"in 2001, Peter Wollen wrote a rather impressionistic piece on Situationism for the New Left Review, in which he discussed the Danish artist Asger Jorn and his 1948 essay, 'What is Ornament?'. Jorn, a founding Situationist and also an appallingly sloppy painter, had a quaint view of art:
For Jorn, the pairing of European versus oriental ran together with other pairings, such as classical versus spontaneous, idealist versus materialist, Apollonian versus Dionysiac, with Jorn supporting the second term throughout–oriental, materialist, spontaneous, Dionysiac, and so on.
Further, for Jorn:
the nature of art is not to imitate the external forms of nature (naturalism) but to create natural art. Natural sculpture which is true to its material will be identical to nature's forms without seeking to imitate.
Jorn thus compares a minaret to a horsetail, and a totem–pole to a chestnut branch; the non–Western forms are seen as more organic, more rooted in the natural world."
(Conrad H. Roth)
[A critique of a romantic and 'essentialist' view of art and design.]
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.GramOrnJones