Attempting to decipher Entropa (photo: google images)

David Černy is probably the most widely known Czech artist today, thanks to his controversial “Entropa”. Černy has long been known in the Czech Republic thanks to his daring and often playful stunts that have helped to create a new vision of contemporary art - for instance, when he painted a tank (part of a war memorial to fallen Russian soldiers) bright pink in a nighttime guerilla action.

With Entropa, he has decided to offend the national sensibilities of all the EU's member nations. Originally commissioned as a celebration of the Czech Republic's presidency of the European Union, Černý promised a kind of homage to Europe and its countries, produced in collaboration with 26 young artists from the other countries of the EU. Instead, he worked together with only two other collaborators and created a work that (with varying degrees of success and wit) tries to lampoon national stereotypes.

The work, unveiled in Brussels on 15 January 2009, caused much fuss and indignation from some countries, in particular Bulgaria (depicted as a 'Turkish' toilet) and Slovakia (a Hungarian sausage). To put it mildly, the sculpture did not start the Czech presidency off on a good footing.

In fact, the work is far from perfect. Černý claims to want to lampoon national stereotypes, but some of his ideas of how to make fun of other nations seem oddly parochial (the reference to Gripen fighter planes in Sweden could only be understood by a Czech audience, and covering nuclear-free Austria in nuclear power plants makes sense only if you know about Temelin), bordering on xenophobic (minarets in the Netherlands) or just plain simple (Romania as a dracula-style theme park). If anything, the work testifies to the fact that, as Europeans, we don't know enough about each other in order to properly poke fun at each other.

Still, to see what all the fuss is about (and to see other contemporary art in the newest addition to Prague's art scene), head on down to DOX, where the enormous work is installed on the building's facade. For more information, visit the DOX website at Doxprague.org.