On 25 April 1964, precisely 50 years ago, Danes and tourists alike were shocked when they walked up Langelinie to enjoy a peek at the Little Mermaid statue, only to find that her head had been severed off.
Today at 13:00, the provocative artist Uwe Max Jensen will commemorate the decapitation by re-enacting the occurrence just metres away from the Little Mermaid, and he will do it in solidarity with the statue by performing the act completely naked.
“Equipped with a hacksaw and a bucket I will mime sawing off the head of the Little Mermaid, and the performance will end with me putting my head into the bucket so you can experience the historic fate of The Little Mermaid,” Jensen told Metroxpress newspaper.
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Body fluid art
The artist is behind previous provocative pieces of art, including using his own body fluids to make a painting out of urine in Brande.
He was also behind ‘For one complete week, I will only use the Aarhus Museum of Art when having a shit’, a piece of art that only he was able to view after the museum banned anyone from filming it.
And in 2005 he urinated in Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Waterfalls’ sculpture in Aarhus, which he claimed was a performing art named ‘Raising the water level in a sculpture by Olafur Eliasson’. He was subsequently dismissed from the museum.
An advocate of decapitation
“The decapitation did the sculptor a favour,” Jensen argued. “It added something dark to the Little Mermaid. A whole new dimension. In my mind, it is one of the largest art happenings in Denmark.”
The head that was severed from Edvard Eriksen’s famous statue in 1964 was never recovered, although the now deceased artist, Jørgen Nash, claimed in 1997 that he had tossed it into the Utterslev Mose bog.
