unknown is the beginning of all aesthetic activity.

Is this orientation indicative of a moral purpose per se? Only by way of analogy/metaphor/mimesis/poiesis/etc. Where it takes hold at all, it is necessarily only at a distance from so-called Everyday Life, or at least this is so in this case because the result is an artwork. As an artist by vocation and calling, Jorn can model "openness" in the way he goes about his work, but he usually won't succeed in communicating per se to this effect, nor does the fact of his modeling seem likely to get over to much of anyone outside of the social world immediately surrounding art and artists. This is of course all well and good until KK would attach greater pretensions.

Jorn did not intervene to save them; in fact, he writes that the quick and inexpensive painting techniques and temporary lifespan of the murals were important aspects of their meaning. More broadly, the emphasis on the social experience over the finished work exemplified the way the collective practices of Cobra anticipate contemporary Relational aesthetics. Jorn believed that the role of artists was to inspire by example, through their embrace of a creative life, rather than either to create finished works which would only end up decorating the homes of the wealthy, like a painter, or to redesign the everyday lives of the working class, like a modern architect. ... The Bregnerød murals attempted to redefine "painting" from a noun to a verb, considering painting a process of redefining a space, transforming it into something at once more social and more artistic, in a new holistic statement that was simultaneously personal and collective. (83)

All of this begs all of the same questions as do so many later bubblings-up of "Relational aesthetics," itself a rather oxymoronic/contradictory turn of phrase, and most clearly so by the logic of its most vociferous supporters. If "social experience" is paramount, why pursue it through an activity which indeed results in, if not necessarily a "finished" work, certainly some kind of work? Does such a choice of vehicle not indicate that there is something about the process of creation, whether or not this process has clear starting and ending points, which facilitates the specific type of social experience desired? And if so, how could the fate of the work be quite as trivial a matter as such theorists would insist? It seems not merely illogical but actually fully disingenuous to have designated a destination while subsequently insisting that the journey is the priority. Of course who knows what scenarios could arise spontaneously; but as far as both internal logical consistency and empirical resonance, Debord's theory of the supersession of art and its absorption into Life actually seems to me to have quite a bit more going for it. As does, IMHO of course, Modernism writ large, which is perfectly transparent in its internal logic, aims, social role, etc., perhaps without much empirical resonance in the Everyday realm (which is of course intentional).

Needless to say that "inspir[ing] by example" as against "decorating the homes of the wealthy" is rather over-reductive and quite the false dichotomy.

Despite his interest in architectural murals inspired by Léger and Le Corbusier, Jorn rejected the emphasis of those artists on designing a complete socialist environment, which he felt only led to the rationalist plans of Functionalism. He critiqued the notion of design creating a new modernist lifestyle for its technocratic and authoritarian tendency. Jorn argues that, "we need an art that is living, a part of itself," adding that the most useful goal for artists is to attack the artistic establishment that prevents the working classes from understanding their own creative potential. (83)

The terms "technocractic" and "authoritarian" serve to highlight the concealed power differential between the designer and the end user. This much, I think, is worth granting and ruminating on (and possibly even connecting to, say, the current design-driven power dynamic in the Music Production/Distribution sector, where those thought to possess privileged knowledge of packaging methods exert strong gravitational pull on the scarce revenue streams while content (let's understand this usage of that word as a double-usage, as in the classical duality Form-Content AND the internet-oriented sense of a Content Producer) generators are, as they always have been but not always for the same reasons, the last to get paid). All of that having been duly noted, granted, ruminated upon, etc., the concealment of such power dynamics is only sometimes, or only partially, attributable to power's own interests/objectives; in the case of Functionalist design, I would say they are concealed in part because they are unavoidable. It is indeed perfectly accessible to the rhetorical "working classes" to paint murals on the walls of their apartments; it is rather less accessible but not insurmountably so for them to produce and distribute their own sound recordings; but it is scarcely possible for them to design and build the apartment building, the audio editing software, or the Internet themselves; and much more to the point, neither is it necessary for them to do so, unless they experience a Foucauldian level of anxiety over the fact that the specialists in design and construction of each of these items hold, it is true, some modicum of power over them. And so, again having granted the mere fact that such dynamics do in fact exist, it is a long way from there to technocracy and authoritarianism, these sorts of terms representing (or they did before people began throwing them around carelessly) a sort of total-ness of top-down power, complete with mechanisms of accountability which flow in only one direction. Obviously I need to brush up on architectural functionalism, because it seems from a distance that it could not possibly have risen to this level.

...Jorn produced so many more murals in private settings throughout his life; the Kindergarten and Bregnerød house were the exceptions. Unlike the 1930s murals of Le Corbusier, his were meant to inspire in the broadest possible sense, rather than to instruct or to enforce social ideals upon a population. For this reason, the gestural nature of both sets of murals was essential to their message of free expression. In rendering personal expression at a public scale, they broke down the strict opposition of public and private space, countering the ideals of public order inherent in the architecture with a seemingly chaotic organicism. The unprecendented combination of automatic drawing, popular motifs, and dynamic monumental imagery at Bregnerød created an aesthetic tension that suggests the mutual interdependence of collective space and personal expression, the situation Nancy describes as "being singular plural." (84)

So, the Direct Path of "instruct[ion]" is eschewed in favor of "inspir[ation]," ostensibly similar to Eu. Rousseau's opposition of intellectual understanding and emotional realization, of just telling a student the answer versus optimizing conditions for them to arrive at the answer themselves. There is indeed much to be said for this idea, but there's no disputing that it progressively loses its appeal as the scale of interaction is increased, i.e. as the range and quantity of distinct outcomes vis-a-vis individual social agents eventually increase enough to become intractable. Hence if a word as strong as "enforce" is occasionally (or, uh, perhaps all too frequently) appealed to, this reflects the necessity of both reductionism and brute force (hopefully merely of the rhetorical variety) in any mass-/macro-scale communication; these are the techniques which yield tractable outcomes. The theory of "free expression" that is presented here forfeits this tractability in exchange for liberation, but not for progress; or not UNLESS one believes in an exceedingly optimistic human nature which simply needs to be unleashed without being told where to go or what to do. More likely it will go everywhere all at once. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps not, but progress will not be achieved via chaos, which theorists of the latter tell us illustrates a certain Sensitivity to Initial Conditions, which is to say the rich get richer.

Perhaps those of us living now can be thankful that Jorn and others thought to pose an alternative to the comparatively naive First Wave progressivism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet where we go from here is as unclear as ever: the enforcement-inspiration opposition presented here really only marks out the poles of a spectrum, both of which have well-known flaws and limitations. Having learned this much, we may deploy one or the other strategy and hope to learn more about the strategic deployment of each. It is nonetheless hard to imagine resolving the central problem: you can't tell people what to do, and you can't expect them to figure it out for themselves.

Questions of scale arise more specifically as the passage continues. These muralists "broke down the strict opposition of public and private space" by "rendering personal expression at public scale." Seriously?! Just because this act, for instance, highlights the public/private distinction, displays a certain irreverence for it, invites consideration of its nature and implications, in no way necessarily encompasses as well the fait accompli that is related here. In fact the modifier "public" is a rather strange one to apply to the concept "scale," since both physical and intangible objects of all scales comprise the public sphere. As such, a "personal expression" made "public" can have all manner of implications rather independent of its physical scale. Concealed by this rhetorical maneuver is the potential that such ostensibly well-intentioned public displays of personal work reach various absolute statuses at various absolute increments of physical size (and perhaps also, but not necessarily, "scale"). Hence, the general principle enumerated here is quite suspect, and the specific case of "murals" is not exactly an ideal exemplar. The theory runs aground via the same oversight as in the previous case of "enforcement" versus "inspiration:" the sender of communication (in this case the artist) does not exert perfect control (nor anything approaching it) over its reception by any particular individual, or not unless (to recapitulate the previous issue) a degree of simplification and/or reduction is embraced which artists are generally loathe to even consider (and certainly Jorn's larger oeuvre as related throughout this book would give the impression that this sort of truly populist compromise was not in his vocabulary).

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Human Potential

Karen Kurczynski
The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn:
The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up (2014)

He [Jorn] believed that expression is a basic human potential that the institutions of art actually deny ordinary people by turning it into the specialty of a few heroic geniuses. (8)

What "institutions of art" "deny" to "ordinary people" is NOT their potential, but rather recognition and resources. If Sunday Painters believe they are entitled to those things simply for being human, then they deserve neither!

As a child of the 1980s who is suitably well-versed in motivational posters, I believe it to be true and prescient that No One Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Permission. They ought not, at least, simply by forming insitutions for the pursuit of a common agenda, or not necessarily. Past and present adherents to the doctrine enumerated in this passage hence contradict themselves by seeing institutions as inhibiting potential, since it is recognition that is withheld rather than freedom. Certainly it seems true that mere knowledge of the existence/praxis of recognition does inhibit many amateur artists; but this merely proves (proves!) that recognition is in fact their motive! This is SELF-inhibition!

The SI ultimately considered visual art mere cultural capital with no agency to effect broader social change (a belief that led Jorn to leave the movement). While Jorn's ongoing engagement with such neo-Marxist critiques of the institution of art was one of the driving forces behind Situationist theory, he also remained firmly committed to the idea that art plays a very specific role in society. For Jorn, art fulfilled a basic human need for expression. Yet even as modern art foregrounded personal expression for the first time in history, its institutionalization as a specialized sphere of the social elite cheated the non-artist out of a fundamental aspect of human experience. (10)

...the young and idealistic artists regarded Helhesten's ["Hell-horse," journal published in Denmark from 1941 to 1944 by Jorn and colleagues] activities as a direct intervention in social life, rather than simply an art movement. (27)

Jorn would continue to uphold this view of the avant-garde as an emancipatory force in both art and life, writing in 1949 that, "The purpose of art is first of all moral, and subsequently aesthetic." (27-28)

Oddly, this wording connects the seemingly new, proto-postmodern focus on the everyday to the older (typically intensely ideological) trope of "moral" uplift through the arts.

[from a notebook, 2018]