The Natural Order and Other Texts

Asger Jorn, Peter Shield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351885287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In The Natural Order and Other Texts, Peter Shield presents the first English translations of the artist Asger Jorn's three philosophical texts - The Natural Order, Value and Economy and Luck and Chance. Offering a unique insight into an artist's attempt to make sense of a contemporary world which would accommodate his practice, these texts present an important contribution to aesthetics for modern art and an attempt at philosophical reconciliation of modern science and modern art. In 1961 Jorn resigned from the Situationist International and took the ideas of thinkers in many fields and amalgamated them into 'the first complete revision of the existing philosophical system' from the point of view of an artist. He developed a theory of artistic value and the place of the creative elite and adapted his previous ideas of extreme aesthetics to fit into this 'natural order'. Including a comprehensive introduction, Peter Shield's translations of Asger Jorn's classic texts offer invaluable new perspectives to readers crossing the boundaries of philosophy, art history and theory, and cultural studies. Peter Shield is an art historian, whose book Comparative Vandalism on these and other works by Jorn is also published by Ashgate.

ASGER JORN

LUCK AND CHANCE

DAGGER AND GUITAR

Why does my Don Juan mix

Fine poison in his brush-strokes

And in his daughter’s beauty?

Don Juan answered me:

I paint thus, Donna Bianca

Because it amuses me so to paint.

C.J.L. Almqvist^★

Report no. 3 of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism, 1963

To Susanne

Why?

[Addition 1963]

I was once asked by a Frenchman, ‘Why then have you begun to publish books in Danish when you have an international public?’ I answered that I wrote because it interested me to write, but without any belief that I was offering anything important in that area. I therefore stay modestly in Silkeborg and if there is something in what I write, then it will probably seep out.

This was only a half-truth. In its development, any new idea will be connected to its point of origin, to the environment from which it has grown, but it will belong to the environment where it meets a resonance. It is a tradition that all significant Scandinavian ideas are only taken seriously the day they come back as a resonance from abroad. This has the effect that Scandinavian intellectual life is strangely homeless and is seen only in an indirect relationship to the environment from which it has grown, direct connection only being established to the international resonance.

It therefore so happens that Scandinavia receives its own impulses, which could have been directly developed from within, but were put out of mind until a later and far less advantageous stage, as something already recognized and utilized from abroad. This, in the main, seems to me to have been the case with all the artistic development around COBRA. But COBRA was just an intermezzo. We have not yet come to the most important thing and it is my conviction that this rests largely upon something new which began in Scandinavia after the great French Revolution, America’s secession from England and the socialization of Eastern Europe, upon a particular appreciation of what in this period we in the North have regarded as the most important use for our freedom.

Through its conception of international law Scandinavia has played a central role within the UN. Today that organization is dead and powerless. At the same time, the popular shaping of the organization of Scandinavian private life celebrated great triumphs. This has been recognized and imitated everywhere. However, there are limits to how long one can maintain interest around this subject. Other important problems have arisen, above all about the areas of spiritual well-being and personal independence and enjoyment within the general way of life and social urbanization of the population. Here, I have demonstrated that the Nordic Folk High School concept has become the acid test as to whether we also have something to show and offer in this new complex of problems.

Therefore it is not because I believe that it will have any important instantaneous meaning that I have sent out my ideas in Danish. The silence about this particular book, which came out ten years ago, is sufficient proof of this. Why then reprint it? As a rule, a large edition is intended for a large circle of readers. However, it can also have the opposite purpose: by a wider distribution giving it better possibilities of reaching the individual for whom it was written and whom no one knows.^★ In a true democracy the many also have obligations towards the few.

Er irrt der Mensch so lange er strebt

Goethe

FOREWORD 1952

The extreme phenomenology of aesthetics and its personal, humane, social natural and objective relativity is the subject of this little study. It is equipped neither with bibliography nor with references simply because there is nothing to refer to, as the grouping of the phenomena attempted here has no precedents, but represents something new, when regarded as a system.

A contrary reason is the situation that the knowledge from which this system of definitions is constructed is so elementary and so generally known that references to the details are not necessary to anyone who has occupied himself a little with aesthetics. The commentaries on the aesthetic perceptions of others briefly sketched in the book were in fact added after it was written and have changed nothing in the picture as the whole.

That a fleeting glance at Salmonsen’s Encyclopaedia is all I required to support me theoretically is not because I am an opponent of knowledge but in order to have present elementary knowledge or, one could even say, that knowledge left when one has forgotten all one has learned. This represents what an aesthetic artist has normally and abnormally come across in almost twenty years’ activity in the aesthetic production of art.

Within the natural sciences, all scientific results are worked out on the basis of experimental practice in the area under analysis. This has not hitherto been the case within aesthetics and this has given aesthetic research a distortion I am here attempting to correct.

Some years ago, the undersigned published Unknown Truisms about Art, the posthumous manuscript of a lecture by the deceased painter Immanuel Ibsen.^★ That title would also be suitable to this current work, the direction of which was already indicated in my article in the catalogue to The Line’s exhibition in the Copenhagen University Students’ Union in 1939 and in the article ‘Intimate banalities’ in the art periodical Helhesten, no. 2.^★ That Dr. Sigurd Nœsgaard’s scientific rejection of the principle of psychological sublimation lies behind these showdowns with principles of formal beauty, to the advantage of the principle of beauty of character in art and theory, is a special pleasure for me to point out, even more so because I believe there have been have many extensive and sound consequences for me from this liberation.^★

This study is a return to a starting point after having covered a number of other and perhaps more deeply underlying artistic problems, especially in architectonics, in a series of articles in Danish, Swedish and Dutch magazines,^★ all inspired by the Swedish architectural professor Erik Lundberg’s new theory about ‘The language of architecture’.

These articles on architectonics were gradually infused with a growing interest in general elemental or primitive phenomena in the histories of art and religion, an interest which resulted in, amongst other things, some articles in the periodical Cobra (Revue internationale de l’art expérimentale) and in a special study of the significance of animatism as a starting point for poetry and cultic development in the book Golden Horn and Wheel of Fortune.^★

As a study in the dramatic phenomenology of animism, which is identified with the kernel of aesthetics, the current work is thus a counterpart to the work on animatism, posed in an opponent relationship, drama versus poetry.

From this introduction as well as the study as a whole, it will appear that the points of views advanced here are by no means unknown. One could directly say that everyone has them, even if no one will acknowledge them. To advance them here, therefore, is not a question of knowledge but of audacity. Why hasn’t one had this audacity before? It can only be explained as a question of historical maturation.

Is the fruit I am offering here now ripe? Has it reached the point where the core is capable of germination and giving birth to new possibilities? This cannot be said to be so at this moment, but it is also quite immaterial. One swallow does not make a summer, but it is a portent of summer regardless of whether it has itself come too early to take part.

It is said that man is an apprentice and that fear, suffering and danger are his teachers and therefore the day that danger no longer exists man will no longer learn. However, we learn best from our sufferings, and therefore one always has a tendency to judge the generation whose mistakes one experiences on one’s own back with the most intense criticism. This is a natural movement. However, even if my work represents a reckoning with the inter-war generation’s mistakes and weaknesses in particular, I hope I can avoid going to the other extreme. I hope I will be successful in stressing the narrow-mindedness of both the old men of our time, the rationalists, and their predecessors, the naturalists, as it comes out partly in their mutual contradictions and partly in their contradictory attitude to subjectivism, which is the starting point of this work, albeit established on a materialistic basis. My hope is to be able to explain these contradictory attitudes and thereby unite them and turn them to account in a system having the force of novelty, effectiveness and objective truth, even though it is about a not easily accessible area of human activity.

To learn is to struggle but to learn is more than to struggle. To struggle is to make mistakes and it is these that one must learn from. If one wants to learn as long as one lives, then one must struggle as long as one lives. ‘Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes’, says Oscar Wilde, but this is quite incorrect. He who struggles and makes mistakes without forgetting anything and without learning anything is perhaps the ideal aesthetician, but he is also a complete idiot. It is precisely the intention of this book to demonstrate that idiots are never complete and that aesthetics are not absolute and ideal. This gives future generations the possibility of learning from our mistakes, to which category this study possibly belongs.

Silkeborg Sanatorium

May 1952

Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen:

Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!

dann magst du mich in Fessln schlagen,

dann will ich gern zu Grunde gehn!

Dann mag die Totenglocke schalten,

dann bist du deines Dienstes frei,

die Uhr mag stehn, der Zeiger fallen,

er sei die Zeit für mich vorbei.

Goethe

The sublime or informal

FOREWORD 1963

Time has passed since I published this book privately and much has happened. It is perhaps difficult to understand this book without understanding its preconditions, without understanding the naivety with which I had thrown myself into working for that artistic tendency we called COBRA, which at that point lay a splintered ruin whilst Christian Dotremont and I, despairing and mutually distrustful in the extreme, lay side by side in the beds of Silkeborg Sanatorium, discussing what had happened. Neither of us dreamt that despite everything we had realized something unique. Many of our enemies maintain this today, so there must be something in it.

My naivety consisted of the belief in a sound artistic development able to vary the normal and healthy without making holes in the rules. This was explained in my ‘Discours aux Pingouins’ in the first number of the COBRA magazine. I felt that I had read Franz Kafka’s thoughts and when, on several occasions in Suresnes in 1950,^★ a similarity between my pictures and Kafka’s world had been intimated, I began an article intended to show the morbidity which arose in Kafka’s world because of the struggle against tuberculosis.^★ The article was not finished before I myself lay in the sanatorium. It was surely that same reaction that at that time made me bristle before the few pictures I saw of Wols and deny their validity. I have to say that at that time I had the same reaction to pictures by Wemaëre.^★ Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Natural Order
• Value and Economy
• Luck and Chance
• Notes