“The disturbing duckling” is one of the most important works by the Danish artist Asger Jorn. The work hangs in the town of Silkeborg, where Asger Jorn (1914-1973) was born. Museum Jorn calls it a “national treasure”.
Asger Jorn gained international fame as one of the founders of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International.
The painting was the pride of the museum – until Friday morning a week ago. Then the picture was pasted over and scribbled on. And the perpetrator, the performance artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard, renamed the work without further ado: the disturbing duckling, she announced, had become the “disturbing bitch”, the disturbing bitch. The destruction of the work is art, and Asger Jorn’s work is now hers.
“I’ve just visited the Jorn Museum in Silkeborg,” read their Facebook page, “and made a double change. I’ve put a picture of myself on the famous duckling. I’ve also signed the work, as it’s now a work of Ibi-Pippi and no longer of Asger Jorn.”
In Denmark, many were shocked, especially the management of the museum. “She was very violent,” says Jacob Thage, director of the Jorn Museum, to the SZ. “Vandalism can never be justified.” And now the country is discussing: vandalism or art? Asger Jorn was famous himself for painting over other people’s paintings. Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard defends herself as simply doing what Asger Jorn himself did in his career as an artist. Jorn painted the disturbing duckling in 1959 on a cheap oil painting of a farmhouse, a flea market bargain.
So new art in this case too? Asger Jorn expert and author Jørn Erslev Andersen from Aarhus University is not the only one to veto it. “There’s a big difference to what Jorn did. He bought the picture and painted it. He owned it. When nobody knew that the duckling would one day become such an important work in recent art history,” he says. What Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard did, however, was completely “unacceptable”.
A restorer is working on the picture, it is still unclear whether the damage can be repaired
One of the few defending Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard is Jens Haaning, the artist who became known in autumn 2021 for his work “Take the Money and Run”: At that time, Haaning had collected 70,000 euros from a museum in Aalborg and empty picture frames delivered. In a talk show on Danish radio, he judged that the duckling’s smearing was a “very competent work of art”.
With that, Haaning was pretty much alone on the show. Marco Evaristti, for example, who put live goldfish in mixers in 2000 and left it up to museum visitors to switch on the mixers, called the action “pure vandalism”: “If you buy a car and I put my name on your car and it call it a work of art, is it my car? I don’t think so,” he says. Asger Jorn had always bought cheap originals by unknown artists for his works. “It was ironic to paint them over,” says Jørn Erslev Andersen. “In doing so, he made the unknown images recognizable. It was an artistic gesture.”
However, there is no excuse for the vandalism that the painting has now suffered. “I don’t even know who the woman is. We have other radical provocative artists, but I’ve never heard of her,” he says. In fact, male-born Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard has caught the public’s attention less with her art than with her publicly performed 2015 civil registration as a woman, without any gender reassignment. She describes herself as “a lesbian woman trapped in a man’s body”.
Also present at the performance at Museum John was the no less controversial artist Uwe Max Jensen. Jensen, for his part, has been noticed in the past by publicly urinating on various objects. He is politically active and ran for the far-right Stram Kurs party in the 2019 elections. Jensen helped film the action and broadcast it live on the Facebook group “Patriots Live”. Jensen later claimed that he himself was appalled by what had happened.
A painting restorer is now working on the picture, but according to museum director Jacob Thage, it is not yet clear whether the damage can be fully repaired.
“It’s too early to tell. The ink is pressed into the paint, you can see that,” he says. “But we are optimistic.”