… you’re the only one like you,” sings Barney, and the reassurance extends, surely, to countries. No other place is like Bulgaria, Germany, France … These countries might now be part of the European Union, but they retain their unique national characteristics…
And so the current president of the Union – the Czech Republic – commissioned a Czech sculptor to create for the European Council building in Brussels a vast mosaic celebrating the rich uniqueness of each member country. The sculptor would subcontract, as it were, each country’s part of the mosaic to a sculptor in that country, and the result would be a big colorful celebration of diversity.
… Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a “for sale” sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.
France? On strike.
The 172-square-foot, eight-ton installation, titled “Entropa,” consists of a sort of puzzle formed by the geographical shapes of European countries…
[The sculptor] admitted that he and two of his friends constructed the whole thing themselves, making up the names of artists, giving some of them Web sites and writing pretentious, absurd statements to go with their supposed contributions.
For example, next to the piece for Italy — depicted as a huge soccer field with little soccer players on it — it says, “It appears to be an autoerotic system of sensational spectacle with no climax in sight.”
The fake British entry, a kit of Europe in which the piece representing Britain has been taken out, says, “This improvement of exactness means that its individual selective sieve can cover the so-called objective sieve.” [Someone’s been reading Alfred Jarry.]
… The Germans are probably not too thrilled that their country is represented as a series of highways that, looked at a certain way, possibly bring to mind a swastika. Spain has to settle with being a huge construction site, while Romania is shown as a Dracula-themed amusement park…
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Update: Pictures. Plus this, from the Daily Mail: “The eight-tonne mosaic will also go ‘live’ later this week, when certain country ‘pieces’ will start to move and make noises.”
January 15th, 2009 at 12:59PM
Hah! Glenn Reynold’s (Instapundit)commentary is "IN EUROPE, ART SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER. Power is not amused."
January 15th, 2009 at 2:13PM
I’m glad to see that I was not the only one who saw a swastika in the German one.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:53PM
Wonderful!
There is a brochure with artist statements and biographies downloadable from EU2009, the Czech EU presidency site.
…a statue could be made of gold and cost less than a pile of rancid fat on a chair, provided, that is, that the artist behind the fat is Joseph Beuys. This forms the basis for my own design.
The minarets in the Netherlands will emit the sound of singing muezzins!
…Malta was home to an elephant no taller than 90 centimetres. Imagine an elephant so small you can’t see it with your own eyes and release it on the island. Seek to find the essence of nature essence as well as your own essence in it.
Sweden is flat-packed in a cardboard IKEA box!