Divided We Stand
- An Outline of Scandinavian Situationism
Howard Slater
The reseach behind this introduction springs from a week long continuous drift through various archives in Copenhagen. Beginning as casual interest in the Scandinavian branch of Situationism it soon developted into more fundamental discussion and research regarding revolutionary strategies among avant garde movements. Joint research by Howard Slater & Jakob Jakobsen
"It is not the sky we mean, but the past a non existent wall"
- Ron Silliman: Paradise (1984)
"If polyphonic orientation is wanted, the tones must be separated while at the same time they are interwoven"
- Asger Jorn: Mind And Sense (1964)
Historiography is one thing when it is a history in the abstract that seeks to find origins and from these origins reassume the reproduction of those already outmoded social relations that, at the deepest level, always inveigle us towards intrepid discovery and the idealised wish to be someone other than who we are becoming to be. Another historiography can exist. It can be a drift in and out of archives; stealing in, taking out, photographing, noting, continuing in a bar or outside a station by the sausage wagon. You bump into it. Trip over the remnant of a bunker. Descend down a ladder opposite the barracks. It reanimates you as you slowly discover that the vista doesn't narrow to a vanishing point but that, once arrived at, the vista widens, can no longer contain the desire that made it so noticeable, and sets this desire to rove amidst detail, conjecture and imagined presences. So too, the researchers disappear in the loop of the roundtower, on the waves of Inderhavnen, in a practice of histogenesis (1). After checking the acoustics of a ruin they next sidle into the routed spaces of a backlit museum and rifle through a dark case of exile. No longer is Asger Jorn the star pupil of Fernand Leger, but one of many autodidacts who went to listen and discuss with Christian Christensen, the Danish anarcho-syndicalist. And Jorn has a brother too. His name is Nash as there can only be one by the name of Jorn. In the shadows - fogs obscure the many bridges - Nash, a poet, reinvents himself... but not quite as a Nashist. Somewhere nearby and already distancing himself towards a later rapprochement is J.V.Martin, an illustrator, a painter, a pyromaniac. At the so-called end of it all this latter tops the accounting list with Debord and the entire Italian section that goes by the name of Sanguinetti. So much for Pavan and Laugesen. So much for the Situationist Antinational of '74.
We must accept the standard Situationist historiography before we can read the hieroglyphs. We accept it because our friends wrote it and we know they wrote it so that it wouldn't have to become too well trod and, being thus well treaded, arise as a litany that incants itself as we pretend it is ourselves who are speaking and not the assemblage of which we are only a part. In other words we accept Cobra as Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. These place cannot be denied. They do, for the time being at least, exist. And Jorn, existing too, was, like a good striker - here, there and everywhere, looking for an inverse geometry of angles. For him, and the others at Cobra, painting was already a realistic abstract-expressionism, a surplus of energies, but, coming with a consciousness of its own practice, coming at us with theoretical tangents that sought a reconciliation of passion and logic, it never quite revelled in the easy light of having its consciousness made for it. A 1949 a priori: "True realism, materialist realism, renouncing the idealist equation of subjectivity with individualism, as described by Marx, seeks the forms of reality that are 'common to the senses of all men'" (2). Pollock was an individualist in a world of masses. Jorn and the others already had subjectivities, intensities, in a world that had them too. Jorn always turned up. From CIA to SI via Alba and the International Movement For An Imaginist Bauhaus Jorn wove people together so that they could better break apart. He was at the founding conference of the SI in 1957. Barely six months later Debord, a guest in Copenhagen and brought to meet Christensen whilst meeting Nash, collaborates with Jorn and the two relaxedly knock-up Fin De Copenhagen as the London Psychogeographical Committee. With its iconic weather maps recurring against a backdrop of paint drips, demi-lines and newspaper fragments, this Fin De Copenhagen, already blunting pop art's impact and provoking thoughts of a potential topography, still seems to suggest the flexible fixity of a situated place as it is buffeted by meteorological currents no nation or government can control. So too, historians despair at the impending lack of finality and at the already tangible sense of obsfucation: an obsfucation that puts us, like the fogs that had us in the centre of nowhere, at both the hub and the periphery of a mutable culture, in the interland of contradiction. The two cover their tracks because to be tracked is to no longer be able to play these games of bad passion. Visibility does nothing for subversives - it beckons them to police cells and art bars that can only offer the conversation of screws, curators, dealers and journalists. But, on the same trip, visiting the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark, Debord dreams of building an archive for the Situationist International. So, already, at the very outset, before any documents or activities have been produced and enacted, with 'everything to invent', Debord, either with a sense of grandeur he feels sure he can live with or in calling on history to be his judge, has something tangible in mind. Is it, then, a case of what follows being done with half an eye on posterity? Is it here, on the steps of Silkeborg, where a Situationist ideology took hold and not in the convenient scapegoats who went by various names at various times: Spur, Nash, Garnault, Vaneigem. Posterity is transcendence... passion and logic unite in the interstices of the everyday.
To announce a presence something already present has to be revealed as too seamlessly enunciating the persistent social relations. At first the SI's targets gave rise to incisive critiques of cultural practices that had had their day, but wouldn't tire of that day. Jorn's playful demolition of Lettrist pretension, appearing over the two issues of Internationale Situationniste published in 1960 - Originality & Magnitude and Open Creation And Its Enemies - are not only eclectic expressions that fulfil Jorn's ethos of writing "to oppose any clear-cut schemes or directives about art" (3) they work on expanding a never finalised theory of situations towards an extemporised topology, towards situlogy. Not content with the role of pedagogue and preferring to treat theoretical matter as an expressionist material, Jorn drew the 'construction of situations' as a "transformative morphology of the unique". Breaking away from the neutralising equivalences of a topology based upon geometry, Jorn attempted to offer "an inverse geometry" that took account not solely of space, but of the transformative action of time. Key here was Jorn's guiding principle of "the creation of variabilities within a unity, and the search for unity among the variations" (4) with which he tried to dynamise topology and to overcome the self-atomisation of individualist artists through his constant support of groupings such as the SI. For Jorn value lay in variability, in the "morphology of time", that makes uniqueness a common quality. He saw the schematics of Isou and the Lettrists as a scientific practice of art that dissemblingly sought to extol individual genius, as an indication that the creative aspect of human life - the persevering with being as a morphing variability - was forever being seduced towards a functionalism that served capitalism - the preservation of being as an individualised unity. In the late 50s, then, this variability as a human value, the "unique of the identical form", had, for Jorn, a progressive revolutionary value that could be found in the Situationist International as it grew to include fledgling Italian and German Sections that were both instigated through contacts Jorn had made. The strongest of these contacts seems to have been that made with the Spur Group. Together they authored the first Spur Manifesto and proclaimed a new aim for artistic practice beyond commodification and non-committal contemplation: "Abstract painting has given us the commonplace of four-dimensional space. The painting of the future is polydimensional. Endless dimension awaits us". By the Third Situationist International Conference of 1959 Spur had become participants in the Situationist project. From 1960 they started to issue their own, largely graphic, journal and began to work even closer with other Scandinavian Situationists such as Staffan Larsson, Katarina Lindell and J¯rgen Nash. Indeed it was Nash, the one time vice-chairman of the Aspekt Association - a grouping dedicated to politics and culture - who co-edited the second issue of the Spur magazine and who, together with Jacqueline de Jong and Danish artist Albert Mertz, collaborated on a Spur film - So Ein Ding [Such A Thing] - rumoured to have been orchestrated and urged upon its participants by Jorn. On this same trip to Munich in early 1961, a collectively authored tract, titled The Avant Garde Is Unacceptable, was printed and distributed as an intervention against a conference on modernism: "In this society, artists are expected to take over the role of the Court Fools of the past, expected to take payment for providing society with the delusion that there is a special kind of cultural freedom"(6). It was the status of this 'freedom' that would soon lead to a rift in the movement - a rift, each side of which maintained a presence in Scandinavia and a claim on the title Scandinavian Situationism. This same rift was straddled by Asger Jorn. He had perhaps, in Open Creation, already made reference to it when he suggested that there were two tendencies of situlogy - a ludic, playful, experimental tendency and an analytical, technical and scientific tendency. Rather than seeing these as mutually exclusive Jorn, ever hopeful for an interweaving, offered that situlogy could give a "decisive push to the two tendencies".
Can we speak of a rift, a clear cut secession? Does a cultural practice that is fluid, collaborative and rhizomatic lend itself to an historiographic segmentation? The finer details are always absent, their enigmas help form an epistemophilic drive that makes research a matter of group analysis, makes history a possible practice and makes life associational. So, the year 1962, the year of the schism between the artists and the politicos, the practitioners and the theorists, comes, on this trip through the archives, to be a little more blurred than we thought. It is this blurring of the edges that constitutes the dynamic field of homeomorphism, the variability within a unity where the unity is the accepted facts and the variability forms a chink in what we are led to believe. Not only have Nash and Jorn decided to form a Bauhaus Situationniste (BS) in 1960 (7), purchasing a farm in southern Sweden, but Debord, Strijbosch, Bernstein and J.V. Martin are to make an art exhibition in Odense in 1963. Either side of these events lies the case of Spur. With copies of their magazine impounded by the German police and the Spur members up in court on charges of producing 'degenerate art' it was declared by the 'Conseil Central' of the Situationist International that the Spur Group (i.e. the German Section) had been excluded. The variability within a unity that Jorn espoused as 'open creation' had been interpreted by the 'Conseil Central' as fractional activity. Charged with disregarding Situationist discipline - they failed to communicate fully with Nash and de Jong who were 'Conseil Central' appointees to their 'editorial board' - the Spur Group were condemned as using the SI in order to 'arrive' as artists. Perhaps more damning, and indicative of an inconsistent proprietorship over knowledge that would come to haunt the SI, the Spurists were accused of a "systematic misunderstanding of Situationist theses". That the 'Conseil Central' did not aim their declaration at Jorn and Nash when these two founded the BS at 'Drakabygget' in Southern Sweden, is perhaps indicative of an anomaly of Situationist discipline: its arbitrary wielding of a fledgling sovereignty. It seems equally haphazard when, in Jean Sellem's chronology, all the Spurists are to be found as members of the BS alongside Ansgar Elde, Jaqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, Ambrosius Fjord (psued), J.V.Martin, J¯rgen Nash and Hardy Strid. The exclusion of the German Section - who had made their Spur In Exile edition at Drakabygget - sparked-off an almost immediate protest in the form of the leaflet Danger! Do Not Lean Out signed by de Jong, Nash and Elde. In it these three say that they were prepared to criticise the Spur Group (presumably over the planned publication of all issues of their magazine by an Italian art publisher), but were led to protest against the action of the 'Conseil Central' - Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Atilla Kotanyi, Uwe Lausen - which they saw as a 'fait accompli'. A decision had already been arrived at by the four which the signatories indignantly point out was itself an indication of 'fractionalist' activity: "An organisation whose essential decisions are not based on the principle of debate is totalitarian and does not agree with our rules of collaboration... To call in comrades from other countries only to hand out a printed leaflet is not a very positive method. It can be explained only as an outcome of the non-activity policy of those four members" (8). This leaflet was met with a further proclamation from the SI - calling itself the 1'Internationale Situationniste - that first excludes all 'Nashists' and then goes on to give the "supreme authority" to represent the Scandinavian section of 1'IS to J.V.Martin. The latter, a painter, who had worked with J¯rgen Nash in the Aspekt Association, who illustrated an Editions Internationale Situationniste book of poems by Nash in 1961, and had exhibited with Hardy Strid, also wrote a press release concerning the ideological conflicts with the Drakabygget group. With the exclusion of Strid, who was secretary for the Scandinavian section for barely a month, all 'Nashists' had been excluded from 1'IS by the Sixth SI Conference in Antwerp, leaving J.V.Martin in a somewhat isolated position in Randers, Northern Denmark. It was Martin who proposed that the term Nashism be adopted by the 1'IS: "Principally known for his attempt to betray the revolutionary movement and theory of that time, Nash's name was detourned by that movement as a generic term applicable to all traitors in struggles against the dominant cultural and social conditions"(9). This power to allot 'supreme authority' and name 'traitors' is another indicator of the sovereignty that 1'IS took upon itself. Maybe it was calculated to irrevocably alienate Nash from any claim to the Situationist 'title' and similarly to ward-off any pretenders to the sovereign mantle: several months before this round of exclusions, in the autumn of 1961, a magazine called Nye Linjer [New Lines] had appeared in Copenhagen. Situationist ideas were in other heads.