Prague Trip Day 15 (David Cerny's Art)

     Our trip to Prague has taken us to many museums and seen lots of art. And while it is easy to focus on the Czech Cubists like Josef Gocar, or Bohumil Kubista, or the Art Nouveau master Alphons Mucha there also needs to be space for contemporary artists as well. That void has largely been filled by artist/provocateur David Cerny whose work is visible all around the city. Our walking around the city led us, often by chance, to several of his works.

     The first that we noticed, and perhaps the most striking, was in the plaza outside a shopping center where we were looking for electronics adaptors. The sculpture was of the giant head of the legendary writer from Prague, Franz Kafka. The head sculpture was divided into layers which could move independently in different directions. It made for a beautiful metaphor about the author's works.

     As we were returning home from that same shopping trip we were winding down a narrow street in Old Town when we looked up to see a sculpture of a man hanging by one hand off the top of a building. It was another Cerny work called "Hanging Out." As it turns out the man in the sculpture is Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Like most of Cerny's work, it begins with a shock to the system, in this case the surprise at seeing a sculpture in such a surprising location. The surprise then leads the viewer into the question of "what does it mean?" Cerny himself does not discuss the meaning of his art publicly, encouraging viewers to find their own meaning. I would like to think that Hanging Out is a statement about Freud's work regarding how the effect of a constant fear of death can effect the psyche. Or perhaps it is a statement about just trying to hang on in the modern world, and that decision about whether to keep struggling to hold on or to just let go. I'm not really sure, but I do think that this sculpture is the kind of hidden gem that seems so indicative of Prague.

     Another walk down an unassuming side street in Old Town let us discover another, somewhat more disturbing, Cerny piece, this one titled "Embryo." The sculpture is that of a fetus coming down through a drain pipe. I am honestly not really sure what to make of this one, but I heard one description saying that perhaps it is a statement about how an artistic idea is born, or about the creative process. While it did not connect with me specifically, it is a good example of the three elements so common in Cerny's work: creative, provocative, and public. It is a thought provoking piece that blends curiously into the landscape.

    The final Cerny sculpture that we came across was in front of the Franz Kafka Museum, and was titled "Piss." This was a humorous fountain featuring two figures urinating on a map of the Czech Republic. The sculpture is also interactive, and if you use your phone to text in a message to an SMS number than the two figures will move around and spell out the letters. This fountain's location at such a touristy spot makes me think that maybe the artist was making a statement about the tourist industry on the city itself but also the country as a whole.