Guy Debord and Asger Jorn | Mémoires

Guy Debord and Asger Jorn

Mémoires 

Copenhagen, Denmark: Permild & Rosengreen, 19

64 pp., 8 ½ x 11", "softcover"

Edition size unknown

An artist book with a legendary sandpaper cover. I first heard of this title when I bought Public Image Ltd's 1979 record Metal Box, which came housed in a metal film canister. John Lydon had reportedly first wanted the LP released with a sandpaper cover, in order to destroy the other records in your collection every time it was removed or returned to the shelf.

A year later the idea was realized by Manchester band The Durutti Column, for their album The Return of The Durutti Column (below). Released by Factory Records, the packaging for the disk was hand-assembled by label-mates A Certain Ratio and Joy Division. Ian Curtis is said to have done most of the labour, while his bandmates watched pornography in the other room.

Aphex Twin took the premise a step further, with the release of a sandpaper work designed to engage with your turntable stylus (see earlier post, here).

Mémoires is the second artist's book produced by the Danish artist Asger Jorn and French artist and theorist Guy Debord, when both were members of the Situationist International. See this earlier post for their debut.

The heavy-grade sandpaper is typically credited to Debord, but the printer V.O. Permild disputes this account. He maintained that he was tasked with finding an "unconventional" material for the cover, such as asphalt or 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 to my final suggestion: sandpaper. Can you imagine the result when the book lies on a blank polished mahogany table, or when it's inserted or taken out of the bookshelf. It planes shavings off the neighbour's desert goat."

Greil Marcus describes reading Mémoires and it's collage of cut-up texts, maps, cartoons and newsprint, splattered with coloured ink, as "like waking from a dream, or falling into one." Strangely, though, his brilliant book Lipstick Traces - which charts the history of punk backwards to the Situationists - fails to note the connection to either Public Image Ltd or Durutti Column. This despite the fact that PIL's John Lydon/Rotten appears on the book's cover and that Marcus discusses the Situationist comic by Andre Bertrand where Durutti Column took it's name and title of their sand-paper covered debut, The Return of The Durutti Column. 

Factory Records was essentially founded at a small Sex Pistols concert in Manchester, attended by Tony Wilson and many of the bands he would eventually sign. Wilson had been introduced to the comic (titled Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti in French) in University, and the influence of the Situationists can be found throughout the label's catalogue, perhaps most notably in his notorious nightclub The Haçienda. It was named in honour of a phrase from Ivan Chtcheglov’s essay "Formulaire Pour Un Urbanisme Nouveau", which was reprinted in the anthology Leaving The 20th Century: The Incomplete Work Of The Situationist International.

The first full-length LP on Factory Records wasn't always intended to be issued in the now-legendary sandpaper cover.  The original plan was to release the disc in a metal film canister, which was abandoned when PIL's Metal Box was released. One of Wilson's colleagues at the Granada TV station was dating artist Jamie Reid, who had designed the cover for the Sex Pistol's debut (and swan song) Never Mind the Bollocks. Reid had ties to the Situationists and introduced Wilson to a sandpaper copy of Mémoires.