Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn's "Modifications"

Abstract

In a 1962 painting, Danish Situationist and artist Asger Jorn declared in a graffiti-like gesture that avant-garde won't give up/' The phrase appeared not in a theoretical text as was his usual practice, but as a gestural scrawl behind a painted girl in a confirmation dress, in I!avant-garde se rend pas (fig. 1). As part of the series New Disfigurations exhibited at Galerie Rive Gauche in Paris that year, the work resumed Jorn's Modifications, first shown in May 1959. These works developed directly out of Jorn's participation in the Situationist International (SI) group, which Jorn cofounded in 1957 along with Guy Debord, Michele Bernstein, Ralph Rumney, Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio. In the Modifications, Jorn added grotesque imagery or abstract painted or dripped additions to amateur academic-style paintings found in flea markets.1 Here, Jorn has added not only the scribbled text, but also crude drawings of a bird and a stick figure, a simulated street wall behind the figure, and finally, a Duchampian moustache and goatee to the girl's face. In classic avant-garde provocation, Jorn lampoons the bourgeois propriety of the girl by vandalizing her portrait. He accomplishes this both through the facial additions and the vulgarity of the graffiti text, applied in the high-art medium of oil paint, appearing behind the girl as if out of the repressed unconscious of the history of painting. The graffiti scrawl is no more an authentic message than the image of the girl, however, because its juxtaposition with the found painting exposes graffiti itself?and by extension, all avant-garde provocation?as a convention. Jorn's invocation of the avant-garde reads less as a declaration of his own sentiment than an assertion that