FULL AUTOMATION IN ITS INFANCY: THE SITUATIONIST AVANT-GARDE BOOK FIN DE COPENHAGUE

Dominique Routhier

doi:10.7146/nja.v29i60.122841

Abstract

This article discusses Fin de Copenhague, a Situationist book experiment from 1957 by Asger Jorn and Guy Debord. By way of a contextualizing archival study with special attention to Jorn’s contemporaneous book project Pour la forme, the article demonstrates that the Russian avant-garde book was a key influence if also a point of critical departure. On this reading, Fin de Copenhague marks a turn away from the unbridled technological optimism of the historical avant-garde. In its material implications and aesthetic choices, Fin de Copenhague draws attention to crucial changes in the capitalist mode of production and challenges the then nascent discourse about “full automation.”

Highlights

This article discusses Fin de Copenhague, a Situationist book experiment from 1957 by Asger Jorn and Guy Debord
By way of a contextualizing archival study with special attention to Jorn’s contemporaneous book project Pour la forme, the article demonstrates that the Russian avant-garde book was a key influence if a point of critical departure
“What do you want? Better and cheaper food? Lots of new clothes? A dream home with all the latest comforts and labour-saving devices? A new car ... a motor-launch ... a light aircraft of your own ?,” asks an anonymous British ad, that, somehow, found its way into the chaotic jumble of cut-out materials making up Fin de Copenhague: a joint artistic enterprise that Asger Jorn and Guy Debord undertook in May 1957. (Fig. 1) Clippings from various newspapers, illustrated weeklies, advertisement catalogs, women’s magazines, and other commercial debris from the booming postwar economy’s dizzying new visual battle array form the bulk of this paint-stained, thirtysomething pages of “montage wrapped in flong.”[1]