@ossobuco,
Eh, CJ, it's not brussels that's outraged. It's the Bulgarian representatives, Slovaks...some others..those that were made fun of. Understandably on one hand, but also sadly on the other. It is healthy to have some sense of humor about self....but then there would be much less ground for stereotypes.
Here's an article by Slavenka Drakulic (a wonderful writer) that sums it up nicely:
Grand coup de toilette
Czech artist David Cerny's installation in Brussels has revealed the strength of old cold war hostilities between EU nations
Slavenka Drakulić
o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 January 2009 13.00 GMT
o Article history
Some 10 years ago I published Café Europa, a book of essays on the post-communist life. One of the stories was about my visit to the bathroom of Nicolae Ceausescu's daughter Zoe and the condition of toilets in Romania in general. Even in a very well-known restaurant, visiting the ladies' was a risky decision: "Closing a door behind you, you begin to choke on the sharp stench of urine as you desperately try to find a dry patch on the flooded floor," I wrote. "And then you have to pull a dirty piece of rope in order to splash the water. Soap is nowhere to be seen and toilet paper seems to be a completely unknown thing. There is not a single public toilet in Bucharest where you would find it."
When this story was published in the Italian daily La Stampa, the Romanian ambassador to Italy immediately wrote an angry letter to the newspaper. In it, he attacked me as a malicious individual who wanted to damage the pride of his homeland.
The uproar over Czech artist David Cerny's art installation in the European council building in Brussels reminds me of this episode. Toilets still seem to be touchy subjects, at least for some post-communist countries.
The idea of commissioning sculptures from 27 countries based on the prejudices they harbour about each other was interesting " even amusing. The result was, of course, controversial, and Bulgaria became the centre of the outrage: the eight-ton sculpture in the form of a map, named Entropa, featured a "Turkish" toilet in Bulgaria's location.
Bulgarian delegates at the EU immediately produced an official objection, and the culture ministry declared that they had nothing to do with the display and had not selected Cerny themselves. According to the Standart newspaper, Betina Joteva, press officer at Bulgaria's Brussels office, said the "ridiculous piece of art offends the national dignity of the Bulgarians and shows really bad taste", and insisted on its immediate removal.
This unsubtle call for censorship implies that if the Bulgarian cultural bureaucrats had selected an artist to represent the country, they would most certainly not have represented it as a toilet. By issuing this official objection 20 years after the fall of communism in Bulgaria, the bureaucrats at the culture ministry " much like the Romanian ambassador in La Stampa " reveal that they haven't yet heard that art should be an act of freedom, not a propaganda tool, regardless of how tasteless or offensive a particular work might be. Such objections have no meaning except to remind Bulgarians and the rest of the world that the political system might change overnight, but the old way of thinking is alive and well.
However, this was not the end of the story: another scandal followed. Cerny admitted that he and two friends created the whole sculpture and invented the names of the other artists who were supposed to contribute to it. "No other country in Europe has those kinds of toilets," he said in an interview. Clearly, he has never visited Trieste. I squatted in one such toilet in a Trieste cafe very recently. "Turkish toilets" are common in that part of Italy.
Apart from creating a successful worldwide advertising campaign for himself, by tricking his political masters Cerny has pulled off an admirable coup. He has reminded us that politicians are usually people who earn their living by lying to the people who elect them. By creating an enjoyable distraction for the media in the middle of the "cold" war over Russian gas, Cerny proved that Europe " east and west " neither laughs nor forgives.
