ANDERS HERWALD RUHWALD: Reconsidering This Constructed World
by Luca Bochicchio
Jorn’s House is undoubtedly a representation of the multiple artistic and philosophical ideas of its main artist and creator, Asger Jorn; an organism which, in an ideal demonstration of the ideas of Jorn, is by no means a finished or tautological pedagogical work, but is rather experiential, experimental and open (“We are abandoning all efforts at pedagogical action and moving toward experimental activity”, A. Jorn, Contre le fonctionalisme, Paris 1957).
The concepts of mutation and change which characterise all of Jorn’s visual and plastic works acquire, in the garden of Albissola, further tangibility as the mineral, vegetable and artificial elements which make up this fragment of imaginative architecture are affected on a daily basis by the workings of time. At Jorn’s House, time is an unavoidable and, for the most part, accidental element which we need to take into account, seeking as much as possible to distance ourselves from the critical and ideological superstructures that our viewpoint inevitably applies: for Jorn, being part of the flow of life most certainly involved action and reaction against the coercive capitalist regime, but it also meant accepting the passing and the changing of things, objects, bodies, and of life itself as a part of nature. A garden is a living work, and this is even more so for the garden created by Jorn in Albissola, which is inevitably a clear example of the natural metamorphosis of life and the real.
Jorn purchased the property on the Bruciati hill in 1957 and, according to the photographic and epistolary documentation that we have, in less than ten years the majority of works for the adaptation and transformation of the area had already been completed. However, it was immediately clear that this was an ongoing operation, without any fixed conclusion. The period photographs held in the archives, as well as the objects that even today inhabit the garden and the building, all suggest this form of continuous evolution, this continuous emerging and modification of new spaces, new sculptural forms, new small and large-scale interventions both temporary and permanent, in the continuous attempt to find an adaptation (a key concept in Jorn’s philosophical-architectural ideas).
Right up to his death, Jorn was not alone in carrying out this adaptation, but was accompanied by his friend and assistant Umberto Gambetta (known by his friends simply as Berto): the actions of the “non-professional artist”, underlined by Jorn in many of his writings (beginning with the reference to the postman Ferdinand Cheval in the famous essay “Ansigt til ansigt” in A5. Meningsblad for unge arkitekter, Copenhagen, II, 5, 1944), here had an opportunity to be expressed, and to express the potential of spontaneous construction and cooperative work in urban areas for the improvement of the living conditions
of mankind. In addition to the act of recognition with which, from the moment of the death of the artist (1 May 1973, International Workers’ Day), the house and the garden became the property of the community (specifically of the Municipality of Albissola Marina), Jorn established that Berto and his wife Teresa Saettone could continue to live freely in the house until their deaths, maintaining the building and cultivating the garden that they had contributed to rendering
so special. The choice of Jorn to entrust this place first to Berto
and Teresa, and then to the Municipality of Albissola, necessarily entailed a certain margin of freedom with regards to interventions on the house which went beyond Jorn’s personal life, in the continuous adaptation and necessary maintenance of the areas, always (it goes without saying) with respect for Jorn’s works and ideas.
With the donation and transformation of his house into a public museum, and perhaps even more so with the provisional leaving of the property to Berto and Teresa, Jorn had therefore provided for the expansion and the continuation of activity in this place, as well as the natural changes that were to take place in
the garden, destined to become a “public park” (according to the wording of his official will). It is clear that Jorn could not stand the idea that his example of situationist architecture may one day be forgotten or, even worse, uprooted and transformed into a residential complex, which was actually the case for the surrounding area, as indicated by Ruth Baumeister in her essay in this book. However, he was also against the idea of a museum in the exclusive sense
of the term, a kind of mausoleum for the worshipping of Jorn, where objects and places would be presented to public, as though frozen in time since 1973 and simply handed down to posterity.
On the contrary, Jorn wanted this place to continue to be open to encounters: a centre for discussion, a channel of communication which fosters confrontation between people, and between people and art.
I think that the best way to interpret the wishes of Jorn,
in addition to the two essential missions for whoever is called to administer a legacy of this kind – conservation and mediation, the latter seen as the communication and valorisation of the historical identity of the place and the work as a whole – is to respect and open this place to research and experimentation. In this sense, contemporary artistic research (neither easy or predictable) is currently and undoubtedly the best field of action for moving with freedom of thought and with an ethical stance. A form of intellectual freedom which, now more than ever, we know is not to be taken for granted and, in many sectors and areas of contemporary society, is without any guarantee. A society which Asger Jorn, like many other thinkers of the last century, had already sensed moving towards
a collective utilitarian distortion, clearly tied to the insurgence
of an overwhelming form of global capitalism. The functionalism that Jorn had fought against is therefore not only to be seen in an architectural, economic and industrial sense, but also and above all from a psychological, social and political point of view.
Everything mentioned up to this point is necessary in order to understand on what basis Anders Herwald Ruhwald began to work once he came into contact with the Jorn House Museum. The factor of time, and the consequential spectres of memory, served as an initial and wide-ranging area for reflection, while Jorn’s theoretical writings, above all those on the theme of functionalism (which make up the majority), and that kind of “practical” example represented by the house and garden in Albissola were the large-scale field of encounter, a single and comprehensive text on which Ruhwald worked.
In reality, the encounter with Jorn, albeit partially unconscious, had begun much earlier, if we consider – as highlighted by Glenn Adamson in his essay published in the catalogue – that Asger and Anders were born just a few kilometres and decades from each other. It was Ruhwald himself who told me how he had grown up (just like many Danish youngsters) with a fascination for the mythological account of the life and work of Jorn, this adventurous fellow citizen, an illustrious forerunner in the artistic field. What then happened was that their paths converged and Anders’ career – his research into objects and their life, made up of relationships with spaces, our bodies and our minds – once again met that of Jorn at his House Museum in Albissola. Here, Ruhwald’s point of view necessarily changed, widening to include the meticulous exploration of the areas modified by Jorn. This exploration took on the form of research, a subject to be examined and perhaps temporarily resolved with a system of notes, sort of annotations to a complex text expressed in a language that for Ruhwald is the most congenial, maybe as much profound as natural: sculptures.
As explained by Glenn Adamson, Ruhwald’s methodological and procedural approach opened conceptual scenarios with unexpected reflections, due mainly to the artist’s choice to no longer “set” his sculptures in an attempt to “dialogue” with the space and with the spectator, but rather to document and discuss expressive and philosophical urgencies which emerged from the direct encounter with the all-encompassing work of Jorn through the bodies, Ruhwald own plastic forms (a linguistic extension of himself). The text and subtext finally withdraw, leaving the field clear for a new temporary intervention, aimed at discussing, actualising and questioning a collective point of view which is always at risk from becoming unified and standard.
“A place full of ghosts,” is how Ruhwald described Jorn’s House, a place full of memories of people and facts which no longer exist, if not in the mind of those who still remember them, as well as in the traces and signs of the ideas of Jorn, which have remained impressed in these spaces. As a comment on this sensation, Ruhwald intervenes in Jorn’s studio, in the empty room on the first floor
of the western building, creating the three sculptures Old Man, subtitled The Walker, The Future, and Tullio, where Tullio is actually Tullio d’Albisola (1899-1971) from the famous Futurist ceramics manufacture Giuseppe Mazzotti, the first which opened its doors
to Jorn in the spring of 1954 on his arrival in Albissola. Ghosts... and sailors, like the four heads of the Sailors distributed throughout the garden, looking out over the Mediterranean sea towards the horizon. Those sculptures, while reflecting a 20th century canon, are more related to a sensory curiosity and a willingness to engage an unknown world, and so facing the pivotal issue of the environmental essence of Jorn’s works in the garden and the house in Albissola.
In each room, Anders has added his own personal
“annotation” to the text represented by Jorn’s House. He has therefore, in turn, developed a discussion, a thought, a reasoning which speaks to us of the functionalism (and relative capitalism), of language, design, landscape, but above all of colour (and the idea of colour), and the way in which we perceive and act upon the world (our constructed world). Anders has successfully achieved his objective, finding in this place the very challenging meeting point between the empathy of form, structure, colour, matter and materials, of objects contaminated by ceramic, and the abstraction of concepts, of theoretical and imaginative thought. He has consequently brought life to the museum, topical and transitory as we know it to be, he has carried forward an open discussion, as Jorn wanted. He has challenged the subjection of a place which is heavy with memories, geographies and environmental signs, and has dialogued with the great intellectual and critical legacy of Asger Jorn. In order to do so, he has brought into play not only his work – the result of a long period of study and metabolism of forms – but also his body and his language, offering his sculpture to space and time, dimensions that also include us.
LUCA BOCHICCHIO IS THE DIRECTOR OF CASA MUSEO ASGER JORN AND A RESEARCHER AND LECTURER IN CONTEMPORARY ART AND CULTURAL HERITAGE COMMUNICATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GENOVA. HE ALSO WORKS INDEPENDENTLY AS AN ART CRITIC AND CURATOR.
The Annotated Asger Jorn
GLENN ADAMSON
“It seems to fill my head with
ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
That’s Alice, through the
looking-glass, where she discovers a book filled with backwards writing.
Holding the pages up to a mirror, she isable to read the contents, a poem called “Jabberwocky.”
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
all mimsy were the borogroves,
and the mome raths, outgrabe…
In his inexhaustibly wonderful book The Annotated Alice, the mathematician Martin Gardner provided extensive commentary on Lewis Carroll’s masterworks. His notes on “Jabberwocky” are typically informative. He gives translations of the poem into French and German, and records Carroll’s half-jesting definitions for the made-up words: TOVE. A species of Badger. They had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag; lived chiefly
on cheese. Along the way, Gardner offers some thoughts on the nature of nonsense. “There is an obvious similarity,”
he writes, “between nonsense verse of this sort and an abstract painting.” While the realist artist and poet alike must abide by external realities, the abstract painter and the writer of nonsense are free. Their creations may “suggest vague meanings, like an eye here and a foot there in a Picasso abstraction, or they may have no meaning at all.”1
It is in this spirit that we might understand Anders Ruhwald’s artistic response to Asger Jorn – a project that Ruhwald himself describes as a “series of annotations.” Think
of these sculptures, introduced within the rooms and around
the grounds of Jorn’s residence in Albissola, as something like Gardner’s elaborate footnotes. They deepen our encounter with an elusive figure, without ever trying to pin him down. Attempting to actually make sense of Carroll’s books, or Jorn’s gesamtkunstwerk, with their many aesthetic layers, to say what they “mean,” would be a travesty. Marking out new paths through a wonderland, though – that is another matter. For, as the Red Queen put it, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Jorn and Ruhwald were born about sixty years and twenty miles apart, in the towns of Vejrum and Randers, respectively, in the northern part of Denmark. It’s a rustic part of the world, and traditionally, a religious one. Jorn was raised a devout Christian there. Though he later repudiated the faith, it remained central to his life; at one stage, as part of his investigations into primitivism, he collected many thousands of photographs for an archive of Nordic art, concentrating particularly on medieval stave churches. In a broader sense, too, the question of symbolism consumed his intellectual energies. He was fascinated by the communicative potency of the pictorial sign – which would have included the crucifix he was obliged to worship as a boy – but also concerned about the use and abuse of that power. In his important 1962 essay, entitled “Neither Abstraction Nor Symbol,” Jorn tried to stake out a middle position, not wholly non-objective, nor dogmatic, but instead suggestive. He cited an experiment he had conducted with a group of painters, in which he made a scribble and laid tracing paper over it, asking each artist to highlight the part of the drawing that seemed to them most important. Each chose a different passage in the drawing, a result that for Jorn proved the inherent ambiguity of the artistic sign. This was the same phenomenon that Alice confronted in “Jabberwocky” – the way that a language can teeter at the precipice of legibility, without quite tipping into it. It’s a concern that has been intrinsic to Ruhwald’s practice, too. Long before
his engagement with Jorn, he was creating sculptures that could be read as figurative, as purposefully undefined, or as indexical records of process, all depending on one’s perspective. In his 2014 exhibition The View From the Sides of My Nose, Ruhwald presented pairs of objects – two columns, two clay masses on tall stands, two priapic totems, two Google “you are here” pins, and so on. Each set, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, was just slightly different – in texture, material, color, or handling. One could imagine magic spectacles, like the 3D eyeglasses handed out at the cinema, which would have made each pair resolve into a single impossible object. The show made palpable the relativistic nature of looking, much like the famous color studies of Josef Albers, but in sculptural and expressive dimensions.
For the Albissola project, Ruhwald has taken a related approach. In Four Sailors, for example, he disaggregates the morphology of a human head – eye, nose, ear, mouth – and positions them throughout the Casa Jorn gardens. In part, this was simply an attempt to reinhabit the grounds. Ruhwald was struck by the nostalgia still clings to the site: “People who knew Jorn and visited the house when it was still lived in express a natural disappointment with the place as it is now, not having him there – or his several wives, kids, goats or friends.” The Four Sailors restore a sense of welcoming presence. Yet they are only vaguely anthropomorphic, and cannot be assembled into a holistic form, except in the mind’s eye. Appealing to the visitor’s constructive imagination in this way, Ruhwald invites the associative response that was so important to Jorn – what he had called “ambiguities in artistic decipherment.”3
It is unsurprising that Ruhwald chose to activate the gardens with a group of guardians, for liminal space is another
of his preoccupations – and one that he again shares with Jorn. Though just as committed to radical change as his fellow avant gardistes in CoBrA and the Situationist International, Jorn was primarily interested in how change actually occurs, both in art and in history. This led him down some strange rabbit holes – including his obsession with “triolectics” (like dialectics, but operating through structures of three opposing terms) – but also remarkable instances of clarity, as when he wrote: “Between question and answer there is a delay, the duration of which is the present itself.”4
Jorn was here adapting the widely known Situationist concept of dérive, or “drift,” in which time is spent in intentional aimlessness, in order to cultivate chance discovery.This principle characterizes all of Ruhwald’s interventions at Albissola. One encounters them throughout the property, around corners, on steps, perched on edges of things. Dérive is particularly important to a trio of works that he has positioned in Jorn’s studio, each titled Old Man, and having the approximate scale and stance of a person. Their head-like appendages are propped up on steel rods, which wander hither and thither on their journey upwards from the floor. It is easy to see the three sculptures as variant pseudo-portraits of Jorn himself, perhaps even a nod to his interest in triolectics.Easy, too, to understand them as diagrammatic of Jorn’s geographically digressive biography, which took him from Copenhagen to Paris, and eventually to Albissola – “the village where the Italian futurists had already roamed,” as Ruhwald notes.
Elsewhere in the house, in Jorn’s bedroom, is what appears to be a sunset-lit cloud, captured and brought down to earth. Entitled Pillar, it too could be taken as a portrait, perhaps showing the artist’s interior mental landscape. Ruhwald has taken advantage of clay’s inherent formlessness, using it to materialize the open-ended feeling of dream images – another sort of conceptual drift. It is a motif that recurs throughout the project, in works that Ruhwald has collectively titled Adaptable Body. That phrase refers, one again, to figuration, but also to
his own craft: the clay body and its infinite possible forms. Each sculpture in the series features a glazed blob propped up on a shaft. Two of the amorphous shapes are connected to store-bought clamps, an image of extreme contingency – they can be detached and reattached at will – and another pair features Alvar Aalto stools, which are repurposed as plinths (an obvious allusion to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel). As in the compact and graphically powerful sculpture This Constructed World – in which a Poul Henningsen PH lamp is caught fast in a mass of clay – these latter works juxtapose diametrically opposed modes of Nordic modernity: design icons, meet the avant garde. Ruhwald has bestowed the additional title of La Dolce Vita on the “assisted” Aaltos, prompting thoughts of Federico Fellini’s filmic satyricon of 1960, but also referring to a work of that title by Jorn, painted right on top of a found amateur painting.
These so-called “décollages” or “modifications” were perhaps Jorn’s most prescient works, anticipating postmodernism, and they are quite close to Ruhwald’s own working method. Like Jorn, he has his issues with functionalist modernism. He draws heavily on its aesthetic codes, and general formal rigor, but always splices those traits with contradictory ones. Two further works in Ruhwald’s show apply this hybrid approach to very different ends. Construction of a Rainbow, located in the children’s bedroom, is a sculptural extrapolation from Bauhaus-style color and form experiments, disarmingly reimagined as a giant ring toss game. Dog Whistle incorporates two elements, both sourced in Detroit: the Vietnamese-style flowerpot is from a strip mall, and the greyhound is from “Ceramics By Bob & Hazel,” an extraordinary shop in Pontiac, Michigan, which offers slipcast objects of every description. It’s a gold mine of kitsch. Ruhwald simply joined these two found objects together, glazed them, and in an inspired comic touch, popped a ring over the dog’s snout. It sits in perpetual high alert, yet seems aware of its own ridiculousness.
This witty appropriation of “low” industrial ceramics does have a specific correlate in Jorn’s practice – for his house, he sourced tiles and electrical parts from local Albissola factories, repurposing them within his own ambitious decorative scheme. But there is also a broader theme at issue, here, to do with one of Jorn’s most important ideas: the vibrancy of the commonplace. In his early essay “Intimate Banalities” (1941), part manifesto and part fairy tale, he railed against deadly good taste, and expressed his preference for the hackneyed. In one beautiful passage, he describes his “greatest musical experience,” which supposedly occurred in a provincial village. Jorn claims that the local people were seized by a sudden and inexplicable enthusiasm for playing small plastic whistles, such that the town was filled with the sound: “Every boy, every girl, men and women, even elderly honourable citizens would secretly carry the small pan pipes in their pockets, taking it out when they believed themselves unobserved to drink in a few warbles of this captivating wonder.”
It is probably a coincidence that Ruhwald found room for a Dog Whistle in his project – and, as we know, that particular instrument can’t be heard by human ears. All the same, it is easy to imagine, drifting over the space of Casa Jorn, the tuneless chirping of his parable of a village brought to life. In a space filled with aesthetic departures – “a maze of continually intersecting strains of narratives, people and ideas complicated by the passage of time,” in Ruhwald’s words – he has introduced further tangents, leading both back to Jorn, and forward into the ever-expanding possibilities of sculpture. The house was already a cabinet of curiosities, a hall of wonders, a total environment, a stratigraphy of ideas. And with Ruhwald’s annotations? Well, Alice put it best: curiouser and curiouser...