Background

Asger Jorn documented Gotland’s medieval art and architecture

In early summer 1964, Asger Jorn (1914-1973) set off for Gotland on a self-assigned mission. He rented Sigsarve farm on the southern part of the island and stayed there all summer. By this time, Asger Jorn was already an acclaimed artist, who, for decades, had been transcending all conceived boundaries for artistic practices, in the situationist spirit. Now he was here in the service of history, not as an artist but as an art historian, with the intention of photographing and documenting Gotland’s enormous treasure of mediaeval art and architecture. After a few weeks, he was joined by the photographers Gérard Franceschi and Ulrik Ross, and his artist colleague Jacqueline de Jong, and they proceeded with the project.

Research centre for a series of books on Nordic Folk Art

Since the late 1950s, Jorn had been working on composing his art history within the framework of his Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (SISV), a research centre in Silkeborg, Denmark. The aim of this project was to produce 32 volumes chronicling 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art. One of the books in the series, titled Stone and Bone, was to be about Gotland. From its tentative start, the project intensified in the early 1960s when the situationist movement was fractioned and several of its Swedish and Danish members were excluded.

Jorn, Nash and the Situationist movement in Scandinavia

The Scandinavian situationists, headed by Jorn and his brother Jörgen Nash, published the magazine Drakabygget in 1962, in which the political framework of the SISV was largely formulated. Drakabygget’s full name, Magazine for art against atom bombs, popes and politicians, gives some indication of the brothers’ ambitions. In a fit of artistic fury, Jorn outlined his ideas for an anarchistic Scandinavian type, a notion that, abstruse and singular though it may sound, seems to have provided one of the propelling forces for his art historical endeavour. The uncertainty about the basis and objectives of the project need not necessarily mean that it was unconsidered. On the contrary, the contradictions and the arbitrary were a method in themselves.

On the surface, Jorn appears to interpret Scandinavia’s history in the same way that early 19th-century artists regarded ancient Rome and Greece. Although the ideas underlying the SISV contain a measure of irony, Jorn took the project entirely seriously, and it could perhaps be interpreted as a special form of strategic essentialism – an attempt to build a new foundation and an alternative horizon for future possibilities.

One art book in the series published

Jorn did not succeed in his intention to publish the art books. Only one volume was printed, by his own publishing company: 12th Century Stone Sculptures of Scania. The book consists mainly of black-and-white photographs of mediaeval art, with an essay by the Swedish professor of archaeology Erik Cinthio. Jorn is responsible for the composition, and here we can study his montage method, which he called comparative vandalism.

The camera as a supporting member – material for a new art history

The research can be described as a paraphrase of the French art historian André Malraux’s great work, Le Musée Imaginaire, which he embarked on after the Second World War and finished in the 1970s. For Jorn, as for Malraux, photography underpins his practice. Photography is used to cut the works of art loose from their context, so that they can be used as material for a new art history. Not only does photography enable studying geographically dispersed objects simultaneously and at leisure, but also to change their size, to reveal patterns and structures.

The camera as a direct energy link to objects – not merely a mimetic mechanic

The question, here, is who or what performs the comparison, and what lens is used. Jorn, unlike Malraux, rarely mentions the medium of photography, and seems to use the camera as though it were linked directly to the energy of the objects and not merely a device for depiction. Where Malraux’s project reveals man and humanism, Jorn seems to show another kind of being. A being that does not see itself reflected in the photographs.

Art beyond representation

Jorn’s train of thought is not always easy to follow, but it can be traced back to Malraux’s ideas in the first part of his imaginary museum, The Psychology of Art. For instance, Malraux writes that to mediaeval man a sculpture of the Madonna was not a sculpture but simply: the Madonna. By envisioning art as direct and unedited, it is easier to understand what Jorn was trying to achieve; an attempt to generate art beyond representation and to create an understanding for the images through what they do, not what they mean. But Jorn goes even further in his comparative vandalism. Not only does he seek evidence of vandalist creativity in the images; his own examination is also a form of vandalism of art history itself.

Where Malraux created a new form of universal art history, Jorn’s project points in another direction, towards a strategic use of the particularly Scandinavian, as a resistance against the universal art history that Malraux was trying to reinvent. Jorn focuses equally on how objects and images have migrated over time, and on how they have been incorporated in new constellations. Among other things, he is interested in how wood, as a material, has been used in Scandinavia to replace original stone sculptures.

Jorn photographed some one hundred of Gotland’s stone churches

Jorn’s excursion to Gotland is one of the trips he made through Europe and the Nordic region. On the island, he and his colleagues photographed some one hundred stone churches and other historic sites. They seem to have concentrated on the rough, direct imagery of mediaeval reliefs and sculptures, but also on carvings and what could be called mediaeval graffiti. The plastered walls of stone churches are often decorated with pictures of unknown origin that appear to have been made by the artisans themselves while the plaster was still wet. Gotland’s prehistoric mazes, so-called Troy towns, were documented, and Jorn’s colleague de Jong used a large part of the material in her magazine The Situationist Times.

Art history as a way of making art

Jorn devoted years to exploring every conceivable way of making art. There is practically no medium he left untried. Film, music, photography, ceramics, performance and political activism were all part of his artistic practice. When he began using art history, and attempted to create a new art historical horizon, he appears to have overstepped a boundary for what was artistically permissible.

The project never gained academic recognition

His work received no recognition from the academic establishment. The Danish archaeologist PJ Glob, who had promised to support the book project, ultimately found the scientific quality of Jorn’s project to be doubtful and withdrew his funding. Jorn was forced to cease working on SISV and closed his centre. Tens of thousands of photos were stowed away, and Jorn understandably grew bitter about not being able to finish his project. In 1972, when Denmark joined what later became the EU, an institution that Jorn firmly rejected, he made plans to leave. He had been working on a final edition of books about Gotland and the Theoderik myth, based on the reliefs on the church in Grötlingbo. When he died of lung cancer in 1973, his last wish was to be buried there.

In 2001, Pontus Hultén curated a historical exhibition at Vandalorum in Värnamo. He called the exhibition The True History of the Vandals and dedicated it to Asger Jorn and his Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism.