The Network as Artwork: Asger Jorn and the Situationist International

摘要

From 1957 to 1961, the Situationist International (SI) connected artists and theorists in a network that stretched from Bavaria to the Benelux, Algeria to Scandinavia. Its attempt to politicize the practice of non-signifying art even engaged associated chapters as far afield as Tel Aviv and Montreal. While SI is one of the most studied postwar avant-garde groups, little attention has been paid to this international extension; the scholarly gaze has been predominantly trained on its proponents in Paris. The international's project has been interpreted through the final position of SI's French members at the end of the 1960s.;Adopting a trans-national approach, this dissertation homes in on why such an expansive international emerged and its project evolved, arguing that we need to situate SI in its original historical moment and relate its project to its international extension. The ideological repercussions of Soviet's invasion of Hungary in 1956 opened a space across western Europe for oppositional projects outside of the communist institutional structures. SI was one of the few groups who wanted to capitalize on this possibility aesthetically. But by drawing on primary sources in Swedish, Danish, French, English and German, I show that its constituent members envisioned doing so differently.;While originally Parisian, the venture to construct a 'situation', which gave the international its qualifying adjective 'situation-ist', was adapted to the needs of the various contexts to which it was exported. Informed by the local legacies of the interwar avant-garde and the status of leftwing parties, the SI members put forward diverging opinions of how aesthetics intersected with politics. And such modifications affected the originally Parisian designs. For, as I show, by instituting a conversation on what constituted postwar avant-garde praxis, SI's organizational practice became integral to, indeed inseparable from, its overarching aesthetico-political project. The international was the situation.