Went to visit an old acquantance on my way  home from the Louisiana Museum today. Bus 388 wound its way along Denmarks coast, and deposited me on her doorstep: Karen Blixen. Her home in Rungstedlund is now a museum, showing a couple of rooms as they were when she lived there. Furnished with odds and ends from various family homes, all grand ones it seems. After reading her books, I had the impression that she was rather snobbish. Found nothing to counteract that impression today.

The museum houses an up-to-date art project in its attic, a collaboration between Danish and Kenyan artists.  I remember the title: “Not about Karen Blixen”. If it wasn’t about her, it wasn’t much about anything else either. No tension present at all – nor did they explore lack of tension, the way Carsten Holler did with his Double  Club. A quote from my essay: “What seems to be representative of Höller’s work is the practice of creating a safe environment, but a safety with danger lurking behind. In the “bar & restaurant & discotheque” Double Club (2008 – 2009) for instance, the Congo is present but the work is presented as being not about massacres, genocide and refugees. “You go there, thinking to have to decide on these issues, but find out on the spot you don’t.” There is a direct link from Höllers work to the Situationist’s idea of hidden states: Sous le pavé, la plage.