Art & Craft Lectures / Ellef Prestsæter
Vandalizing Art History: Asger Jorn and the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism
“After I established my Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism a few years ago, a lot of people have wondered why I invented this peculiar name, not knowing whether they should take it seriously or as a joke.” These are the words of the Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914–1973) in 1967, referring to the experimental art historical research project he had started six years earlier. The provocatively named institute, designed to produce new perspectives on art history and involving the collaboration of distinguished art historians and archaeologists, was founded shortly after Jorn abandoned the avant-garde group the Situationist International in 1961. One of the primary goals of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (SICV) was to produce a multivolume series of coffee-table photo books documenting “10,000 Years of Nordic folk art.” Jorn joined forces with Gérard Franceschi, one of France’s foremost museum photographers, and together they undertook a comprehensive photographic campaign across the Nordic countries and continental Europe documenting a wide range of objects, from Iron Age objects and Medieval churches to Sami and Inuit handicraft. When the SICV project folded in 1965 due to Jorn’s inability to secure funding for it, it left behind an archive comprising more than 25,000 negatives, as well as a pilot volume of one of the projected books in the series, Skånes stenskulptur under 1100-talet (12th-century stone sculpture from Scania).
What happens when an avant-garde artist decides to intervene in the business of art history? Who are the “enemies of open creation”? And how do Sami objects fit into Jorn’s notion of “Nordic Folk Art”?
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Ellef Prestsæter is an art historian and curator. He is the artistic director of Guttormsgaards arkiv and a founding member of the art and research group Institute for Computational Vandalism. Recent exhibitions include: Taterlandet, Nitja senter for samtidskunst, 2025; Warren Brodey: Earthchild — A Time Journey, Guttormsgaards arkiv, Blaker, 2024; and Open Creation and Its Enemies: Asger Jorn in Situation, Valencia Institute of Modern Art (IVAM), 2023. Recent publications include: The River is Elsewhere: Images of Log Driving on the Glomma (with Hans Hamid Rasmussen) (Torpedo Press, 2024) and Open Creation and Its Enemies: Asger Jorn in Situation (La Fábrica, 2023).
The Art and Craft Lectures is an annual lecture series devoted to art education, research, theory, and politics. The 2025/2026 program, titled Crafting Knowledge and Community, explores knowledge and its production: through ways of making, thinking, and practice. Moving away from Modern dualities towards what Rosi Braidotti defines as the posthuman condition, we are concerned with the relational, affective, and epistemic processes that define our ways of being, with the human, nonhuman, and technical mediations. The program, convened by Sara R. Yazdani and Susanne M. Winterling, nurtures an interdisciplinary exchange of practice and theory.
Taking a collaborative approach to practice and research, the lecture series seeks to generate inspiration, critical navigation, and community across the arts. It invites scholars, artists, and curators from different disciplines to give a traditional keynotes or conversations that guide the semester, and as a platform for students and faculty to share and discuss practice, concerns, and inspiration, with an open door to the public.
The lectures are free and open to the public.
The Auditorium, KHiO
Fossveien 24, Oslo
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Photo: István Virág / Kunstdok
Also check out other Arts events in Oslo, Exhibitions in Oslo, Photography events in Oslo.
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