Czech artist to take controversial but crowd-pleasing art work down at EU HQ in protest

Popular art work in EU lobby coming down early

BRUSSELS — An art work that created controversy by making fun of nations across Europe will be removed from EU headquarters by the Czech artist to protest the political upheaval in his own country.

Installing grand artistic exhibits at the Justus Lipsius building, where EU ministers and heads of governments usually meet, is traditional for countries that take over the E.U.’s rotating presidency for six months.

When the Czech Republic took that role this year, David Cerny’s 25 x 25 meter (yard) installation, entitled “Entropa,” went up in January and quickly became a big crowd pleaser and an irritant to the some of the countries it portrayed.

The map of Europe on a tubular grid — complete with sound effects — portrays Germany as laced by autobahns roughly in the shape of a swastika. The Netherlands is covered by floodwaters pierced by minarets of mosques. Italy is full of over-sexed football players, Greece covered by forest fires and Sweden as a box of prefab furniture.

France is “on strike,” while Polish clergy raise — Iwo Jima-style — the rainbow flag of the gay community in their mostly Catholic country. Britain is absent, reflecting its traditional aloofness from the EU. Bulgaria, angry at being depicted as a squat toilet, was covered with a black cloth after protests from the government in Sofia.

Cerny said the goal of the work was to court controversy by depicting common stereotypes or prejudices and to prove there is no place for censorship in contemporary Europe.

But the artist said Friday that he is upset at the recent collapse of the Czech government in his homeland, so he will remove “Entropa” from the building two months ahead of schedule and install it at a modern arts center in Prague.

The Czech coalition government of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek lost a parliamentary no-confidence vote March 24, and Czech President Vaclav Klaus has appointed a new government to lead the country until early elections in October.

“This is a protest against what has happened in my country,” the artist told The Associated Press on Friday. He accused Klaus — an EU critic — of orchestrating the fall of Topolanek’s government, which held the EU presidency in the first half of 2009.

“Killing the government in the middle of the EU presidency was totally stupid,” said Cerny.

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AP writer Barbara Schaeder contributed to this copy from Prague.