PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Good King Wenceslas looked out and found his horse dead and hanging upside-down.
Such are the antics of Czech artist David Cerny, who over the years has become prankster and provocateur in a nation quite comfortable with the absurd. His public art -- he has painted a Soviet tank pink and built huge sculptures of baby aliens climbing a radio tower -- can be assaults on politicians and the elite, or whimsical metaphors of society.
Consider the king and his horse. Aside from providing the opening line to a Christmas carol, Wenceslas was a revered 10th century Bohemian leader; he and his steed are memorialized in bronze in the Prague square that bears his name. But Cerny, disgusted by the inability of post-Cold War governments to inspire the nation, in 1999 sculpted a Wenceslas trying to look heroic while riding an expired mount.
The work, said Cerny, a rumpled man peering through shards of black hair, represents a country in ideological debt because of short-sighted politicians and the resurgence of the Communist Party, which won 20% of the vote in last month's elections for the European Parliament.
"We should ban the Communists," he said. "I'm in favor of the new European expansion. My biggest wish is that the Czech nation will dissolve. This country killed the intelligentsia three times. First Germans killed it, then the Communists, and thirdly, anybody left ran away. The few who survived are not able to save the country."
Surly idealism, leavened with a bit of fun, has turned Cerny into one of the more recognizable public artists in Europe. He is a dissident for a new, softer age. With the Soviet era long over, the consequences of one's political art are less severe than in the days when playwright and future Czech President Vaclav Havel was jailed for anti-communist views.
Cerny's long-running attacks on National Gallery Director Milan Knizak -- a video caricature of whom the artist has placed inside a fiberglass rectum -- is not likely to land Cerny in prison. In 2000, Cerny refused to enter the National Gallery to accept a prestigious award because of his opposition to Knizak, whom he considers autocratic and more motivated by politics than art. As would seem fitting, Havel, who was president at the time, walked outside the gallery and handed the artist the prize.
