When Art Irritates

Entropa exhibit.  Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Two years ago a controversial art piece was unveiled that still has tongues wagging.  Entropa: Stereotypes are barriers to be demolished was created by artist David Černý for a commission by the European Union to commemorate the Czech Republic's presidency of the Council of the EU.

Romania depicted as a Dracula theme park.  Image courtesy of the BBC.

Every six months a different country covers the presidency of the Council.  Prior to the Czech Republic, France held the position.  It is customary for the presiding country to erect an exhibit in the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels.  France offered a large balloon in the national colors of France.

Belgium as a half-eaten box of praline chocolates that have been bitten into.
Image courtesy of Tomáš Pirkl.

Černý chose to create a work that displayed negative stereotypes of all 27 EU member countries.  Each country is shaped like its real borders.  The depictions of each country range from harmless fun to rather risque innuendos.  

Poland with priests erecting a rainbow flag of the gay rights movement
on a field of potatoes, ala U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima.  Image courtesy of Pirkl.

The entire work measures 54' x 54', and weighs 8 tons.  Made of glass-reinforced plastic with joints made of steel, the entire work resembles an unassembled model kit with snap-out parts.  Černý claims that the Monty Python brand of humor influenced him.

Slovakia depicted as a wrapped Hungarian sausage.  Image courtesy of CT24.

The work was unveiled on January 12, 2009.  The next day Bulgaria's ambassador to the EU registered a protest on behalf of his country with the European Commission, and sent a formal protest to the Czech government demanding that the sculpture be taken down immediately.  The Bulgarian part of the piece was covered with black fabric on January 20th.

Bulgaria is shown to be composed of Turkish toilets.

The Bulgarian sculpture after it was covered up.
Both images courtesy of Wikipedia.

Czech officials defended the exhibit and stated that they wanted to avoid censorship as an expression of freedom.  Given the controversy they expected complaints from other countries, but few were forthcoming.

Malta with a dwarf elephant and a magnifying glass.  Image courtesy of Pirkl.

The Czech officials had a change of heart, however, when the evening of the unveiling Černý announced that he and two friends created the entire piece.  When the proposal was made to the Czech government, Černý had said that an artist from each country would create the piece for their respective countries.  They had even published a booklet listing each country's artist with résumés for the artists.  These ended up to be fake.  Černý stated that they had originally planned to contact artists but limited time and financing prevented it.  Once that fact was revealed, the Czech prime minister remarked that had they known that it would not have been authorized.

Portugal as a wooden cutting board with three pieces of meat shaped
like former colonies Angola, Brazil, and Mozambique.  Image courtesy of Pirkl.

Černý was accused of misappropriation of funds.  He claimed that since they knew they would be deviating from the proposal, the funds would be returned.  He also stated that the deception was part of the art.  In the end, it was decided to let the piece remain on exhibit, as it was "art, nothing more and nothing else".

Hungary as the Atomium, a monument in Brussels built for the 1958 World's Fair,
made of watermelons and sausages on a floor of peppers.  Image courtesy of antaldaniel.

No one seems to have denied that the stereotypes were true.  Blaming the art for the stereotypes doesn't cut it.  Since art reflects life, it is the way people think that is offensive, not an inanimate object.  Bravo for artists who dare to reflect shame and ugliness!

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For more of Černý's work click on his website.

Since last September, Entopa is part of the Pilsner

Science Center, Techmania.

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Shining the Light on Urban Art

Caged Memories art installation by Luzinterruptus.

When I was an art history student at UCLA, the art department shared the same building.  Installations seemed to be the ticket for art students in those days, and we art history students never knew when we saw something whether it was really what it seemed or an installation.  One day a cleaning bucket, on wheels and filled with filthy water, was sitting out on the patio in front of the entrance to the art library, with several old mops sitting in it.  On the side of the bucket spray dispensers of, assumably, cleaning fluids, hung by their handles.  A couple of dirty rags hung on the handle completed the scene.

Things that would be better if they were clean by Luzinterruptus.

We weren't sure whether someone cleaning had temporarily left it, or if it was an art installation.  We stood around debating it and giggling, then we all went to our respective classes.  I was in a seminar a couple floors up.  Before sitting down, I looked out the window to see if it was still there.  A couple of other people were curious, too, so every time there was a break we looked down out the window. About an hour later, a man dressed in a jumpsuit that some custodians wear came along and pushed it on his merry way.  It was what it was.  Why he left it out in the middle of the patio was a question that bugged some of us, so at break, on our way to get coffee, we caught up with him and asked him.  He shrugged and just said it had been his lunch break.  It took me a while to get into the spirit of installations.

Someone lives there by Luzinterruptus.

Perhaps that's why I'm intrigued with the Spanish interventionist collective known as Luzinterruptus.  They call themselves the "light art" collective.  The anonymous art collective chose their name to reflect their ideology of attracting attention through light, which eventually fades or is interrupted.  They purposely chose projects that not only do not damage anything, but leave space for other street artists and for the public to share.  Using simple materials, often recycled and/or recyclable, they work at night and try to do a project once a week.

For one night they were lamps by Luzinterruptus.

Please, recycle your garbage is one intervention many of us in the U.S. can identify with.  Disgusted with the electoral campaigns for municipal and regional elections, the group decided to put it all in the trash.  Since telephone booths are used for advertising they placed garbage bags over them, basically trashing the politicians.  Although they tried not to focus on any party, they stated that "curiously" most of the ads they found were from one party.

For last year's Spanish poetry festival in Madrid they hung 1,000 white envelopes which contained a light and a poem written for the event in a public garden which was also the site of poetry readings and performances. On the last night members of the public were given the envelopes to keep or address and mail out.  The lights in the envelopes continued to shine.  This installation - 1,000 poems by mail - effectively "shared the light" of poetry in a public space.

The poems hung for three days, then were offered to the public.
The ones addressed by people were mailed by Luzinterruptus.

Thinking that the trash containers throughout the city look like seas, especially since they are covered in blue or green tarpaulins, they decided to add paper ships to them - lighted, of course.  One sees the sea between the cars was carried out in the Salamanca district of Madrid.  Apparently, they were the first things kids saw on their way to school in the morning.

One of their most interesting, to me, installations took place in the Dumbo district under the Brooklyn bridge in New York.  Literature versus traffic consists of 800 books and lights strewn all over the street for several hours.  That's one way to deal with traffic.

These clever and dedicated artists create wonderful surprises just for the delight of making and sharing them.  How great it would be to wake up to one of these installations

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All images courtesy of Luzinterruptus.

Photos by Gustavo Sanabria.

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Loo-De-Dah

Bonvicini's London installation.  Image courtesy of Jennifer Carlile/MSNBC.com

Eight years ago one of the most influential artists in recent years displayed an installation that is still causing waves.  It is going viral AGAIN in emails, albeit without crediting her with her work, and misinforming the locations of the piece. The piece is a toilet within walls made of one-way mirrors.  Inside one can see out, but no one can see into the structure.

Monica Bonvicini's "Don't Miss A Sec" was installed at two places in Europe.  One was in 2003, where it was placed on the construction site of the then future Chelsea College of Art and Design, across the street from the Tate Britain Museum. The other was in Basel, Switzerland in the middle of the Basel fairgrounds.  It is not in Houston, Texas, as many emails state.  The toilet is usable.

At the center of Ms. Bonvicini's work are architecture and public spaces.  She likes to examine the relationship between physical and social spaces.  "Don't Miss A Sec" is about the desire to see it all and the failure to be able to do so.  It pushes beyond the absurd what is public and what is private.

A person cleaning the installation in London.  Image courtesy of Scott Barbour/Getty Images.

She came up with the idea in 1999, when she sketched it while on an airplane.  She related it to the urge to not miss anything, to the notion of "see and be seen".  If you use the toilet, you can still see the next art work, who's passing by, who they are talking to, what they are wearing, and other social "must have" information.

Image courtesy of Ai Binami.

In London, the use of the prison toilet-and-sink unit pertains to the site, which was once the Millbank Penitentiary where prisoners were held before being shipped to Australia in the 1800s.  Her idea riffs off Jeremy Bentham, the renowned jurist, philosopher, and reformer.  His best known idea was for a prison building he called a panoptican.  This was a cylindrical building with a central tower that allowed guards to see all the prisoners in their cells without being seen by the prisoners.  (Today this is accomplished with the use of surveillance systems such as closed-circuit television.)  "Don't Miss A Sec" reverses this concept by giving all the power of viewing to the person inside the piece.

Jeremy Bentham by Henry William Pickersgill, painted prior to
Bentham's death in 1875.  National Portrait Gallery, London

Ms. Bonvicini was born in Venice, Italy, and currently lives and works in Berlin. She attended the University of Arts in Berlin where she studied painting.  She transferred to Cal Arts where she was allowed and encouraged to explore her interests in architecture and art.  Since 2003 she has been a professor of sculpture and performative art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Monica Bonvicini has gone on to other work, but this piece seems to have caught the fancy of internet users all over.  An homage, perhaps, to the insatiable curiosity inherent in humans - I refer both to its popularity and the fact that one can answer nature's call without missing the action.

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Unless otherwise noted, images of installation are in Basel, Switzerland, and are 

courtesy of the artist, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, Italy, and West of Rome Inc., Los Angeles.

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