ABSTRACT
In this essay I discuss the urbanistic thinking and practice of two artists closely associated with the founding of the Situationist International (SI): the Danish painter Asger Jorn and the Dutch painter, sculptor, and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys. Both helped establish the SI, and subsequently, long after their official separation from the group, Jorn remained a friend and financial backer of the group, while Constant was politically affiliated with, and an inspiration for, the radical Provos anarchist movement in Amsterdam. In particular, I will pay close attention to the special graphic practices of these two artists—various practices of modelling, drawing, collaging, and so on—which they used to explore the possibility of a new, utopian relation between creatively designed spaces and new forms of selfhood beyond the individualist self characteristically reproduced by modern capitalism and its built environments. These practices were intended to ‘mobilize’—render more fluid and flexible—the built environment of the cities, helping to disclose the social encounters and social action that ultimately, in their view, structured it, whether in the form of dynamically perceptible, playful human activity or in the static forms of accumulated, reified, alienated labour. They also suggestively ‘modelled’ (in both the conceptual and architectural sense) a new collective mode of production of space intended to overcome the reified abstractions of capitalist, modernist urbanism. Participating in the broad twentieth-century and avant-garde questioning of the status of artistic work (as specialized activity) and works (as specialized objects), Jorn and Constant offered artistic analogons of social spaces that would no longer be structured by capitalist work, understood as a modality of alienated labour, but rather by an autonomous free play of encounters and situations.
