“ Indeed, the Czech Republic, which recently gave up the six-month presidency of the European Union, is still reeling from the scandal caused by Mr. Cerny’s satire of European stereotypes in an eight-ton mosaic of the bloc’s 27 nations called “Entropa” last January.
The piece, which was installed at the European Council building in Brussels, was supposed to proudly display unique traits of each country in the union. Instead, it depicted Bulgaria as a Turkish toilet, Catholic Poland as a group of priests raising a gay flag and Germany as a network of motorways eerily resembling a swastika.
Officials in Prague, who had commissioned the work to mark the Czech presidency, had asked Mr. Cerny to oversee a work by artists from each of the union’s member states. Instead, the sculpture turned out to have been entirely constructed by Mr. Cerny and two friends in an elaborate hoax. Mr. Cerny even fabricated fake biographies and Web sites for the nonexistent artists, along with pseudo-intellectual absurdist texts. The fictional Bulgarian artist Elena Jelebova notes that she sought to create a “punk gesture, intentionally primitive and vulgar, fecally pubertal.
The piece, which was installed at the European Council building in Brussels, was supposed to proudly display unique traits of each country in the union. Instead, it depicted Bulgaria as a Turkish toilet, Catholic Poland as a group of priests raising a gay flag and Germany as a network of motorways eerily resembling a swastika.
Officials in Prague, who had commissioned the work to mark the Czech presidency, had asked Mr. Cerny to oversee a work by artists from each of the union’s member states. Instead, the sculpture turned out to have been entirely constructed by Mr. Cerny and two friends in an elaborate hoax. Mr. Cerny even fabricated fake biographies and Web sites for the nonexistent artists, along with pseudo-intellectual absurdist texts. The fictional Bulgarian artist Elena Jelebova notes that she sought to create a “punk gesture, intentionally primitive and vulgar, fecally pubertal.
— Great stuff in the Times’ profile of Czech Artist David Cerny
