“Everyone knows Asger Jorn. The best of painters. In addition to which, he did everything. Marvels: that is to say, in every domain, innovations. We are even beginning to learn—and here the latecomers will be forced to catch up quick—of his decisive contribution to the new urbanism and the creation of a situationist topology. Not to mention détourned painting, which is something quite different from ordinary painting; hundreds of pages of studies on aesthetics, from which aesthetics will never recover; the largest ceramic work in the world. And, of course, tapestry. Asger Jorn never stopped exiting painting, on every side.
Michèle Bernstein, 1960. Open Creation and Its Enemies is an in-depth survey charting the singular trajectory of the Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914–1973), a founding member of avant-garde movements such as Cobra and the Situationist International. While often acclaimed as an extraordinary painter, the exceptional range of Jorn’s practice merits the kind of broader exploration undertaken in this book. Lavishly illustrated and brimming with previously unpublished materials, Open Creation and Its Enemies makes legible the experimental parameters and artistic and political stakes of Asger Jorn’s transdisciplinary activities. Alongside new artistic and critical perspectives on Jorn, the book features a comprehensive collection of Jorn’s own writings, including programmatic texts on banality, ornament and automatism, letters to Guy Debord on key situationist questions, and essays grappling with the dynamics of long-lasting image traditions. The volume also includes a selection of texts on Jorn by contemporaries such as Lawrence Alloway, Gaston Bachelard, Michèle Bernstein, Öyvind Fahlström and Per Kirkeby”