Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Marx:
Let the dead bury the dead, and mourn
them.... our fate will be to become the rst living people to enter the new life.
The second section, 'December 1952', quotes Huizinga,
and the third, 'September 1953', quotes Soubise.
The work contains two separate layers. The rst is printed
with black ink, reproducing found text and graphics taken
from newspapers and magazines. The second layer is
printed using coloured inks, splashed across the pages.
These sometimes connect images and text, sometimes
cover them, and sometimes are seemingly unconnected.
The black layer contains fragments of text, maps of Paris
and London, illustrations of siege warfare, cheap reproductions of old masters and questions such as 'How do you
feel about the world at the moment, Sir?' The coloured
layer contains freeoating ink splashes, lines created by a
matchstick loaded in ink, and a Rorschach inkblob.
The book is a work of psychogeography, detailing a period in Debords life when he was in the process of leaving the Lettrists, setting up Lettrism International, and
showing his 'rst masterpiece',[1] Hurlements en Faveur
de Sade (Howling In Favour Of Sade), a lm devoid of
imagery that played white when people were talking on
the soundtrack and black during the lengthy silences between.
The book is most famous for its cover, a dust jacket made
of heavy-grade sandpaper. Usually credited to Debord,
the sleeve was actually conceived in a conversation between Jorn and the printer, V.O. Permild:
[Permild:] Long had [Jorn] asked me, if I
couldnt nd an unconventional material for the
book cover. Preferably some sticky asphalt or
perhaps glass wool. Kiddingly, he wanted, that
by looking at people, you should be able to tell
whether or not they had had the book in their
hands. He acquiesced by my nal suggestion:
sandpaper (int) nr. 2: Fine. Can you imagine
the result when the book lies on a blank polished mahogany table, or when its inserted or
taken out of the bookshelf. It planes shavings
o the neighbours desert goat.[4]
Fin de Copenhague
FIN DE COPENHAGUE
Editions
Notes
References
Mmoires, Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, Editions
Situation International, 1959
Asger Jorn, Guy Atkins, Methuen, 1964
Asger Jorn, The Crucial Years 1954-64, Guy
Atkins, Lund Humphries, 1977
Guy Debord, Merrield, Reaktion, 2005
Potlatch 1954-57, Debord and others, Lebovici,
1985
Panegyric, Debord, Verso, 1991
Fin de Copenhague, Asger Jorn and Guy Debord,
Editions Allia, 2001
Books of Warfare: The Collaboration between Guy
Debord & Asger Jorn from 19571959, Christian
Nolle,
7.1
Text
7.2
Images
7.3
Content license