On Jan. 11, as Mercury turned retrograde, Czech concept artist David Cerny punk’d the stodgy Council of the European Union. His joke? A 2,760-square-foot model kit-like sculpture that depicts the 27 EU countries with ironic, politically incorrect stereotypes: France is on strike; Sweden looks like an IKEA flat-pack; Britain is missing altogether. Bulgaria is a patchwork of Turkish squat toilets and Italy is covered in soccer players who look as if they’re masturbating with the help of soccer balls.
The piece, sardonically entitled “Entropa,” was commissioned to celebrate the temporary Czech EU presidency. Twenty-seven individual artists would illustrate the theme “Europe without barriers.”
But Mercury the Trickster had other plans. The underfunded and over-ambitious EU plans inspired Cerny and his colleagues to secretly change the plan.
To complete the postmodernist joke, Cerny’s team created a brochure, complete with 27 fictional artists and dense mock artist statements. Elena Jelebova, for example, is a Bulgarian whose toilets intend “to cause a scandal, especially at home,” with a “punk gesture, intentionally primitive and vulgar, fecally pubertal.”
The hoax was revealed soon after it’s unveiling. “We knew the truth would come out,” said Cerny to the BBC. “But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.” Bulgaria didn’t: it demanded the Turkish toilets be covered. But the rest of the European countries are — in good Mercury retrograde style — rethinking their assumptions about one another. Which is the point, says Cerny: “Self-reflection, critical thinking and the capacity to perceive oneself as well as the outside world with a sense of irony are the hallmarks of European thinking.”