The House of Asger Jorn at Albisola
Curated by Roberto Costantino
Marco Lavagetto, The House of Asger Jorn at Albisola
On Wild Architecture
We know that the Situationists, originally at least, wanted to build towns as environments that would lend themselves to the unlimited deployment of new passions. Of course, this was no easy task, and we would need to do a lot more. Along the way, various partial projects had to be abandoned, and a good number of our abilities were not put to use, and, sadder still, all the more so in the case of hundreds of millions of our contemporaries.
On a hill overlooking the Ligurian coast, Asger Jorn has now carried out work on some old houses and has built a garden to bring them all together. What fonder commentary could there be? We are told we have become famous. But the times, still unaware of the means available to them, are a long way off recognizing our full potential. Asger Jorn has been so much to the fore everywhere on the scene that most people are unaware that he was once, first and foremost, a Situationist, the perennial heretic of a movement that would not accept orthodoxy. Nobody contributed as much as Jorn to the origins of this adventure: he searched out people from across Europe and gathered so many ideas, and, even in blithe poverty, would often come up with the money we needed to pay off our debts with the printing houses. During the fifteen years since our meeting at Cosio d’Arroscia, the world may have started to change, but not our intentions.
Jorn is one of those people who manage to remain unchanged by success while constantly changing the stakes of their achievement. Unlike those who, not so long ago, were founding a career on just one breathless artistic trick, and unlike all those who, more recently, have set out to base their general quality of image on one sole statement of a revolutionary intention, total and totally unpracticed, Asger Jorn has never denied himself the chance to intervene, even at the most modest level, in whatever field was available to him. He was among the first to offer a modern critique of the latest form of repressive architecture, the type which today represents an oil slick on the “icy waters of egoistic calculation”. And in his Italian residence, again doing everything himself, Jorn shows just how, even on the concrete issue of our appropriation of space, everyone can undertake the reconstruction of the Land around him. The paintings and the sculptures, the steps that never quite match the differences in the ground level, the trees, the various elements with their various additions, the water tank, the vines, the sundry (yet always welcome) debris, all go to make up one of the most complex landscapes one could possibly visit in a fraction of a hectare, and one of the most unified. Everything finds its place, painlessly.
For those who have not forgotten the conflicting, passionate relations between the Situationists and architecture, this must appear like a sort of Pompeii in reverse: the relief of a city that has yet to be built. Likewise, see the contributions of Umberto Gambetta to all the aspects of the Situationist output, and the collective play to which Asger Jorn exposed the perspectives for transcending for a separated culture and everyday life.
The “Facteur Cheval”, along with artists, managed to build alone a monumental piece of architecture; and the king of Bavaria was a man of great means. Jorn outlined, amongst other things, his own awkwardly limited village on a small “private property”. Yet it bears witness to what one can begin to achieve. As Ivan Chtcheglov, one of the founders of the Situationist movement, said, all that was needed was “a degree of time, luck, health, money, and reflection, as well as good humor…”
Good humor was never lacking in the Situationist scandal which was at the behind so many ruptures, outrageous demands and strategies. Those who like to wonder in vain how history might or might not have turned out — such as, “mankind would have been better off had those people never existed” —now have another amusing poser to keep them occupied: couldn’t the Situationists have been appeased around 1960 by being given two or three towns to build instead of being pushed to the extremes and being forced them to unleash the most dangerous subversion the world has ever seen? Others, meanwhile, will say the results would have been the same whatever the course of events, and that by giving in, however slightly, to the Situationists who had no sense of settling for the minimum, all that was achieved was a heightening of their pretentions and demands. Simply, it would have taken less time to come to the same result.
Guy Debord
Albisola, September 1972
Text published in the catalogue of the 1st Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art “The Happy Face of Globalization”, Attese, Albisola (Italy), 2001. Courtesy F.lli Pozzo, Turin - Le Jardin d’Albisola, 1973.
