On 29 April, a famous painting by the Danish modernist Asger Jorn was “modified” with glue and a magic marker (DK). Den foruroligende ælling (The Disturbing Duckling) hangs in Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Jutland. “It is one of his five most important pieces . . . a national treasure,” said Museum Director Jacob Thage. Jorn was one of the founders of Cobra, a postwar avant-garde movement based in Paris.

The action was the work of a group of museum guests, explained Thage. One person defaced the painting, writing “Ibi-Pippi” on it and attaching a photograph while another filmed the event. The signatory turned out to be the performance artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard. She had achieved some celebrity a few years ago when she changed her legal sex status from man to woman without undergoing surgery.

The anxiety of influence?

The Disturbing Duckling is one of Jorn’s trademark “modifications,” in which he took a conventional painting he found in a flea market and added something to it in his own style. In this case, it was a cottage in the woods that is dwarfed by Jorn’s brightly colored, expressionist duck. The piece resonates in Denmark because of its allusion to Hans Christian Andersen.

After the incident, Orup Hedegaard wrote on Facebook, “I have … made a double modification…. It is now an Ibi-Pippi work and not an Asger Jorn.” Commenters mostly called her a narcissistic idiot who should be locked away in a psychiatric hospital.

Watch performance artist wreck classic painting

Another Facebook post has a video of the incident (DK). One of the witnesses was Uwe Max Jensen, who is perhaps best known for performance art consisting of pissing on artwork. He said he’d expected Ibi-Pippi to display her penis [sic] at the museum.

https://www.facebook.com/PatrioterneGaarLive/videos/702533260895589

The museum, which of course regards the action as vandalism, does not yet know whether the damage from the glue can be repaired. Orup Hedegaard was arrested but not held in custody, and the police are investigating the case.

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When the artistic medium is cold cash

A more interesting affront to the institution of the museum that took place last year also reappeared in the news recently. The artist Jens Haaning borrowed more than half a million kroner ($70,000) from the Museum of Modern Art Aalborg to update two pieces for an exhibition in September. The money was supposed to be used to fill two frames with krone and euro bills representing the average annual incomes in Denmark and Austria. The original versions from 2007 and 2010 had to be inflation-adjusted.

Haaning delivered instead two empty frames bearing the title Take the money and run (DK) (in English). He declared that he had no intention of returning the money and maintained that he had fulfilled the agreement. The empty canvasses, along with their title, were themselves a work of art: “It’s not theft. It’s a breach of contract, and a broken contract is part of the work. The piece is that I took their money.”

In defense of looting

Haaning described his action as a protest against the terms that the museum required of him, since updating the pieces would have cost him DKK 25,000 ($3,500). He issued a general invitation to everyone to behave similarly: “If you have some shitty job … and are actually asked to give money in order to go to work, then take the money and run.”

The museum displayed the empty frames as part of the show, Work It Out, whose theme was the future labor market, and they garnered international notoriety for the museum as well as Haaning.

In January, after the contract’s repayment date had passed, the museum sued Haaning (DK) for the loan, although it didn’t press criminal charges. Its director, Lasse Andersson, conceded that Haaning had created a work that made a comment on the entire show (DK). But he insisted that the museum had to enforce the contract because it is accountable to its foundation sponsors, adding that Haaning had received a total of DKK 46,000 to update and display the pieces.

No comment on own insult

“There is a museum director who does not know what art is/can be, and I actually have no comment on that,” texted Haaning.

Several fellow artists lavished praise on the Haaning’s creation (DK), portraying the museum as a stodgy literalist. The Danish Visual Artists Trade Union sees Haaning’s action as a justifiable protest against low wages for artists generally. It’s hard to make a living as an artist anywhere, and even harder in a small country with a small potential audience. But an affluent welfare state recognizes this and gives many of them stipends. So it’s really just more of taxpayers’ money that Haaning wants to abscond with.

More ethereal than an NFT

The new twist is that Haaning wants to sell the work (DK) (that is, the empty frames) so that he can hire a lawyer to help him send a bill to the museum for distributing photographs of the pieces. But the museum is retaining possession of them until the suit is settled. So Haaning is offering for sale two frames that represent confiscated money but that are inaccessible until the court decides whether the money may remain confiscated.

By displaying Haaning’s contribution in the exhibition as planned, wasn’t the museum acknowledging its artistic merit or interest? And if someone buys it, would that also validate it as a genuine work of conceptual art? But if the court rules for the museum, then the piece’s title, Take the money and run, will need updating again. Haaning didn’t run. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too by not only taking the money but bragging about it. The “work” could be called Take the money until forced to return it. Then, as remnants of a failed prank, what would the frames be worth to an art investor?

Money for nothing

Maybe the museum’s real mistake was not in signing a contract with an avant-garde malcontent but rather in thinking that the original pieces were really worth a financial “update.” Now it’s undeniable that, with his paradoxical caper, Haaning has created some reputational value out of close to nothing. Since he borrowed the entire average 2019 incomes, maybe the frames had been emptied of their previous contents from 2007 and 2010, and the works hardly existed until another generous dupe came along. But Haaning is also generating an average annual income in legal fees that he may be liable for himself.