Bøger om Situationisme

Fortællingen om samtidskunsten må handle om den ekstreme markedsgørelse og instrumentalisering af kunsten, der har fundet sted inden for de seneste årtier. Men den må samtidig også handle om, hvordan samtidskunstinstitutionen har været rum for fremvisning og diskussion af politiske konflikter, der for en stor dels vedkommende ikke har fundet sted andre steder i takt med, at tidligere venstre-politiske offentligheder er blevet afviklet, og politik er blevet reduceret til administration. Det er historien om samtidskunsten som et sted for politisk engagement og systemkritik. Selvom kunstens relative autonomi er under pres og hele tiden muterer, så er det kunstneriske felt og det enkelte kunstværk stadigvæk kendetegnet ved at være delvist uden for den kapitalistiske produktions- og administrationslogik. Og denne partielle adskillelse, den relative autonomi, udstyrer kunsten med et transgressivt potentiale. Som relativ autonom sfære er kunsten på én og samme tid en udfordring og en bekræftelse af det kapitalistiske samfund og værdiformens abstrakte dominans. Som Adorno formulerer det, er vareform- en autonomiens historiske mulighedsbetingelse. Det betyder ikke, at kunsten kun er ideologisk (i en dårlig forstand), den har bevaret sin historiske oprindelses emancipatoriske logik, og om ikke andet negativt afspejler den et løfte om lykke. Der er noget subversivt ved kunsten, den er en art oprør. Det er således ikke nok at udpege aporien – kunsten undergraver og bekræfter samfundet, kultur og barbari hænger sammen – nej, aporien skal på en eller anden måde analyseres og overskrides. Den er netop ikke ahistorisk, en invariant, men historisk og kan derfor ændres. Eller som Debord siger, kunsten er revolutionær (eller den er ikke).

»Men selvfølgelig: vores tid, som foretrækker billedet fremfor sagen, kopien fremfor originalen, repræsentationen fremfor virkeligheden, det forekommende fremfor væsenet. Det som er helligt for den, er ikke illusionen, men sandheden er profan. Ja, helligheden stiger i dens øjne, i samme grad som sandheden aftag­er og illusionen tiltager, således at den højeste grad af illusion for den også er den højeste grad af hellighed.«Det spektakulære samfund (tidligere kendt som Skuespilsamfundet) foreligger hermed i ny dansk oversættelse. Bogen består af lige dele totalfilosofisk teori og kritik af det kapitalistiske varesamfund. Guy Debord beskriver den samfundsform, der skabes gennem varer, billeder og ideologi, og som i 1960erne var ved at materialisere sig over hele verden. Med sine kritiske détournementer af Marx og Hegel står bogen i radikal opposition til reklamegørelsen af sproget, og er mere aktuel i dag end nogensinde før.»I den virkeligt omvendte verden er det sande et moment af det falske.«

In 1964 Asger Jorn (1914-1973), along with two photographers (the Frenchman Gérard Franceschi and the Dane Ulrik Ross) and his Dutch partner Jacqueline de Jong, travels around the island of Gotland in order to capture its archaeological riches: stone figures and carvings, churches, frescos, mazes. The island comes to figure centrally in the Danish artist’s conception of a specifically Nordic tradition going back to pre-Christian times and significantly influencing European culture tout court. Reflecting Jorn’s enduring interest in popular art forms, the project was not only retrospective in character, but also connected to contemporary political and artistic concerns, such as the artist’s opposition against what would later become the European Union and his recurring need to redefine his own position vis-à-vis the international art scene. The Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism was founded by Asger Jorn shortly after leaving the Situationist International in 1961. Operative for a brief period (1961-1965), the institute’s output was photographic and paginated: for Jorn the printed book was a site for the analysis, sequencing and presentation of large quantities of heterogeneous visual materials. Through his “continuous collages” (the phrase belongs to Jorn’s friend and collaborator, the archaeologist P.V. Glob) of photographs, Jorn wanted to trace image migrations across space and time. Most ambitiously, he planned the production of 32 voluminous books devoted to 10,000 years of Nordic folk art. One of the books was planned to be titled “Sten och ben” (Stone and Bone), focused exclusively on Gotland, but only a pilot volume on 12th century Scanian stone sculpture was ever published. Fifty years later, in the summer of 2014, director at the Baltic Art Center (Gotland) Lívia Páldi and Swedish artist Henrik Andersson invited writer, researcher, and curator Ellef Prestsæter, artist Jakob Jakobsen, publisher Mathias Kokholm (both Danish) and, most notably, Jacqueline de Jong to participate in what was called The Scandinavian Mutant Summer Camp. During a few glorious summer days the campers drove around the island, using the 1964 contact sheets as a navigational tool and an interface to the past, retracing the movements of the vandals fifty years earlier while looking out for new revelations. Stone and Bone – A Trip to Gotland 1964/2014 includes visual and textual materials from the SISV archive and the books and magazines where Asger Jorn presents the material and performs the most complex and pataphysical version of his comparative vandalist method. Jacqueline de Jong is probably the most insistent user of the SISV archive with her heretic Situationist Times, one of the most remarkable artists’ magazines of the 1960s, with a range from wild archaeology to contemporary cultural topology. Situationist Times has a strong resonance today as precursors to the idea of “artistic research”, which gives her a central role in this book. Besides de Jong and Jorn a new generation of vandals present their different approaches to an artistic research or a contemporary vandalist method in the archive: Henrik Andersson, Ellef Prestsæter & Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism, Jakob Jakobsen and Mathias Kokholm.

Gothenburg fragmentsBetween the 3d and 5 September 2021. 12 artist, thinkers, workers and strikers met in former hotel Volrat Tham in Gothenburg. This is the exact location where the fifth situationist conference took place in 1961 from which the legendary and disputed split in the movement occurred.The anniversary impulse derives perhaps from the notion that the unconsciouis, as psychogeography teaches us not only structured as a language but also in time and even as a space. Therefore, a conference on a conference in the same room and 60 years after the event took place is maybe not such a bad idea. As it would turn out, it is not clear which of the conferences, in a historical meaning could be categorized as tragedy and which as farce.But dealing with Situationism could if you believe Asger Jorn be a quite risky affair, as he himself described it as the most dangerous of all -isms from the moment you start believing in it. This self-collapsing reasoning might be one of the conflicting affects that the fifth conference legacy’s leaves us with. The contradiction impacts also on the way the events can be historicized, there seem to be a conflict in looking back on someone who is looking to the future. It might feel as is if they are looking at us with an injunction. Perhaps there is an inherent guilt in a prophecy that have failed. But what if it did not fail, what if it is still in the making? From an anachronistic view the absence can be transformed into latency of presence which would be Jorns comparative-vandalist approach towards history. When the fifth conference dispersed into a traveling derive in 1961, it meant that some members of the SI ended up in Hamburg where they continued their discussions. They came to formulate the mythic Hamburg Theses which effectively ended the first phase om the movement, meaning that a stronger position against art within its modern context was established. The works in this books can be read as fragments of the conference aftermath where the actual gorge in movements ideology is the focal point.Did the conference in 2021 put something to its final rest or was it a resurrection? Neither probably. In the haunted house of Volrat Tham there was no corps or ghost but rater something not living, not dead, the undead.The contributions in this publication can be read as a response to immanent divergence in art, value, labor and capital that has somatized into situations. Recuperation is still unfolding but we are looking at new symptoms on which the participants of the book are scouting.Ambrosius Fjord

"en n unik og afgørende figur i 1950’ernes og 1960’ernes litterære miljø.”– William S. Burroughs “[...] Ingen begyndelse, ingen midte, ingen slutning. Det er dette dødvande, et tæn- kende menneske er nødt til at begive sig ud i, og fra hvilket kun den enfoldige kan trække sig tilbage. Måske gør det ingen skade at fortælle nogle få historier, droppe et par efterladenskaber langs vejen, men det kan kun være småbidder til at gøre de intetanende interesseret, mens jeg lokker dem ud på den endeløse tundra, som er alt, der er at udforske. Gud ved, at det er et stort nok tillidstrick at få folk til at lytte til dig, mens du knevrer løs uden også at skulle forsøge at forklare, hvordan Bella fik brændt sin bagdel. Jeg sagde til mig selv: “Nå, men her er der et fint, ufrugtbart vildnis, som du kan have det sjovt med at tumle rundt i, hvor der ikke er nogen vej ind og ingen vej ud og nærmest ikke en sti, øjet kan følge. Hvad mere kan et men- neske ønske sig til at udfylde sine obskøne horisonter?” Problemer med afløbet der- hjemme? Afløbsproblemer? Måske er det en stoppet kloaks skyld. Jeg drak en fla- ske hostesaft (0,1 l. væske, morfinindhold 0,01 gram pr. 30 ml.) og tog lidt speed og følte mig bedre tilpas. [...]”