As a first selection, rather than concentrating on an artist's entire body of work, I have lingered on a recent operation, about which you may have read something, an operation that every artist with a modicum of gray matter and a modicum of socio-artistic critical sense should carry out if the occasion arose.
The artist in question is Jens Haaning, a conceptual Danish artist, no longer even very young, who lives and works in Copenhagen. Since the 1990s Jens has always worked with pieces that express a sharp reflection, often ironic and provocative, of our complex Western society, with all the crazy mechanisms that such a society often offers as time goes by: migration, nationalism and so on.
Last year he devised an operation titled "Take the Money and Run". The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Denmark gave Jens the sum of $84,000 (532,549 Danish kroner) to create other versions of an earlier work of his in which he had glued banknotes over the entire surface of the pictures, to highlight the difference in average annual income between Austrian and Danish workers, thus gluing on various Euros and various Kroner.
Unlike that work, a month later Jens returned to the museum's halls to hand over two completely white, and therefore empty, canvases, declaring that "the work is that I have taken their money" and walking away as if nothing had happened. The museum asked Jens to return the money lent for the reproduction of the earlier works and, in turn, got this answer from the author: "This is only a piece of art if I don't return the money".
The Kunsten Museum gave Haaning until January 16 to return the funds and, following his failure to comply, confirmed that it will take legal action.
In the meantime the museum, justifying itself, declared that it took legal action "because we have a responsibility toward the private foundations that financially support this exhibition for which that work was created, and we have a responsibility toward our funders," as the museum's director, Lasse Andersson, explained. Nevertheless, Andersson admitted that the exhibition in which Jens's work appeared was a success, but despite this the artist still stands firm in his position and the museum, for now, says it does not want to report him to the police so as not to bring too much scandal upon the institution itself.
The fact remains that any artist who has the chance to steal, sabotage, defuse any mechanism tied to institutions or to those ambiguous roles on the ladder of the art world should do so, looking for any possible conceptual foothold so that it does not come across as a reckless action and one judged negatively in hindsight. Since by now the boundary between art and life has become blurred ever since the diverse art mechanisms of the '60s and '70s, let us exploit these dynamics to destabilize this world that by now moves on autopilot.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →