Klaus Jorn
The Other Side of the Hyperbole
Letters To My Father, Alexander Wood Gallery, January 1988
The Other Side of the Hyperbole
by Gabriele Peretta
(Originally written for the exhibition at Alexander Wood Gallery, New York, 1988)
Being the son of an artist is not easy and never has been. It brings both advantages and drawbacks. But the basis of everything is common sense, which teaches one to see—and how to see. “The son of an artist would be wise to choose another profession.” This we have heard many times. But there are also cases where it is the father who deliberately instills the habit in his son from early childhood, in an attempt to preserve artistic creation through memory. Once this condition—as in the case of Klaus Jorn—is passed on and begins to develop at a distance from the father (even though he remains constantly present), it becomes not a release, but one’s own existential choice. A continuous path that includes positive influence, the immortality hidden in the act of transmission, and a unique opportunity offered by human nature.
Exceptions have clearly shown us that such deliberate acts demand one address the public directly. The work begins to draw in the opposite direction, searching for a continuity of its own. It becomes clear that the son of Asger Jorn should not necessarily be seen as a copy of his father simply because they share a surname.
As a child, Klaus Jorn painted alongside his father. He also worked in his father’s studio, helping with tasks such as stretching canvases. He learned how to construct a painting—but later left home during his teenage years. After a deep inner crisis that led to isolation and self-destruction, he eventually freed himself completely from the historical burden that had weighed him down. As he puts it, he is now using pictorial art to find his balance in the world.
There would be little point in recounting every way in which his life links back to his father. He could fill entire volumes with stories rooted in conflict and love, in passion and rebellion. But what matters is that the “result” is Klaus Jorn’s own maturity—and what counts are his works.
Music has played an important role in his creative process. He never forces himself to paint more than one picture a day, and he listens to music while working. Ever since childhood, he has loved the clarinet. He is fond of Plato, Kierkegaard, and Freud. He criticizes Hans Christian Andersen and refers to Freud as if he were a writer friend—flawed for his focus on sexuality, but brilliant when he spoke of the Ego, the Id, and the Superego.
The daily work of drawing and painting on paper is of great importance to Klaus Jorn. He often visits churches in Copenhagen, and before painting, he performs rituals that—as he describes them—send shivers down one’s spine.
He gave up playing jazz several years ago. In fact, he prefers the traditional genres he used to perform at jazz clubs in the past. The reference to jazz recalls the words of musician Joe Jackson, which seem to describe Klaus Jorn’s art precisely:
“Art is a clock without time, measuring an inner time.”
His art reaches toward infinity. He himself says that it depicts a development without limits. He also says that the beauty and intensity of a picture is like an egg, with the yolk representing essentiality itself—moving toward the center.
Notre Dame in Paris is one of his favorite churches—because its two towers express a balance between two opposing forces. This, he says, is exactly what he seeks in his art: a meeting between love and friendship, symbolized by two forms—one inward, one open.
The attentive observer will notice the many influences that have shaped Klaus Jorn’s work. These reach back as far as Plato’s Apology and the Gorgias, where we meet the charismatic figure of Socrates. Jorn’s emphasis on the quality of life rather than its length, his interest in timelessness, in the myth of the “naked man,” and the use of the body as a symbol in his personal and artistic search—all reflect these deeper roots.
He says his artistic journey began the day he learned how to draw a triangle—“the opposite of a woman’s sexual organ,” as he puts it. Since then, he has tried to create only what is unique, seeking a single, unifying work.
The attentive reader will recognize how—just as for some artists in the 19th century and others in the first half of the 20th—a return since the 1960s to classical-philosophical imagery has produced some of the most radical and speculative perspectives in painting. In invoking Plato, Socrates, Kierkegaard, and Freud, Klaus Jorn distances himself from any superficial idea of renewal. He does not abandon the importance of antiquity, nor the constancy of Truth and the Word.
This antique, anti-historical, and non-topical outlook contrasts sharply with the historicism creeping into much of today’s geo-art and neo-conceptual trends. “At a certain point,” said Carlo Michelstaedter (Gorizia 1887–1910), “man chooses knowledge, and creates his understanding. The work confirms the personality of the artist, provided the method and the right to create remain intact. And this is the crucial point—reason, the absolute, the divine.”
This view of knowledge is typical of those few who remain critical of modern science. To criticize science is to reject the false “security” it promises: a security that fits individuals into a machinery of comfort and consumption—while stripping them of their responsibility as individuals. Instead of the confident man, we face the armored man.
He represents the other side of the hyperbole.
(See C. Michelstaedter, “La persuasione e la rettorica”, ed. Sergio Campailla, Adelphi, 2nd ed., Milan, 1986)
This article was produced for the exhibition at Alexander Wood Gallery, New York 1988)
About this text / Historical note
This catalogue essay by Italian critic Gabriele Perretta — later recognised as one of Italy’s central theorists of post-media and visual communication — was written for Klaus Jorn’s exhibition at Stalke/Jedig in the late 1980s.
Perretta was among the first international critics to write about the Stalke circle, helping to connect Stalke’s early Danish experimental scene with the emerging Italian avant-garde.