Further to my post below on Czech artist David Cerny’s magnificent yanking of the EU chain, I’ve been enjoying the official brochure the European Union got duped into issuing to commemorate his sculpture. It features the comments of the various fictional artists Mr. Cerny enlisted for his celebration of Euro-harmony. The Swedish sculptress “Sonja Aaberg” explains her entry thus:
IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth.
The acclaimed Slovene artist “Erwin Mrkosek” writes:
I have chosen a text by the official Slovenian national tourism agency as a departure point for examination of our national identity. According to this text, the first tourists appeared in Slovenia back in 1213 and left a message documenting their visit in one of the caves in the Postojna complex. The discovery that we ourselves are unquestionably the descendants of these tourists is telling; we view ourselves from the position of foreign visitors. This is a strategy associated with the delight of masturbation…
The United Kingdom entry, which is entirely non-existent to symbolize British antipathy to Europe, is annotated by its creator, “Khalid Asadi”, as follows:
If art and associated attitudes are not to become pleasing-appearance ready-made goods, but a living, albeit perhaps fleeting, organism, art should be able to improve exactness of its message in the time allotted to it and thus, paradoxically, define itself in history… These screen points are spatial holograms of historical memory, experience, and therefore each such new overlap becomes another non-linear tangle to the naked eye.
I also like the list of previous exhibitions Mr Cerny has provided for each artist. You may recall “Sabrina Unterberger’s” solo show in Vienna, “Ernst Logar is cooking a soup of his childhood.”
It’s one thing to put one over on a gallery owner or a contemporary art prize but to put one over on the European Union is pretty impressive. Even before it emerged that all these cutting-edge EU artists were made up by Mr Cerny, the Euro-bores weren’t taking it well:
“This is very provocative for an official building and does not seem to have been properly discussed in the appropriate forum,” said one official.
“This might all be very ‘fun’ for some people but shocking art is not going to help get things done,” said another hissy official.
Now it’s like August 1914 all over again:
The Bulgarian foreign ministry has called in the Czech Ambassador to “explain the Czech presidency’s Entropa project.”