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The Long Voyage

Michle Bernstein
pre-situationist archive

1960

situationist international archive

Translated by Phil Edwards and Not Bored!

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EVERYBODY KNOWS Asger Jorn. He's the best of painters. What's more,
he has done everything. He has made marvels: that is to say, innovations
everywhere. We are even beginning to discover, and henceforth those
behind the times will soon be forced to realize, his decisive contribution to
the new urbanism and to the creation of a situationist topology. Not to
mention his detourned painting, which is quite another thing from ordinary
painting; several hundred pages of aesthetic studies, from which aesthetics
will never recover; and the biggest ceramic sculpture in the world. And,
naturally, tapestry. Asger Jorn has never stopped making paintings, despite
doing everything else.
Thus, he has succeed in bringing a revolutionary modernization to even the
most traditional, the most outdated, artistic technique and this at the
moment when, in the techniques that claim to be painting's most advanced,
we see the base Feudal-Christian tradition express itself without shame,
reactionary forces raising their head.
Jorn's work in tapestry owes much to the initial revelations of and
thereafter to Jorn's personal collaboration with Pierre Wemaere. It is
surprising, moreover, that the importance of Pierre Wemaere in this matter
is a long way from receiving the recognition that would be appropriate. In
fact it was in 1938, in the course of a trip through the Scandinavian
countries he made with Jorn, that Wemaere glimpsed the possibilities of
renewal contained in the ancient tapestries of Northern Europe. And since
then, their collective work has constantly developed. Their original
conception of material fabrication, which maintains the creative freedom of
the performer, has now produced this workshop of a new style, installed for
the moment in Paris, on the Rue Saint-Denis, out of which comes "The
Long Voyage".
Within a durable form and one that stinks of the museum one can see
quite clearly in tapestry the ancient lineage of two structures of
communication very much alive today: the art of comics, and the art of
cinema, in their permanent interaction. Tapestry is the comics that have
stood the test of time: the tracking shot that does not pass.
"The Long Voyage" is more than fourteen meters long and twenty-four
meters high. This experiment, which came from the North, will return there:

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Situationist International Online

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come the holidays, it will be moved to the University of Aarhus. Jorn has
insisted that the tapestry remains covered until then, so that it bursts into
sight with the traditional presentation of the plastic arts that, in the West, is
now always permanent. Thus, renewing a Viking tradition, "The Long
Voyage" will become visible for the occasion, like the painting in a Chinese
roll.
The theme of "The Long Voyage" is precisely the Viking adventure, which
has passed away without a thought of coming back. "The Long Voyage" is
a eulogy of exile and head-long flight. It is the flight of nebulae, in every
direction of an expanding tapestry, as in the design that Jorn and Wemaere
had seen in Bornholm during the course of their trip: there is no orientation,
no compass; it can be read in either direction, starting from a center that is
not otherwise defined.
"The Long Voyage" is also a story, an odyssey without an Ithaca and
without a return; it is the flight of the days from every moment and from all
coasts; it is the story of a hero (Asger Jorn, for sure), in his voyage across
life, like those explorers who, having discovered America, lost it again. And
America reappears in "The Long Voyage," with the cowboys from the
Westerns, the displacement of the Frontier.
The tapestry also has Danish fog and the trumpeters of Fortinbras, of
course. In brief, all the techniques of the nouveau roman could not
encompass this ensemble; the School of the Look will lay down its arms
when it looks at the complexity of this tapestry.
Travelling, between continents or galaxies, or in the labyrinths of everyday
life, is what explains Jorn best. In his n-dimensional continuum (the
dimension of time is the funniest and the most beautiful), Jorn looks like the
painter of Science Fiction UFO, Unidentified Flying Objects, 1955. But,
contrary to the general spirit of this genre, which is the uneasy transposition
of aggressive class and race domination into space, the traveling creatures
encountered in Jorn's paintings are well met. Inheritor of revolutionary
universalism, Jorn is the first to proclaim the fraternal slogan: "Monsters of
all planets, unite!" The long voyage is not finished.
Jorn's work is beautiful. Anyone who doesn't like Jorn's work is wrong.

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