How Asger Jorn Stole the Value-Form of Avant-garde Art
A lecture by Eric Alliez
Presented as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
This event is free and open to the public. Please join us for a reception following the talk.
“Détournement is a game born out of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorize can create new values,” we read in ‘Détourned Painting,’ in the context of an exhibition as aggressively ‘kitsch’ as can be: Twenty Paintings Modified by Asger Jorn (1959). But what is the relation between the critique of political economy delivered by Jorn in the form of ‘Value and Economy,’ published contemporaneously, and these paintings placed entirely under the sign of a vicious kick to the Greenbergian ass? This question will project us at the heart of the Jorn-Debord dispositif, before and beyond the scission between “artists” and “revolutionaries” to problematize the situationist moment — and Situationism itself — in relation to the present. This talk will settle accounts with the ‘aesthetic delicatessen’ of the artwork whereby Jorn appropriates not so much the ‘détournement of painting’ as ‘painting détourned’ by the action of its devalorization in a situationism that is not at all circumstantial.
Eric Alliez (b. 1957), philosopher, is a Professor at University of Paris 8 and at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University (London). He has been visiting professor in many universities worldwide. He is author of Capital Times, The Signature of the World: Or, What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting, and Wars and Capital, with Maurizio Lazzarato (Semiotext(e)), and coeditor of The Guattari Effect, and Spheres of Action: Art and Politics (MIT Press).
