News | Sunday, 25 January 2009

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Next time, a dead bird, not an elephant

Matthew Vella
If you’re Bulgarian, chances are you’re somewhat miffed at seeing your country turned into an effigy of a giant Turkish urinal.
But the diplomatic incident that Czech artist David Cerny caused with his ribald art piece Entropa, funded by the Czechs to mark their presidency of the EU, seems to say more about what Europeans think of each other than Europe’s own entropy.
Having your country depicted as a urinal is certainly offensive, but there’s also something unnerving about squat toilets. It’s the sudden realisation that you’re shitting in a country where no English is spoken. What do you do if you run out of toilet paper?
Unlike Bulgaria’s squat toilets, or the way Germany’s autobahns seem arranged in a swastika, Malta’s depiction in Entropa fails to create any incident or offence – if only because of its harmless and unexciting characterisation. 500 million Europeans today know a prehistoric dwarf elephant, certainly one not up to Barnum standards, once roamed the Maltese plains. A dead bird would have, at least, generated some self-righteous outrage. But still, what could be worse than a urinal?
Thanks to Cerny’s work of art, his parody of the EU has given life to the vulgar, comical, and outrageous stereotypes of this disparate collection of nations, and put paid to their pretensions of ‘European oneness’.
Belgium is a chocolate box. Cyprus is two halves held by a hinge. Italy’s recognisable boot is dotted with its national football team on the field, masturbating. Romania is lit up by the eyes of a vampire, and Poland has priests lifting the rainbow flag. All 27 member states, complete with glowing lights and noises, are connected by a plastic air fix skeleton.
Cerny’s sculpture, funded by some €380,000 from the Czechs, created a diplomatic incident here and there, but with its bawdy send-up of European stereotypes it replicated what we knew all along. Deep down, we’re still a Europe of nations, irrespectively of the Union, and we like to look down on each other.
In unveiling the sculpture, Aleksandr Vondra, the Czech deputy Prime Minister, delivered a defence of freedom of expression, and apologised to the nations that felt offended, summing up Entropa as “just art — nothing more, nothing less.”
The director of Malta Contemporary Art, Mark Mangion, sums it up with the New York Times’ headline: ‘Art hoax unites Europe in displeasure’.
“A kind of poking at the pretentiousness of European diplomatic structures. Typically problematic, EU-funded public sculpture transcending this, and entering the territory of the now accepted joke that is the Eurovision Song Contest, that we in Malta take so seriously and waste so many resources on. At least he got people talking. That’s very commendable,” Mangion said.
Cerny certainly fooled the entire European institution itself, whose partiality for some contrived art that celebrates European unity hides its own labyrinthine and opaque diplomacy. Art should never be officialised.
As hoaxes go, this one had style. Charles Bukowski said style was the answer to everything: “doing a dangerous thing with style is art.” Hoaxing Brussels, too, has turned into art.

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