Obnoxious. A hooligan.
Enfant terrible of the Czech art world. Provocateur. Artist David Černý's been called a lot of things. Here and there amid the myriad Baroque churches and Art Nouveau hotels, the Renaissance palaces adorned with
sgraffito and the Gothic spires, you can find the art (some would say "art") of David Černý.
Černý first made a splash on the Czech psyche in 1991
when he painted pink a Soviet tank that had been declared a National Cultural Monument during the communist era (commemorating the USSR's liberation of Prague). His most recent offense stemmed from the Czech Republic commissioning a sculpture from him to mark the occasion of its presidency of the Council of the European Union. (The Czech officials claim they thought they were commissioning a collaborative piece involving input from 27 artists around the EU.)
From
Wikipedia's Entropa entry:
The Council of the EU has a rotary presidency system, whereby the governments of member countries exchange leadership every six months. It is customary for the presiding country to place an exhibit in the Justus Lipsius building, which are normally uncontroversial. France, which held the presidency before the Czech Republic, had simply erected a large balloon in the French national colours.
Entropa was installed at the EU headquarters in Brussels in early 2009.
From a
BBC report on the controversy:
The artwork, called Entropa, shows the EU's 27 members as snap-out plastic parts of the sort used in modeling kits. Each represents a country according to the crudest national stereotypes.
Bulgaria is shown as a Turkish toilet, Romania as Dracula's castle, and the Netherlands is underwater, with just a couple of minarets poking through the waves. But even more controversially, Denmark is made up of Lego building blocks which, from a distance, form an image of the Prophet Mohammed. And Germany is a network of moving autobahns - lit up, they resemble a crooked swastika.
Entropa was removed from the Justus Lipsius building in May 2009 and installed the next month in Centre of Contemporary Art DOX in Prague-Holešovice. It has been at the Techmania Science Center in Plzeň since last September.
I've been collecting pictures of Černý's work around Prague since the fall. Given that these are public installations that have been around for a number of years, it's safe to say that these are among his least controversial pieces. But that doesn't mean they're not irreverent.
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| Proudy (Streams) 2004. In the courtyard of the Kafka Museum in Malá Strana. |
