Jorn's pictures are conceived and created as paintings, which means they are fundamentally open, without any “recourse to content.” His titles are often brilliant tricks, collateral effects, and sometimes deliberate diversionary tactics. They describe nothing and do not help to shed light on the fascination of painterly events. As small poetic additions, they are instead to be understood as marginal maneuvers that distinguish the paintings and draw us into the confusing hustle and bustle of a distorted world. They are titled “Mr. Spökenkieker,” “Miss Stake,” “The Nine Swabians,” or “Come back soon, boy.”
In Munich at the end of 1965, Asger Jorn declared his large-format painting “Am Anfang war das Bild” (In the Beginning Was the Image, 200 x 300 cm) finished—a coup, painting as world, a statement that lives up to its title. This programmatic image is also a self-assurance of the status quo for a future that can only be secured through extensive practice. Jorn had reinvented himself through painting—at the height of his time, he was the most vital painter in all of Europe. In the summer of 1966, in the midst of the Swinging Sixties, he was finally able to spend months exclusively painting in London after years of wandering. Conroy Maddox, a Scottish surrealist, kindly gave him his studio. The paintings are now called “Turning Point,” “Stunted Forces,” and “We Shall All Be There.” They are colorful, wild, and furrowed; another programmatic painting, “The Situation of the Central Figure,” takes months to complete. Jorn is in full swing, pushing the canvases ahead of him. In October, the major exhibition “Recent Paintings” followed at Arthur Tooth & Sons in Haymarket, and in February 1967, another 20 works were shown at Lefebvre in New York, including “Very well indeed” and “Tale of timid terror.” This is followed by a show in Philadelphia, with one exhibition after another.
In the meantime, Jean Dubuffet had suggested that Jorn meet Jean-François Jaeger, the charismatic director of the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris, to bolster the prestigious gallery's artist roster. The magnificent pavilion in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the right bank of the Seine, seemed to be the perfect place for the spirit of the moment. The young art dealer's credo, “I don't possess, I belong,” also appeared to Jorn as a promising vantage point for the future. In April, the spectacular exhibition opened on Rue de Seine—again, nothing but new paintings. The painting “Une mime de rien (ou presque)” became the centerpiece and set the tone. Max Loreau wrote the text for the catalog, “Vers une peinture péremptoire: Asger Jorn,” and made it unmistakably clear: "Jorn the Viking swings his brush like a club. You can't talk about him without changing your vocabulary. Not just a word here and there, but from the ground up. That means [...] questioning principles before dealing with the details.“
In the multifocal imagery of ”Une mime de rien (ou presque),“ painting and title enter into a dialog. It takes some practice to identify the ”nouvelle défiguration,” and, to put it bluntly, we will not find clearly defined characters. The material —the “matière première” — the paint applied in various ways will not reveal them. A figuration, let's say, has raised its ‘arms’—or are they wings? What is real? What does the “Mime de rien” promise?
The actor who presents this nothingness is, of course, also the “acteur en action,” even if what is to be shown consists precisely of the material that makes this “nothingness” visible and, through the “how” of the performance, brings everything into our imagination. The clever transformation of the phrase “nothing” into “almost nothing” then, in linguistic logic, in the symbolic exchange of representation and imagination, once again elevates nothingness to something, a barely describable “presque,” a “close to”—more of a question—hidden in parentheses. And the mime speaks as an image and with the image – without words, literally like the pantomime Marcel Marceau as “Bip” or like the mimes who stand at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni's magnificent film with their hands raised at the fence, after a “tennis match” without a ball and without rackets, confidently awaiting what is to come, a ball to play with that does not exist even in the reality of the film, but which David Hemmings, in the role of the photographer, picks up as a matter of course after a brief pause and throws over the fence with a heavy swing. The game continues... The film was shot in London in the summer of 1966. In the movie, “reality” is lost in the image structure of a possible enlargement. In the spring of 1967, “Blow-up” was released in Paris. Initially a sensation for cineastes, today it is a highlight of cinematic history – ou presque. [EH/AH]