Against Art, Against the Book: Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article reconsiders the relationship between the postwar avant-garde and the Situationist International through two collaborative books by Guy Debord (1931-1994) and Asger Jorn (1914-1973): Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires (1959). Despite their historical significance, these works have rarely been subjected to sustained material and formal analysis as discrete aesthetic objects. By attending closely to their material construction and compositional procedures, this study proposes a new interpretation of the Situationist conception of art. Whereas previous scholarship has often reduced the Situationists’ understanding of art to either a wholesale negation of artistic practice or a declaration of the historical exhaustion of the avant-garde, this article rethinks the Situationist “negation of art” as a materially grounded and media-specific operation. In this sense, the two books are examined as a reconfiguration and expansion of appropriation, one of the central strategies of postwar experimental art.
Through the material deployment of color, cut-up imagery, urban cartography, and practices of dérive, Debord and Jorn simultaneously inherit and disrupt the formal legacy of the postwar avant-garde. In particular, they mobilize visual elements associated with vernacular, “low,” or extra-painterly forms and place them into friction with the formal language of modernist painting, thereby producing a multilayered critique of art’s role within the society of the spectacle. Their collaborative practice thus moves beyond formal experimentation toward a broader interrogation of postwar capitalism’s visual regimes. At the same time, the two books activate the medium of the book itself as a technology of storage, circulation, and reproduction, unsettling conventional notions of artistic autonomy and originality. Art consequently ceases to appear as a singular, self-contained object and instead enters the circuits of reproducible media and mass dissemination, demanding a renewed understanding of its social and political function. Ultimately, Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires illuminate both the possibilities and the contradictions of postwar artistic practice. The two books demonstrate how radical aesthetic production could intervene in the visual order of postwar capitalist society while simultaneously exposing the structural limits of art’s critical agency within that order. In this respect, they occupy a crucial aesthetic and political position within the history of the postwar avant-garde.