The passionate house of Asger Jorn at Albissola
Giorgina Bertolino
The house that Asger Jorn built at Albissola represents the fruition of a promise that rang out as a challenge. In 1954, in a letter to the artist Enrico Baj, Jorn wrote, “The house must be not a ‘machine for living’ but rather a machine for surprising and enthralling, a machine for universal human expression.” The property that Jorn purchased in 1957 was situated in the hills above Albissola at a site known as “Località Brucciati.” Jorn liked the name [translating as “The Burnt”] and entitled a painting Bruciato that he presented to Mr Massardo who had sold him the house. The first lot that he acquired was an old farmhouse, a ruin. With the help of Umberto Gambetta, Jorn restored it and made it his home although the work lasted years. Jorn had already been living in Albissola, firstly as the guest of Lucio Fontana at Pozzo Garitta and then with his family in a ground floor apartment in Via Isola. In the August of 1954, he had organized in the Ligurian town the International Ceramics Meetings as the “First Experience of the Imaginist Bauhaus.” The “second experience” was also staged at Albissola, in 1955, and consisted of the decoration of around a hundred plates by a group of children. The second lot of the property was composed of a separate house. In part it became the home of Umberto Gambetta who decorated the façade with ceramic fragments, and in part it was used by Jorn as his studio. The two houses were surrounded by a garden and separated by a deep cistern, evidence of the original agricultural nature of the property. An oven, built onto the second house, has become something of a symbol of the house. Dressed in black and white pebbles, it was built by Jorn and Gambetta and testifies to their joint labours.
In order to continue with our reconnaissance, we shall draw above all on two guide-images taken from two pieces written by Guy Debord. The first concerns the Jorn’s house, which the French theorist defined as an “inverted Pompeii.” The second is instead taken from the title of another of his essays published in Museumjournal in 1958, Ten Years of Experimental Art: Jorn and his role in Theoretical Invention. We believe, in fact, that the house may be seen as a “theoretical invention” and that the concept dear to Debord whereby the praxis precedes and guarantees even the most “sublime of theories,” reflects Jorn’s method of research. In the short essay On Wild Architecture written by Guy Debord (Albissola, September 1972), Jorn’s house is defined as a “small village” where “Jorn shows how (…) each one of us could undertake the reconstruction of the earth around himself;” the house is an example of the possibility of conjugating space and desire, environment and passion. Through Debord’s definition it is possible to arrive at the first reliefs of the Situationist “city” that exists via the critical and passionate modification of that which exists. We shall attempt to delineate this relationship starting out with the clues provided by Jorn’s home. In the Formulary for a New Urbanism, the incunabulum of Situationist theory regarding the idea of architecture and mobile settings, essential concepts in the reading of Jorn’s house, Gilles Ivain wrote, “We propose to invent new mobile settings (…) Architecture will be (…) a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life” (IS, No. 1, May 1918, pg. 17). In his text Image and Form from 1954, Jorn similarly wrote that “The architectural is the point of ultimate realisation for every artistic initiative, because creating architecture means forming an environment and establishing a way of life.” Architecture is the first true point of contact between Jorn and the French followers of Debord. They shared a criticism of the form of the house pre-established in relation to mass consumption and control over the masses. The points of departure are however different: Jorn starts out from aesthetics while Debord’s initial concern is political. The possibility of an accord between the two points of view derives from a series of words that are fundamental to the Situationist “vocabulary.” Out of fairly broad concepts — such as that of “environment,” or “provisional/temporary” — are born keywords such as “détournement,” “psychogeography,” “dérive,” “situation” and “game.” These words can all be found in Jorn’s house, as Debord himself understood when he spoke of the “inverted Pompeii” and the reliefs of an unbuilt city. Let’s stick with what the Situationists call “environment”: a concept closely associated with the idea of “situation.” As can be read among the Definitions from the first Situationist International bulletin: “everyone has to find precise desires for environment in order to realize them.” The Situationists temporarily overturned, liberated and created “zones” as was the case with this house in Liguria. That is to say, they create settings that are deliberately temporary, provisional and mobile. The term “mobile” refers to that which develops and is modified in continuation. In a text from 1955 entitled Architecture and Play(Potlatch, No. 20, 30.05.1955, pp 50-51), Debord reveals sources and models: the residence of Ludwig of Bavaria, the Palais du facteur Cheval and the Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters. “All these constructions — he wrote — belong to the Baroque strand.” With its idea of illusory, dynamic and synaesthetic space, the Baroque is useful in the aspiration to articulate that precise desire for environment in a determined physical space. From this point of view too, the house at Albissola is rich in points of interest, some of which having almost literal iconographical references to the richness of the Baroque and others that appears to have been mediated by the “Baroque” experiences of Fontana. More generally, it might be said that Jorn’s Ligurian house may be referred to the complex space of the Baroque in its use of the volute and the fold that concerns not only the masonry, but also with respects to the garden and the very idea of space.
Excerpt from the Proceedings of the “Local ceramic traditions and globalisation of contemporary art” conference, 19/20 October 2002, Fortezza del Priamàr, Savona.
