Frases de Asger Jorn (48 citas)

“[My own goal is] to be completely empty of ideas at the moment of setting brush to canvas, the head being just as empty as the canvas.”

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Asger Jorn

In a conversation with Pierre Loeb, circa 1946; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255,
1940 - 1948, Various sources

“In 1939 I wrote my first article ('Intime banaliteter' [Intimate banalities] in the journal Helhesten) in which I expressed my love for sofa painting, and for the last twenty years I have been preoccupied with the idea of rendering homage to it. Thus I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection. Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.”

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Asger Jorn

Quote of Jorn, in On the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: the Situationist International, 1957-1972 (1989), edited by Elisabeth Sussman, p. 142
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“This calls for an explanation and it may be this, that no painting, however good it seems to us is anything in itself, except chemicals smeared on a flat surface. The value in the work of art is in the spectator, you see, and a painting has no bigger value than the mental and intellectual forces it arouses in the spectator.”

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Asger Jorn

Jorn's quote, from his speech at the library of Silkeborg, September l0th 1953 (translated from an unpublished Danish manuscript by Guy Atkins) ; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum Articles by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255
1949 - 1958, Various sources

“When I used [in his speech] the word silent myths it was for a personal reason. I mean that the relations of pictorial art to the formation of myths has to be silent, consequently not illustrative. In this part of Jutland where the life of the myth has grown strongest and is kept deepest for millenniums, here where I come from and where I have known the richness of the narrative imagination of the people, here I wanted to place a monument to the anonymous strength of the word, not to a single myth, nor to a single cycle of myths, because the myths of the Edda, of the heroic poetry, yes perhaps particularly the myths of the Kalevala, have inspired me like the myth which is to be created today in the people who are glad to tell, racy and fertile.”

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Asger Jorn

Quote from Jorn's speech at the library of Silkeborg, September l0th 1953 (translated from an unpublished Danish manuscript by Guy Atkins) ; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum Articles by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255
1949 - 1958, Various sources

“If a symbolic language dies, it tortures us like a nightmare, like a thousand piece orchestra grating on our nerves and tearing our mind to pieces... It is a corpse with no symbolic power or strength.”

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Asger Jorn

quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 166
Jorn is talking about symbolism of the Nordic myths
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity.”

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Asger Jorn

Statement (c. 1944), on automatic drawing, quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 162
1940 - 1948, Various sources

“This is what aesthetics, development and progress depend upon: that we go out on thin ice.”

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Asger Jorn

On the task of modern artists (1959), as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 169
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“It is said that my art has some typically Nordic features: the curving lines, the convolutions, the magical masks and staring eyes that appear in myths and folk art. This may be. My interest in the dynamics of Jugend style probably also comes into it.”

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Asger Jorn

Quote of Jorn, from: Tecken för liv, tecken till liv [Signs of life, the characters to life], interview by Marita Lindgren-Fridell, in Konstrevy (1963)
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“To get anywhere, one must choose one's mistakes, I chose experimental acts.”

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Asger Jorn

1963
Statement of 1963, as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 129
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“The picture's substance reflects the painter's substance, showing how much he has felt of himself and his society, how much he spans and how deep his experience goes.”

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Asger Jorn

1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

“The reckoning with idealism as a view of life is universal, but it also touches on something central in art-its life's substance. One must understand that it is impossible to distinguish between a picture’s form and its substance. As the flower's structure is governed by the intentional tension (when it loses the sap the form is lost), so also with art the substance creates the tension. Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.”

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Asger Jorn

1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

“The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics.”

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Asger Jorn

1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

“One day Pierre Loeb said to me that the ideal picture is one which is completely clear in the artist's mind before he puts a mark on the canvas, and this was, at any rate in this period.... Léger's opinion. It is the basis on which classical art is built. Therefore the setting-down of the picture on the canvas is in itself something quite unimportant. This is connected with [Fernand] Léger's hatred of textural effects in painting. But I love these effects. I remember that I was once told off because I had applied a thick layer of color instead of the thin and even layer that Léger wanted. To him that was not painting but mere color. If he could have got a machine instead of a brush to apply the color, he would have done so.”

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Asger Jorn

Quote in Jorn's letter, 1952; as cited on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255,
his critical comment on the art teachings of Fernand Léger, which Jorn started to follow circa 1936, in Paris.
1949 - 1958, Various sources

“It has been the giver's intention to create as complete a collection of European art as possible, with the aim of illuminating Surrealism and Spontaneous-Abstract art.”

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Asger Jorn

refering to his art-gift Jorn made the Mmseum Jorn (1962); as quoted in Silkeborg Kunstmuseum — Jorn Samling by Troels Andersen (1973)
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“To break and be able to grow together again in a better way: that is the difficult art.”

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Asger Jorn

Statement of 1963, as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“True realism, materialist realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.”

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Asger Jorn

As quoted in Aftermath France, 1945-54: New Images of Man: An Exhibition (1982), p. 107
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“In contrast to Breton we believe that — behind the false ethical and aesthetic, indeed metaphysical understandings which are out of contact with the vital interest of "man" — we find the real, the materialistic ethics and aesthetics. One includes our needs, the other is an expression of our sensual desires. It is exactly in order to liberate the true ethics and the true aesthetics that we make use of "automatism."”

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Asger Jorn

1949 - 1958, Speech to the Penguins' (1949)

“Be modern
collectors, museums
if you have old paintings
do not despair
Retain your memories
but detourn them
so that they correspond with your era.
Why reject the old
if one can modernize it
with a few strokes of the brush.
This casts a bit of contemporaneity
on your old culture.
Be up to date
and distinguished
at the same time.
Painting is over
You might as well finish it off
Detourn (détournez)
Long live painting.”

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Asger Jorn

On his Détournements, modifications of old, existing paintings, in the foreword to the catalogue of his exhibition Modifications (1959)
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“The basic function of thought is to find ways of satisfying our needs and desires. The Surrealism of Breton and the functionalism of architecture which was more concerned with the way in which thought functions rather than with its function, — was initially idealistic. But is this not something which we can extract from Breton’s definition of automatism?”

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Asger Jorn

1949 - 1958, Speech to the Penguins' (1949)

“To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today. There seems to be just as much magic thinking in modern thought as in older; only it takes place in other areas.”

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Asger Jorn

Quote in Jorn's letter to anthropologist Francis Huxley (1970) - on the magical character of thinking and images
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“An example of this way of thinking is an exchange that took place when someone told Goethe that he admired him for his genius, towering over German intellectual life like a gigantic mountain, to which Goethe replied that "great mountains are found only in mountainous landscapes." The traditional history of art is concerned exclusively which such mountain peaks, and often, as Goethe critically pointed out, they are not even seen in relation to each other.”

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Asger Jorn

Jorn's quote, on the publication of the book Thidrek of Folk Art (1948)
1949 - 1958, Various sources

“It seems to me that today the Surrealist crisis is the central problem in French art. It is essential for future development that this crisis should be solved… The principal error in the aesthetic program of Surrealism is that it is too literary. Painters have experimented with visions, images, dreams, but not with painting, not with color... The unpainterliness of Surrealism has inevitably produced a reaction among younger painters. [Jorn is thinking here of French painters such as Bazaine, Esteve, Lapique, Singier, Le Moal, and he suggests there should be reciprocity]... These artists cannot get any further unless they absorb the lessons of Surrealism into their painting, just as Surrealists can only advance if they adopt the painterly methods of the other group.”

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Asger Jorn

Quote in a writing of Jorn on modern art in Paris, 1947; as cited on the website of the Jorn Museum. 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255,
1940 - 1948, Various sources

“GO TO HELL BASTARD STOP. REFUSE PRIZE STOP. NEVER ASKED FOR IT STOP. AGAINST ALL DECENCY MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY STOP. I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME.”

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Asger Jorn

Quote from Wikipedia: the text of Asger Jorn's telegram in 1964, to the president of the Guggenheim Museum, Harry F. Guggenheim
Jorn was awarded a Guggenheim Award including a generous cash prize, by an international jury assembled by Lawrence Alloway; he rejected!
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“We have defined art as the life form and aesthetic art as the life renewal: the stimulating, animating, agitating, inspiring, inspirational, fermenting, fascinating fanaticising, explosive and outrageous: the renewal of the unknown.”

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Asger Jorn

Statement of 1963, as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 52
1959 - 1973, Various sources

“If you add something to a painting, never let it be for aesthetic reasons. Only let it be for reasons of expression.”

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Asger Jorn

Statement to his friend Pierre Alechinsky, between 1965-1970; as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 115
1959 - 1973, Various sources