Column | The art detective in Stine Jensen is wide awake

I was already on my way to the Frisian Oranjekoek, when my sister pulled me on my jacket. Or I knew what L’Origine du Monde Was? I jumped in my smartest-human stand and listed: ‘Courbet. Painting. Vagina. Woman. Destroyed by angry man.  » Come along, my sister conducted.

We were in Belvédère, a small museum in Oranjewoud, close to Heerenveen. For a while I had stared satisfied with a quiet snow landscape by Jan Mankes, and the exhibition next door, Whispers – Oscar vochscanned. But now I looked at the photographic painting again L’Origine du Monde, corrected for the human of our time Van Oscar Voch, a surface distribution with a white wipe on it. « This is weird, » my sister noted. We then bent closer over the diptych Oscar citizers intwo self -portraits of the artist as a blackface against the background of a Dutch flag, with a sticker « this artwork has been purified – degenerated over one portrait. Criticism of canon culture? On to the tranquil glass display case with retro self-portraits, and the announcement that everyone soon had ‘a tick’ in the house. Did I see it right, a swastika when you tilted the square O and the C?

A sign hung at the entrance with the explanation of the exhibition. The artworks had come about with a computer, I read. « The work of nostalgia can best be described as a dormant consciousness of transience, loss and unfulfilled desires. » It is the atmosphere of the yellowed children’s photo, of a rainy day, of the late light on an afternoon or of the neglected back garden with old bicycle tires and glass fragments, « explains the artist. »

I smelled trouble. Googling on ‘Oscar voch’. « Born in Hondsbosch ». « Hondsbosch does not exist, » I whispered to my sister. Watch movie from the museum. A bald man in a black suit wears a leaders’ band with ticking on it; The interviewer does not ask for that, both stalls clichéd texts about art as « here too is an artist looking for it in stilling. »

A man with führer band broke artificial clichés

The art detective in me was now wide awake. It was a long time since I had felt this type of excitement. To be precise in 2000, when I tried to find out who Marek van der Jagt was. I had scabbled with the letters and the text ‘Jemakeragva-n’ laid. Arnon Grunberg! I then received a postcard from New York with ‘Good scrabblingAG

My sister was also comfortable in it, she had dive the coffee table book published in her own management in the Museum Shop. Neerlandicus and art collector Lex van de Haterd wrote that Oscar loves « mystifications. » The boutade had The artist and the Jew Published, in which he turns against the vulgarization, underpayment and sale of the artist. Lex revealed that it was a pseudonym of Igor Wesdorp. That resulted in a Facebook account and a striking namesake, artist Marcel Wesdorp. I searched for earlier exhibitions from Voch, the majority of the galleries turned out to be lifted.

Could it be that Lex, nicely by age, had finally had his ambitions, that Igor was of service to his actor, and that AI had broken the name Oscar Voch? Or was Igor the Alterego of stilling enthusiast Marcel Wesdorp? Strange that it is prestigious Museum magazine and the Ad So carelessly wrote about « the work of the artist Oscar Voch ». Was this perhaps the question that was above the exhibition: whether all the art can be made by AI, including the artist himself, without us noticing it because we let our art clichés numb ourselves?

I started to find it increasingly sympathetic that this small museum had dared to provide the experiment without providing clarification. After all, you can wonder what the power of art is at this time. Committed art? Yes please, but if the artist starts thinking for you (watch out for fascism!) It also loses its tension and ambiguity. If art creates confusion, it adds something, it keeps you alert, it forces me to take a good look. Because it can just be that you let a man with Fuehrer band broke artificial clichés without anyone crowing it. Whether something so aesthetic (‘still’) can frame (‘the four seasons’) that you do not even notice the soldiers depicted.

I knew one thing for sure. Solving the art council would mean a disillusion, I stopped looking. It is about the confusion, ambivalence, the game and the search itself, that is the power of art. Although I honestly admit that I would love it if it turned out that Arnon Grunberg is behind it

Stine Jensen is a philosopher and writer. She writes a column at this place every other week.

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