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AS AN ICON IN MASS CULTURE, the Little Mermaid has become the official image of Denmark in general, and of its capital, Copenhagen, in particular. Its iconicity is intimately tied to two sources: Edvard Eriksen's famous bronze statue erected on the Copenhagen waterfront in 1913 and Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale from 1837. The complexity of Andersen's fairytale, however, which lends the symbolic value to Eriksen's statue, has been largely ignored because the statue has taken on a life of its own. Historically, it belongs to the final phase of Danish classical sculpture, but it has also become die raw material of modernistic artistic expressions. In fact over the last forty years, the statue has moved toward two distinct representations: the completed statue by Eriksen viewed and revered by the millions of tourists who visit and photograph it and the ongoing fragmented and unfinished work, which has derived from the destruction of the former. This latter "work of art" in turn points to the modernity of which it and Denmark has become part.
The fragmentation started in 1961, when the statue had its hair painted red and was dressed up in a bra and panties. Two years later she was painted red again. In 1964, these prankish attacks were followed by an act of willful artistic vandalism when an unknown assailant sawed the head off the body. Later, Jörgen Nash, a situationist visual artist and author, claimed responsibility for removing the head and for making a deliberate assault on the Danish national symbol. Again, in the 1970s and '80s, the national symbol came under attack. In 1990, she lost half of her head, and in 1998, the entire head was again severed from her body. The final attack to date took place in 2003, when the mermaid was blown off her stone, thrown into the water with injured knees and ups. After reconstructive surgery, she was placed back at "home" on her stone. Since 2008, the daily newspaper Politiken has offered a "Genetically Modified Mermaid" to its readers. It is a small porcelain copy of a large sculpture made by the great Danish sculptor Bjorn Norgaard. In the comfort of their living rooms, the Danes can enjoy in miniature what can be seen in its original...