with strands of Scandinavian romanticism and libertarian activism, all within a materialist and Marxist framework. This is as simple as it sounds, which is to say not at all. In The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up, Karen Kurczynski offers an excellent and much-needed overview of Jorn’s development and of his decades-long effort to achieve this synthesis. The significance of the Situationist International – to which Jorn contributed decisively – for contemporary art, architecture, film and critical theory is undeniable. Yet Jorn’s own role within the SI has often been overlooked, despite the fact that from 1957 to 1961 he was one of the figures most responsible for articulating and sustaining its early practices. His conception of the avant-garde rested on the conviction that the artist must introduce what is truly new – something unexpected, potentially unwelcome and seemingly useless or worthless. Kurczynski’s account brings this paradoxical, generative vision of Jorn to light.
One of the most productive ways to approach Jorn’s career is to break it down into distinct phases, which largely correspond to the larger-scale artistic collaborations he helped animate and in which he participated. The first significant phase emerges in the 1940s, when Jorn was a member of the Danish art and literary magazine Helhesten (literally ‘the Hell-horse’). It was Jorn who proposed the name Helhesten, reclaiming a Scandinavian folk symbol that fascists had attempted to appropriate. This gesture already signals a lifelong preoccupation in Jorn’s work: the excavation and imaginative reclamation of Nordic and Scandinavian histories and imagery.
Two major artistic themes characterize the Helhesten period. The first is spontaneous abstraction, which Jorn and his collaborators framed as a ‘post-expressionist’ mode of artistic production. The second is mythmaking, which they understood as a creative and critical response to the simplistic, dogmatic uses of mythology they witnessed under Nazism. For Jorn, art was first of all a moral practice and only subsequently an aesthetic one. He did not conceive of abstract art as a means of understanding or expressing pre-existing ideas or feelings, but rather as a way of amplifying and intensifying direct life experience.
As Kurczynski notes, the Helhesten period ‘initiated the ideas of the artist as liberating the creative spontaneity of the ordinary person, and documenting the creativity of ordinary people’ (41). Jorn’s approach to mythmaking during this time resisted the classic function of mythology – to substantiate collective identities and reproduce them – and instead focused on the mythopoetic: the imaginative capacity to create new myths altogether. What emerges is a vision of a social aesthetic that sought to dissolve entrenched dichotomies between personal and communal, private and public, expression and rationalism. For Jorn, the terms on the side of spontaneity, expression and imagination served as a dialectical subversion of the rigid and authoritarian tendencies of the latter.
From the late 1940s into the 1970s, Jorn entered another defining phase of his career with the founding of COBRA. In 1947, Jorn and the Dutch artist Constant joined Belgian poets Christian Dotremont and Noël Arnaud to form this collaborative network. Jorn embraced Constant’s term ‘experimental’ to describe his own conception of art as a process of seeking the unknown – a practice consciously modelled on scientific investigation rather than the production of fixed outcomes. COBRA placed collaboration at the centre of its ethos, bringing together artists, poets and performers to experiment across different media and practices. The collective valued aesthetic experience over the mere creation of static objects, interpreting art as a material embodiment of political and ethical critique. In fact, as Jorn remarked, COBRA sought to move beyond the very notion of ‘art,’ replacing it with what he called ‘experimental action’ (77). Jorn’s visual motifs during the COBRA period reflected this attitude toward tradition and innovation. His works often paid tribute to ancient and vernacular artistic legacies without simply mimicking them. Like a jazz improvisation, they offered spontaneous expressions that grew directly out of these precedents, transforming them into something alive and new. Importantly, the apparent spontaneity of these works was itself a conscious language, a deliberate encoding of experimentation and immediacy into the final images.
One of Jorn’s lifelong struggles was to create an art that was both formally challenging and yet accessible – physically and imaginatively – to a broader public. This ambition shaped his approach to myth and modernity alike, and underscored the distinction he drew between merely illustrating myth and reimagining its social functions. Rather than treating mythic themes as inherently conservative or nostalgic, Jorn explored how avant-garde art could revive the ancient social functions of myth – as a shared imaginative framework capable of generating new forms of collective meaning. This concern carried into his involvement with the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, which he joined in the early 1950s. That group later became, in 1957, one of the founding components of the Situationist International, where Jorn played a crucial though often underappreciated role. He compared the social role of the avant-garde to that of scientific research – with one critical difference: whereas scientific experiments aim toward predetermined practical applications, the experiments of the avant-garde pursue unlimited potential purposes, unconstrained by immediate utility. For Jorn, personal expression could only flourish within a collective context that fostered aesthetic experimentation and challenged received ideas of beauty and ugliness. What he sought was not simply individual freedom, but a methodology of artistic freedom – one grounded in the shared activity of redefining and renewing the terms of artistic and social life.
At the 1961 Situationist conference in Göteborg, the SI expelled Jorn’s brother Jørgen Nash along with the German Gruppe Spur artists – figures Jorn himself had encouraged to join, and who were the last remaining artists in the organization after a string of earlier exclusions. As Karen Kurczynski notes, ‘much of the difference between Jorn and Debord’s otherwise close conceptions of the importance of the avant-garde at this time rides on their dispute over this term’ (155). Jorn perceived Debord’s version of the SI as having gone too far, to the point where its commitment to destroying art effectively ceded the terrain of art entirely to those in power. For Jorn, ‘the end point […] was less interesting than the exploratory path itself’ (213).
This divergence reflects the larger spirit of Jorn’s work, which spans an extraordinarily wide range: from highly material practices such as painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics and tapestry, to the theoretical sophistication of his deliberately playful writings. It also raises the question of whether the Situationist International might have found a different path – one that did not expel its artists – and how that might have shaped both the movement and its legacy. Historically, of course, such counterfactuals are impossible to resolve. No doubt the publication of this review will provoke at least one angry Situationist fanboy convinced that everything written here is wrong. Yet what remains undeniable is the great value of works like Kurczynski’s book, which offers a much richer understanding of the life and work of Asger Jorn – and, through him, of the many art collectives and histories he participated in and helped to shape.
In tracing the arc of Jorn’s career – from Helhesten to COBRA, through the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Situationist International – one begins to appreciate the depth and complexity of his vision. Jorn’s lifelong commitment to making art that was at once formally experimental and socially accessible, morally engaged and imaginatively free, challenged both the complacency of mainstream culture and the dogmatism of the avant-garde. As Karen Kurczynski’s book shows, his work was not only about producing objects but about creating contexts for collective creativity, reclaiming myth as a tool of invention rather than tradition, and insisting that the path of experimentation is more vital than any final destination. In the end, Jorn reminds us of what is at stake in the interplay of art and politics: the possibility of imagining, together, something different. Kurczynski’s study gives us a clearer understanding of this possibility, and of how Jorn’s restless, irreverent and generous practice continues to speak to contemporary struggles over the meaning and role of art. The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn succeeds not only in illuminating Jorn’s contributions but also in suggesting that the questions he posed remain urgent today.