46 - Guy-Ernest DEBORD. Memoirs. Asger Jorn’s Load-Bearing Structures. This volume is composed entirely of prefabricated elements. Published by the Situationist International [Copenhagen, Permild & Rosengreen Press], 1959.

Guy-Ernest DEBORD. Memoirs. Asger Jorn’s Load-Bearing Structures. This volume is composed entirely of prefabricated elements. Published by the Situationist International [Copenhagen, Permild & Rosengreen Press], 1959. Quarto, paperback, plain cover in filled emery paper, cream-colored slipcase. First edition: it consists of 48 color plates printed in offset, known as “load-bearing structures.” The layout combines, in the form of collages, excerpts from printed texts, photographs, and drawings, all colored by the painter Asger Jorn, the leading figure of the CoBrA group. The second book produced by the leader of the Situationist International and Asger Jorn (the first, *The End of Copenhagen*, was published in 1957), these *Memoirs* recount Guy Debord’s youth and struggles in the 1950s. They exemplify the technique of détournement—that is, they are composed of text excerpts appropriated by Debord to form his own “memoirs,” as indicated by the warning printed on the title page: “This work is composed entirely of prefabricated elements.” Asger Jorn then intervened on these collages using brightly colored paints. Perfect copy. (Peyré, *Peinture et poésie, le dialogue par le livre*, no. 74: “Beneath its rough, sandpaper-like cover lies a book of high poetry; images and text are sprinkled throughout, the narrative unfolds, one imagines not so much a grenade—which is what *Fin de Copenhague* was—as a bottle of rare perfume; the revolution has slipped into the intimate sphere of the soul, a disconcerting velvety texture, and Jorn composes the arabesques, the spiderwebs, an electric cartography; he arrives at the thread that winds from page to page, a golden thread of restrained excess. Debord and Jorn have journeyed step by step, gathering splendor with every stride. […] The Debord/Jorn duo has pushed the book of dialogue to its limits; it has offered it a chance for a fresh start—spring has been touched.)”