Malta was placed under a rather unique European Council magnifying glass this week when it was not spared the biting sarcasm of Czech artist David Cerny – the artist behind an elaborate hoax on the EU and the EU’s Czech presidency.
When unveiled on Thursday, Cerny’s Entropa installation that dominates the atrium of the Justus Lipsius building – the home to the Council of the European Union and the site of the EU’s summits – created a pan-European furore that has left several member States fuming over the artistic renditions of their countries on a parody EU map.
Italy, for example, is shown as a giant football field with ‘gli Azzurri’ masturbating with footballs and issuing a collective orgasm, Lithuanian boy soldiers are urinating in the direction of Russia, Romania is depicted as a vampire funfair, the UK is completely absent, France is draped with a banner declaring ‘Strike!’ and Bulgaria is a Turkish squat toilette.
Although barely visible, Malta was not spared the scorn.
The country, the EU’s smallest, was portrayed as one of its famous prehistoric dwarf elephants, which in reality came out looking more like a gecko lizard. Above the elephant hangs a magnifying glass several times larger than it.
Not much larger than a pack of cigarettes on an enormous installation, the controversial artwork’s Maltese section is barely visible and photographers had to search high and low to even locate it.
“Malta is a small, perhaps negligible, lump of rock,” reads an informational booklet describing each country’s section. The Maltese portion was purportedly written by Maltese artist Alexander Caruana, which turned out to be a fictitious name.
“For some people, its size may be a cause of mirth. What, then, would they make of our most famous animal, which nobody has actually ever seen: the dwarf elephant, a creature almost too small to miss,” the description continues, without so much as even referring to the magnifying glass.
Cerny had hoodwinked everyone, including his own government and Brussels, into believing the installation had been a joint effort with artists from member States having been commissioned to contribute depictions of their countries.
But in actual fact, it was only Cerny and a few friends that were responsible for the entire work.
Bulgaria had taken particular offence at having been parodied as a Turkish squat toilette, leading the Czech presidency and the artist himself to issue apologies.
Alexandr Vondra, the Czech deputy prime minister for European affairs, commented at the unveiling, “This piece of art has never been meant as the Czech presidency vision of the EU or member States. It is not how the Czech government views the EU. Entropa is provocation of a kind and I understand that some feel offended and I would like to apologise to them.”
Cerny, who said he had been inspired by British satire typified by Monty Python and that he wanted to test whether the EU had a sense of humour, apologised at least three times at the unveiling and said that he would return all the public money, over e350,000, he had received from his government. “We are really sorry that we insulted individual nations, it was never intended to be insulting to anybody.”
It is not known whether the Maltese government is expecting an official apology from the Czech Republic or the artist.