There are countries in the world where an artist like David Černý would have long been in prison—or worse. But in the Czech Republic, this creator with no respect for all that the nation holds sacred is celebrated as the country’s most famous contemporary sculptor.
David Černý turned fifty years old a long time ago, but in many ways he is still a boy who refuses to grow up. His ego has expanded to a size unusual even for an artist; he’s recently started celebrating it at a museum devoted to his art which he himself founded. Good taste, subtlety, and political correctness are notions which Černý never adopted, because he has never even tried to become acquainted with them. In the 1990s he was the creative golden child of political transformation, and today he’s a relic of that era. The way his art develops is quantitative: Černý produces more work more quickly, and for more money, but in an artistic sense he’s standing still. There is an ongoing discussion whether he is even a good sculptor or rather a capable showman, someone akin to a rock star who fills the streets of Prague with his creations instead of playing the guitar.
While tourists and the media adore Černý, the Czech creative scene turns its nose up at him. So far, the sculptor has been immune to criticism because he’s not an average artist but rather a phenomenon which cannot be disposed of with standard critical apparatus. One can enjoy or be irritated by his art, but they cannot dismiss it—largely because the Czech capital city has been intensely saturated by his works, and today it’s difficult to imagine Prague without Černý’s installations. In an essay in his book Zrób sobie raj (Do-it-Yourself Paradise), eminent connoisseur and devotee of Czech culture Mariusz Szczygieł claims that an artist like this could only have come about in the Czech Republic. At the same time, Černý works within a more universal narrative—he deals with the fate of post-Cold War art, the artistic and spiritual condition of post-Communist Central Europe, the unique opportunities and disappointed hopes of the era of transformation, and our parochial struggles with globalization, capitalism, and democracy. In this context, Černý is also a symptom of an era: if he didn’t exist, we would have to invent him.
The Pink Tank
At the end of 1989, when Czechoslovakia was gripped by the Velvet Revolution which brought about the end of real socialism in the country, David Černý was an art student. He was twenty-two, the perfect age to catch some wind in his sails, float towards success, and benefit from the political transformation. Černý might have done no sailing, but he grabbed a brush and, in 1991, covered an old Soviet tank in pink paint. The machine formed the central part of a monument commemorating the liberation of Prague by the Red Army in 1945.
The commemorative tanks displayed on pedestals as a symbol of gratitude to the Soviet Army were a common sight in Eastern Bloc countries. The emotions they sparked were, to put it mildly, mixed—we know how the Soviet liberation of Central Europe ended. In Prague, however, the monument had a particular resonance: its association for the locals was not World War II but the year 1968, when Warsaw Pact tanks entered the Czechoslovak capital to quash the Prague Spring.
In 1991, the tank Černý painted was still listed as a legally protected national monument, so the artist was accused of vandalism and arrested. Identifying him was easy: he had left his personal signature at the scene of the crime. After all, the whole operation was a creative act. During his time in custody, Czech soldiers returned the machine to its original green color, but it didn’t stay that way for long. A group of democratic members of parliament took Černý’s side. Taking advantage of their diplomatic immunity, the deputies painted the tank pink again and demanded that the artist be released. By that point the aforesaid tank had already gained notoriety throughout the world, and enterprising souls sold t-shirts with its image to tourists on the streets of Prague. The tank became one of the icons of Czech transformation.
Černý became famous overnight. This adventure led him to conclude that in the new era art should work quickly and powerfully—and that it’s best for it not to be locked away in a gallery frequented by a handful of amateurs but to appear in the public space. One should also not avoid controversy—on the contrary: art will be provocative or will not exist at all (and definitely not appear on the front pages of newspapers).
Shark in the Czech Style
English scandalmonger and artistic provocateur Damien Hirst, said outstanding art can be recognized when people see it and shout, “What the hell is this?!” Hirst’s creative work embodies the artistic spirit of the 1990s—the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the era of the so-called end of history, in which humanity was free to do nothing more than work, play, spend money, and march towards globalization under the banner of triumphant market democracy. The art of these happy times was to attract attention as aggressively as advertising and strongly affect—even shock—its viewers. It was no accident that the most famous exhibition of British artists from Hirst’s generation was organized by advertising magnate Charles Saatchi, not one of the venerable art institutions. The show had the apt title Sensation.
Černý and Hirst are almost the same age and share a similar attitude to art, shaped on the one hand by the traditions of the avant-garde and on the other by postmodern sensibility, MTV, music videos, and ads. Both artists also share a dream that modern art should be a bit more like rock ’n’ roll. Neither of them wants to be shut away in their studios for hours with a brush or a chisel in hand. Concepts are their material; they both have brilliant ideas and are able to bring them into being. It is easy to say that the TV tower in Prague—the capital’s tallest and arguably also ugliest building—could be climbed by huge, black, faceless babies. The trick is to make such a project a reality, like Černý did.
Also in 1991—the same year when the Czech sculptor painted a Soviet tank pink—Hirst filled a transparent box with formalin and the corpse of a four-meter-long tiger shark. The work, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, became iconic and established the artist’s position as the superstar of the 1990s art world.
In 2006, Černý built an aquarium almost identical to the one in which the Englishman displayed the shark, calling the work The Shark. Inside, instead of the promised sea predator, the formalin held a hyper-realistic sculpture of Saddam Hussein wearing only his briefs, with his legs and hands tied and a noose around his neck. Černý’s scathing commentary on the 2003 invasion of Iraq was supposed to encourage a discussion about how the West disseminates democracy in the Near East with fire, sword, and military intervention, but it provoked another debate about the boundaries of art. Belgium decided that the work crossed these boundaries, and the installation was censored. In Poland, it appeared at the Galeria Bielska BWA during a collective presentation of Czech art, meaningfully called Shadows of Humor. However, the audience in Bielsko-Biała could admire it for one night only, because the day after the vernissage the city’s deputy mayor forced the institution to withdraw the installation. The authorities of nearby town Cieszyn turned out to be braver: on hearing the news about the Bielsko municipality’s decision they allowed Černý’s work to be displayed at Cieszyn’s Galeria Szara.
The King of the Capital on the Vltava
David Černý may share Damien Hirst’s proclivity for shock tactics and powerful special effects, but there is a fundamental difference between these two artists. The latter is a global creator, the former a Czech one, or more specifically Prague, through and through. Yes, Černý is a recognizable name on the international scene; in the last decade of the twentieth century he even spent a few years at prestigious creative residencies and scholarships in New York. But he returned to Prague. In the United States, he was an interesting Central European artist, but he was just one of many. In his hometown, however, he became an institution, practically in a literal sense: in 2001, he founded an interdisciplinary nonprofit art center called MeetFactory. Initially, it was based in the Holešovice district, and currently it’s in a complex of post-industrial buildings in Smíchov.
Černý performs in films, plays rock music with his friend David Koller, is a passionate diver, and is an even more passionate pilot of his private Cessna. Mostly, however, he fills Prague with his installations. Many contemporary artists create with curators and collectors in mind. Černý has little to do with curators; after all, he knows best. But he’s not averse to collectors—he must have some way of financing his many undertakings and whims. Still, his priority audience is the public, preferably in the Czech capital. As a result, one can sightsee in Prague today by wandering from one Černý installation to the next; popular travel websites outline walks along the trail of the sculptor’s works, presenting them as tourist attractions as vital as strolling along the Charles Bridge and the Golden Lane.
That route must include the figure of Sigmund Freud dangling high above Husova Street, holding onto a pole sticking out of a building with one hand. The 1996 work, entitled Man Hanging Out, is Černý’s real hit. The artist has been invited to show it in multiple locations around the world. At times passers-by have taken the realistic sculpture to be a person preparing to jump to their death and have called the police and the fire brigade for help.
Another obligatory stop while touring Prague in Černý’s tracks is the square outside the Quadrio department store, where the artist placed an eleven-meter-tall head of Franz Kafka. It is constructed out of metal panels which are in continuous movement, making the writer’s face undergo constant metamorphosis. In the garden of Prague’s Futura Gallery, there are two exposed bottoms. The hindquarters are raised up on top of enormous, five-meter-tall legs; the figures’ torsos are embedded into the wall of the building. Intriguing black holes gape between the buttocks; in order to peer in, one has to climb a metal ladder. It’s worth the risk, however, because you put your head inside and watch the film screened inside the sculpture. In one bottom, we watch Václav Klaus, the president of Czech Republic, feed the director of the National Gallery, Milan Knížák, gruel. In the other, the gentlemen switch roles and the director feeds the president. Both films have the same soundtrack: Queen’s We Are the Champions.
Today both Klaus and Knížák are in political retirement, but, when Černý built his installation in 2003, they were both holding important positions. The work references the conflict between Černý and Knížák—a conceptual artist who was a persecuted dissident during the Communist era but became a high-ranking official and favorite of the authorities in democratic Czech Republic. When the nation honored him with the post of the director of the National Gallery, it came out that the erstwhile avant-gardist is a surprisingly conservative official who doesn’t appreciate new Czech art. The fact that Knížák would buy his own works for the collection of the institution he ran did not help him build authority in the art scene. He had a particular bone to pick with Černý; their mutual personal dislike reflected a deeper generational conflict. The old-fashioned conceptualist thought Černý was a buffoon and a celebrity, the personification of a new generation of artists that he didn’t understand and that he despised. Černý, on the other hand, saw Knížák as a fuddy-duddy who lost touch with modern art. The man who created The Shark wasn’t the only representative of the Czech art milieu who questioned the artist/director’s policies. And he wasn’t even the one who contested it the most radically – during Knížák’s tenure three other artists visited the National Gallery to manifest their attitude towards its boss by defecating in one of the exhibition rooms.
Galloping on a Dead Horse
Černý is a joker, but Czech politics is no laughing matter to him. This became obvious to Miloš Zeman, Václav Klaus’s successor in the post of the president. In 2013, Černý launched a barge onto the Vltava River and had it towed beneath the Prague Castle, the presidential residence. On the barge there was a sculpture: a gigantic hand with a lifted middle finger. The obscene gesture was directed at the head of state.
The artist loves his country, but that love is critical and so tough that at times it resembles hatred. He celebrated the Czech Republic’s accession to the European Union with a fountain. Its basin is shaped like the map of his homeland. Two statues, steered via the internet, piss into it. You can send a text message to the installation and when you do, the figures “write” the received text with streams of water. Černý says that he created the fountain because he finds both pissing in public and entering the European Union to be pleasurable experiences.
And is it pleasurable to ride a dead horse? It is on such a steed that Černý put Wenceslaus I, the early medieval ruler who Christianized the country and is its patron saint today. The largest and most important square in Prague, Václavské náměstí, was named in his honor. It’s also where his equestrian statue stands. The artist made his own version of that monument, which can be seen under the vault of the Lucerna passage in Prague city center. The sculptor copied the figure of the prince from the original monument. The horse that the ruler sits on, however, is shown hanging upside down. As a result, the rider sits not on the back but on the stomach of the horse carcass, seemingly ignoring the steed’s dreadful condition. Clad in chain-mail, a mantle, and a helmet, he still jauntily raises his spear, gazing proudly into the distance. He looks both terrifying and ridiculous: Černý likes to prick the balloon of tribal pride and show how far one can travel today on the steed of national mythology.
Czechs, known for their sense of humor and lack of self-importance, walk past Černý’s work as if it’s nothing. Although Czech skinheads did once agree to destroy the fountain with the pissing sculptures, only two dozen of them gathered before they were chased away by the police, and there have been no more attempts.
Černý emphasizes, however, that there is another side of the Czech coin. Yes, Czechs don’t get offended by anything, but according to the artist this is partly because the locals simply do not care about anything—besides their own affairs and pleasures, of course. In Černý’s opinion, the typical Czech is a boring mass of dumpling dough, unmixed but constantly doused with beer. He produces such opinions about his compatriots as readily as sculptures for the public space, especially in the years since Václav Havel’s presidency ended. Černý and the late politician were cast from the same mold: both cultural figures from artistic families belonging to the Prague elite, brought up in a climate of liberalism and a deep resistance against the Soviet model of Communism. This was a president Černý understood, respected, and liked, and the feeling was mutual. According to the sculptor, after Havel, Czech politics went all wrong and the citizens started giving power to ignoramuses, post-Communists, and populists. The artist holds this against his compatriots.
Perhaps Černý is too harsh on his homeland. When, in 2009, his country held the presidency of the Council of the European Union for the first time, he was the one who received the government’s commission for a sculpture to commemorate the event. It must have been clear that there would be a scandal, and there was. The original concept involved collaboration among artists invited from all twenty-seven countries of the European Union. Černý created a hoax: the European artists participating in the project turned out to have been invented by the sculptor, who did everything himself. The work took the shape of an enormous steel puzzle. Specific European countries, caricatured by Černý, made up the pieces of this jigsaw map. Belgium is a half-empty chocolate box. Poland is a potato field into which a group of priests is ramming the rainbow LGBTQ+ flag. Italy is a football pitch full of players masturbating with footballs. Bulgaria is a toilet where you crouch instead of sitting. And so on. The work is entitled Entropa. Half of the EU countries took offense, and there were protests and diplomatic notes. Ultimately, the part showing Bulgaria was covered up. Černý was triumphant. He felt right at home in the eye of the storm he created.
The Jester’s Loneliness
In his own country, Černý is both ubiquitous and alienated. “The Czech art community pretends that David Černý doesn’t exist,” said the artist in an interview with Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in May 2023. “I am simply hated and ignored there. [. . .] I know them all, but they ignore me. That’s fair, because I also ignore them.”
He had to set up a museum dedicated to his art himself. It opened in the converted buildings of an old brewery in the Smíchov district. This undertaking was part of a larger operation, as the revitalized brewery is also home to eateries and retail spaces. Apart from his art practice, Černý has also been running the architecture studio Black n’ Arch for years. He’s always had a knack for business, and today he’s not only a sculptor but also an investor. The shrine to his creativity opened in 2021 and was named Musoleum.
At the Musoleum, detached from public space, Černý’s projects are strikingly reminiscent of toys belonging to a big boy who likes to play with cars and guns (some of the artist’s favorite motifs), builds kinetic robot sculptures, and gleefully plays pranks on serious people. Some of the creator’s works openly allude to toys, by the way—for example, his famous sculptures which require assembly. You can assemble a Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve, or a rock star.
Is it appropriate for an artist in his fifties to treat works of art like toys, gadgets, and memes? Černý’s frolicking has lasted for quite a while now, but the question is whether it has a future. The sculptor’s most recent realization, Lilith, is a figure of a naked woman. It was created as a spectacular decoration of a luxury apartment building in the Prague district of Karlín. It is advertised as the largest sculpture of a woman in the Czech Republic. Indeed, its size is imposing: it is twenty-four meters tall, weighs thirty-five tons, and, to top it all off, is a kinetic sculpture—Lilith can turn her head. The statue, however, was heavily criticized. It was pointed out that Černý is recycling old tricks, only on a larger scale. The whole thing is reminiscent of 1990s kitsch, and also has a sexist overtone. “Anyone can overdo it if they lack self-reflection,” commented the Czech curator Marie Foltýnová on the Aktuálně.cz website. The artist does not understand the objections, considering the work “an icon of feminism.”
Černý has had the same hairdo for the past thirty years: an unruly mop of hair in the style of a mad rocker. The sculptor’s machismo also seems to stem from a different era. He gave the monograph of his work the title Fucking Years. He poses on the title page styled to look like Michael Jackson from the Thriller album cover. In the book, he confesses that he considers sex to be his biggest creative achievement and converts the years of his artistic work to the amount of sperm his body produced during that time. Does this still impress us? It’s no secret that Černý is a bit of a boomer who, out of habit, is still called the enfant terrible of the Czech art scene, even though we’re talking about a man who is closer to retirement age than to childhood.
So, should Černý be buried at the Musoleum, among his own works, toys, and jokes that he always laughs at the loudest? Whoa, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and let’s not throw this golden, terrible baby out with the bathwater! Černý is a trickster—in religious studies, this term is used to describe a joker deity. The task of gods is to create world order and guard it, but a trickster has a different agenda: with their intrigues, manipulations, and provocations they undermine the status quo and test its boundaries. They are a fundamentally immature and insufferable character, but, at the same time, necessary. Just like David Černý, who, undoubtedly, still has much to say.
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