Tag: prague

Oafish state-sponsored art

The New York Times profile of David Černy that Krafty posted does a nice job of framing our understanding of Cerny’s crazy-ass work as a reaction against the state-sponsored propaganda-style public art that was commonplace under socialism. I was interested to find out that there was direct link between the two: a traumatizing experience Cerny had as a child when he unwittingly repeated a negative comment his father made about a new Lenin statue to his schoolmates and wound up getting labeled as a young subversive by school authorities. As an homage to What David Cerny Hated, let’s look at a few notably oafish, condescending or poorly-conceived examples of socialist public art:

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1. Soviet Liberation Statue

Location: Prague, in seedy park by main train station.

Status: still exists, minus explanatory plaque that’s been torn off

Defining characteristics: patronizing, vaguely sexually undermining

This was built to commemorate the Soviet liberation of Prague, which is all well and good. It depicts a Czech solider joyously hugging a Russian soldier as the latter victoriously stomps into Prague, which is… a bit more questionable in terms of good taste, but still acceptable.  The problem is that the Czech solider is outrageously girly and limp-wristed, whereas the Russian solider is a solid hunk of manliness. At some point, the statue’s plaque was torn off, leaving it in a decontextualized condition where it reads like a celebration of gay love in the military.

(photo credit: my former Prague College co-instructor Rory Wilmer).

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2. Stalin’s Monument

Location: looming over Prague from Letna park.

Status: dynamited to smithereens in 1962

Defining characteristics: ill-conceived; giant, politically awkward eyesore; drove its creator to suicide; generally bad mojo all around

The Czech government spent over 5 years building the world’s largest statue of Stalin and unveiled it to the public in May, 1955. They had about nine months to enjoy their work before Kruschev promptly revealed the crimes of Stalin in the 20th Congress in February of 1956. Oops. Meanwhile, the sculptor, Otakar Švec, who had been receiving threats from the secret police on one side and hate mail from disgusted Czech citizens on the other, decided to call it quits and killed himself three weeks after the unveiling. 1n 1962, the Czech authorities finally blew up the statue, which has since been replaced by a giant metronome that is both quite cool-looking and symbolically mysterious.

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3. Soviet War Memorial

Location: Treptow Park, Berlin

Status: still exists as mirthful tourist attraction

Defining characteristics: megalomaniacal, overconfident

After the Red Army reached Berlin and effectively ended WWII in Europe, the Soviet authorities – never the most subtle of propagandists – decided to build  a massive memorial in the conquered German capital basically celebrating their own kicking-of-Nazi-ass and winning-of-the-War. Which is pretty much as unsubtle as you can get, although you have to appreciate the sheer chest-beating chutzpah of the decision. One of my favorite weirdo things in Berlin, the memorial is executed in the massive, symmetrical power-art style typical of Soviet public art and concludes with a giant statue of a Soviet solider stomping on a shattered swastika. Fuck yeah! There’s actually something a bit touching about the place, when you consider that the authorities in charge no doubt felt that Soviet-style socialism was just getting started and would easily reign for a few more centuries. Instead, their commemoration of Communism-over-Fascism has already become a tourist curiosity for snickering Western tourists a scant 45 years later.

Czech "Bad Boy" David Cerny

05cerny_190I was delighted to learn, this morning, of Czech “enfant terrible” artist David Cerny, who was profiled in the New York Times.  I guess I had seen the pink tank at some point, but this was the first I heard of his caricature of the Czech president encased in a giant, fiberglass anus, not to mention his installation featuring “two bronze sculptures of naked, urinating men, which proceed to swivel their hips and move their protruding penises to trace his four-letter words into a pond shaped like a map of the Czech Republic.”

The article goes on to explain how Cerny became a “folk hero” when he staged an elaborate prank when the Czech Republic had the rotating six-month presidency of the EU last year.  Apparently some (no doubt officious) Czech dignitaries hired him to oversee a project where artists from each country in the Union would create a work that would “proudly display the unique traits of [their] country.”  Instead, Cerny did all of them himself, savagely lampooning each country (“Bulgaria as a Turkish toilet, Catholic Poland as a group of priests raising a gay flag and Germany as a network of motorways eerily resembling a swastika”), and then made up fictional artists and fake biographies for each one, complete with absurd narratives about the pieces.

That has got to be one of the best abuses of cultural cachet I’ve ever heard of.  The article quotes a Czech museum director who says that his art is “destined for the amusement park,” but then reveals that Cerny also placed that guy in the fiberglass anus, feeding slop to the Czech President to the tune of “We Are the Champions.”  If ever anybody earned his reputation as an artistic “bad boy,” it would have to be him, right?  How do you beat naked sculptures peeing swear words onto a map of your home country, or using your status to embark on personal vendettas against museum directors in the form of elaborate installations making fun of them?

The article, which is a little bit fawning (it says he looks like Mick Jagger, and also breathlessly reports how he “considered” getting fake boobs and walking around Prague with them.  Maybe it’s just me, but he’d have to go ahead and actually do that before I’d call it newsworthy), quotes him talking about the difference between the U.S., where Americans are “taught to be proud and as visible as possible,” and the Czech Republic, where “we are taught to be silent and invisible.”  I am fascinated with the idea that this sort of behavior made him a “folk hero,” as it is all too easy to imagine the opposite reaction were some American artist to make a statue of somebody peeing on the American flag or what have you.  Perhaps Dan or one of our Czech readers can further elucidate this cultural distinction.  (I’m also hoping that this post will inspire Dan to tell us about some other famous Czech pranks that I learned a little about when I visited last year.)

EDIT: Dan reminds me that Cerny also made the creepy babies that adorn the Zizkov TelevisionTower, as described in a recent post.  They seemed sort of crazy when I first saw them, but they are clearly on the tamer end of the Cerny spectrum.

Name days

Having whined about the Czech calendar and its non-Gregorian month names in my last post, it’s time to talk about the coolest aspect of the Czech calendar: name days. There’s a limited canon of accepted ‘normal’ first names (maybe 400?) in Czech; everyone who has a ‘normal’ name gets a name day, which is marked in the calendar. Thus, all the Jaroslavs celebrate together on one day; all the Petras on another, and so forth. Dan, I’m happy to report, is part of the canon, so I get a name day on Dec 17th where I get together with my friend ‘Big Dan’ and have a shot.

In terms of the stature afforded to name days, it’s basically halfway between a normal day and one’s birthday. Thus: name day = (birthday + normal day) / 2.

Petr Bokuvka’s post on this subject over at The Czech Daily World brought to mind two additional points on this topic. First, as Bokuvka points out, both Adam and Eve (Eva) celebrate their name day on Christmas Day (December 24th in Czech). An Adam I know here told me that this produces a dynamic where whenever an Adam meets an Eve here (there are lots of each), they immediately get to bond about the shared experience of getting screwed out of name day presents by Christmas, etc. Cool.

Also, Bokuvka pointed out something I didn’t know: weirdly, the Czech calendar has doubled up on Peter (Petr) by giving him two name days – one by himself on February 22nd and then another that he shares with Paul (Pavel) on June 29th. As I wrote in the comments section of his post, this gives you the opportunity to literally rob Peter in order to pay Paul, as you could skip buying the former a present in order to buy one for the latter… or, to take it even more literally, by stealing Peter’s present and redistributing it to Paul. Seeing as Peter gets two name days, he probably deserves it.

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The Žižkov Television Tower

Inspired by JohnnyO’s sleuthing into Sutro Tower’s missing antenna, I figured I would interrupt normal programming around here (which, let’s face it, has started to resemble an inane cabaret lately, what with children wearing bacon suits and animals giving each other piggy-backs) to do a post on communist Prague’s answer to the Sutro Tower – the Ivan Drago to its Rocky Balboa, if you will – the Žižkov Television Tower:

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One thing the Žižkov Television Tower (pronounced ‘zhISH-kof tel-uh-VIZ-yon TAUU-err’, hereon referred to as ZTT) has that the Sutro Tower doesn’t have is an observation deck, which allows it membership status into something adorable called The World Federation of Great Towers. In fact, if you go up to the observation deck of the ZTT, you’ll see a number of framed photos on the walls of other kindred members of the WFGT, which is pretty cute.

Another thing that differentiates the ZTT is its confounding placement smack in the middle of an old residential neighborhood (it’s hard to compare Prague and SF neighborhoods exactly, but it would be like if Sutro Tower sprung out of the ground at the corner of Folsom and 18th). This gives it a very different sense of proximity than the Sutro Tower, which is essentially marooned on a remote hilltop overlooking a Twin Peaks neighborhood that no one has ever had a single interesting thing to say about.

This jarring proximity provoked a lot of the initial resistance to the tower when construction began in 1985. Note that you can’t really say that there was ‘outcry’ of protest back then since nobody was allowed to publicly protest much of anything under communism, so it was really more of a pent-up in-cry, but there was a lot of it nonetheless. Mainly, the tower was seen an imposition of communist triumphalism on a modest, more old-fashioned neighborhood, a clumsy gesture of imperial egotism and arrogance. As if to remove any last possible hint of delicacy, moreover, the tower was built right over a very old Jewish cemetery, which now looks meekly pushed to one side (note: there’s a widespread belief that the tower planners actually moved the cemetery themselves, but a considerable dissenting voice claims that it had already been moved earlier).

Nowadays, the tower is fairly popular, as the jarring contrast between old and kitschy-new is seen as quirky and likable. I guess I can see both sides of this argument. Meaning, I really like the tower, but I can also picture myself being horrified if I’d lived in the neighborhood at the start of construction, both by the aesthetic and cultural implications of it. Which all goes to show that if you’re running a city, maybe you’re better off just doing stuff and counting on the public to acclimate to it, rather than trying to run things according to the maddening processes of consensus-building and ballot initiatives that exist in San Francisco and result in a city repeatedly voting to demolish, rebuild and repeal the same freeway in successive votes. On the other hand, Czech’s communist government was overthrown before they could see the completion of this tower, so maybe it is better to stick with the milquetoast, coalition-building approach after all.

A lot of the protest around the ZTT also had to do with health concerns, so much so that construction was actually halted for a year after the Velvet Revolution so that tests could be performed to reassure the surrounding community that the broadcast signals emanating from the tower had no adverse effects. As far as I know, there was no reason to suspect any kind of health impact from the broadcast signals other than the one quite sufficient reason that it was being built by the local communist government, who had such a poor record on environmental issues that it often seemed as though they were trying to create unhealthy living conditions on purpose. So, on the one hand, I think you can’t really blame the citizens of 1980s Czechoslovakia for instinctually doubting the safety-mindedness of their leaders in any undertaking. With that said, it often seems like communities will come up with somewhat farfetched public safety concerns when they’re faced with something they don’t like but don’t know how else to verbalize their dislike for. In the 1973 news clipping that JohnnyO liked to about the Sutro Tower, for example, there’s some guy who’s trying to claim that the tower is a threat to fall over and land on a nearby school.

Then, there are the Babies:

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There’s not much to say about the Babies that hasn’t already been said. Installed by sculptor David Černy in 2000, they started out as a temporary exhibit but became a permanent part of the structure by public demand. I used to think that they were perhaps a commentary on the health concerns that originally centered around the tower, but then found out that Černy had already been creating these babies (his ‘technology babies’) for a while before he got this commission, so they in fact had nothing to do with the tower per se. Pretty much every tourist who has ever been in Žižkov has taken a photo exactly like the one above, by the way.

From the observation deck, you get a fun 360 degree view from a height of some 600 feet, at which point the city basically dissolves into a sea of orange tiled roofs with the occasional castle spire or church tower poking through in the distance. You can also clearly appreciate the way that the blocks of flats are built around entire blocks with fairly large courtyards inside:

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(Note: these two photos are not taken from the tower – lame, I know, but the thick reflective glass around the observatory makes it hard to take decent pictures, so these give a better idea of what you see. These were taken on an elevated bridge about 2 miles away).

Technically, the most impressive feature of the building is the elevators, which travel 4 meters a second, and look like this:

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On the other hand, the lamest aspect of the tower is the restaurant, which is decked out in iron curtain-style colors and decor, features diffident iron curtain-era service, and is probably largely responsible for the widespread misconception among visitors that the tower was built in the 70s rather than late 80s/early 90s. Nevertheless, I chose this as the place to propose to my then-girlfriend, party because I wanted us to be able to have a personal happy association with this ubiquitous spot that you can see from hundreds of kilometers away. Of course, if she had said no, then it would have become a ubiquitous reminder of heartbreaking rejection, which would have been awkward… but, fortunately, that’s not what happened. The only awkward part was trying to come up with an explanation for why I wanted to take her up to this touristy place where we would never normally go for dinner. To do so, I claimed that a phony astrological phenomenon – ‘the refraction of Saturn’-  was happening and that we should go eat in the restaurant so we would be able to see it. Worked like a charm. Heh heh.

Finally, the tower looks really cool at night:

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Pneumatic tube update

In response to the Pneumatically Prague post, readers TK and DS sent along this link with more info on the system, including this impossibly-cool photo of the control system…

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… and this description of what sounds like a really fun technological show-down between pneumatic tube, messenger and telex system:

There was an experiment in about 1970 in which they tried to deliver 50 telegram forms (it is the maximum capacity of the capsule) from the Prague main post office to the Prague castle post office by the messenger, by telex system (with the fastest operator – winner of the typewriter competitions), and by the pneumatic tube system. The tube system was the absolute winner, taking 8 minutes to deliver the package.

If you could apply advertising trends from 30 years later to promote the tube, it would have been fun to print t-shirts that read Got Pneu?

Bigger hot dog sales…

… through sexually-ambiguous vampire advertising.

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Good to know that somebody is trying it. This is the side of the delivery truck for Kostelecke Parky, a Czech hot dog brand.

Update: Reader JM alerts us that she used to have undies with this unsavory character on them. See the Comments section for more disturbing revelations along these lines. Meanwhile, regarding the lost panties, I can only extend the hope that she someday finds them in the Warehouse of Lost Stuff.

Fun with bribes

I’ve always been fascinated by the protocol of petty bribes: the folded bill nonchalantly inserted into a functionary’s pocket, the suavely encoded ‘suggestion’ indicating what the bribe is for. One of my unrealized goals in life is to subtly condescend to someone by pretending to try to bribe them with a one dollar bill. Imagine your friend drags you to a posh nightclub that you don’t want to go to anyway and the doorman refuses you entry because you’re wearing sneakers instead of fancy shoes. Theatrically slip him a crumpled $1 and conspiratorially murmur, “My friend George Washington would like to join the party,” then enjoy the series of expressions that pass over his face as he realizes that you’ve essentially tried to buy him off with a candy bar.

In the Czech Republic, these ‘My friend so-and-so…’ lines take on an added dimension because the historical figures printed on Czech bills have biographies that are both more dramatic and obscure than their American currency counterparts. Imagine the fun/confusion that could result  from slipping someone a 100 crown note (equivalent to five dollars) and indicating, “My friend Jan Komensky would like to come in and develop a language where false statements are impossible.” Or: “Excuse me, but I think my friend is late to his defenestration.” A Tomas Masaryk would set you back about $250, but you would get to say, “My friend would really like to join the League of Nations.”

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Czech currency, incidentally, is really beautiful–  I will be sad when it’s eventually retired in favor of the Euro. The very first Czechoslovakian bank notes (along with the first stamps) were designed by the great art noveau artist and Czech patriot Alfons Mucha.

Tomato, to-mah-to

Mark’s inaugural post underscores a weird point: pretty much any caucasian American family can creditably pass for a Czech family.  There’s really no particular Czech ‘look’. Sure, there are a few Slavic archetypes that recur over and over again, but there are more than enough exceptions and outliers to muddy the waters.

Any time I meet a friend or family member at the airport who is getting off a connecting European flight, I like to look at each person coming out of the gate and guess whether they are a Czech traveller returning home, or visiting from somewhere else and visiting. Then, I crane towards them and try to make out an identifying language, to confirm whether I’ve guessed right or wrong. Generally, I’m wrong. And most often, it’s the phyiscal posture of ‘Boy, I’m glad to be home’ or ‘Whee, I’m visiting Czech Republic’ tells me whatever I’m able to figure out.