ABSTRACT
In November 1961 Asger Jorn founded the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism (usually abbreviated to SISV from its Danish initials) with a membership initially of academics and subsequently of a small number of friends. 1 The main purpose was to support an ambitious book project which grew from 16 to 32 volumes covering 10000 Years of Scandinavian Folk Art from the Early Stone Age to the present time. Thousands of photographs of artifacts, works of art and buildings were taken under his direction by a leading French photographer. He intended to employ these pictures, which concentrated on aesthetic considerations rather than archaeological niceties, in pictorial essays, to be printed in parallel with texts by the appropriate archaeological or historical experts. 2 Jorn had already elaborated an ‘artistic-morphological method’ of iconography which traced the development and treatment of various subjects, for example the hand under the chin, or the man stroking his beard, to illustrate the particular preoccupations of various cultural periods, and he would have been expecting to use such methods for the pictures even though this would have clashed with the proposals to arrange the volumes in historical periods and types of artifact. 3
