The David Černý tour of weird art
Normally I've been posting these blogs only every two days so as not to inundate you all. But we did some fun sightseeing today and I took a lot of interesting photos, so I thought I’d tempt fate.
My Sunday started with an 11-mile “run” up and down our neighboring park which HAS NO DOWNHILLS. I can’t exactly characterize the experience as a monumental failure, but it wasn't great. Four-Advil-after-I-got-back not great.
After lunch, we headed out to see some unusual tourist attractions I had mined from a list my friend Carol had forwarded to me, identifying “82 cool and unusual things to do in Prague.” We’ve already seen many of them (like the huge metronome and the Dancing House), but I found a bunch more which piqued my interest. And many of THOSE were strange sculptures created by a local artist named David Černý, whose weird, provocative and acerbic creations are scattered throughout the city.
Like the “Man Hanging Out,” which is a life-sized likeness of Sigmund Freud holding for dear life onto a pole jutting from the roof of a building in Old Town. It’s described as “a sculptural statement about intellectualism in the 20th century and Černý's uncertainty about it.”
And the statue of King Wenceslas riding an upside-down dead horse, located inside a shopping mall. It is a “mocking tribute to the past and modern leadership of Prague.”
And then there are the babies climbing the Žižkov television tower. You’ve seen this tower in several of my photos. Its construction was begun by the Communists in 1985 and is 700 feet tall. It was once considered one of the ugliest buildings in the world.
In 2000, a year after the Communists lost control, Černý attached giant crawling babies to the side of the tower. Each baby is more than six feet in height, their faces featureless aside from something that looks like a bar code.
Below, see the tower and a zoomed-in shot showing some of the babies.
The last Černý installation we saw today was the huge metallic head of Franz Kafka. It’s composed of 42 different mirrored layers that rotate individually. Every hour on the hour, the bust spins in pieces, reflecting the writer's inner torment.
As we walked from one weird sculpture to the next, we saw a few other interesting things.
The Heydrich Terror Memorial (at left) marks the location where Czech paratroopers hid — and died — after assassinating a high-ranking Nazi officer. The aftermath is an interesting but sad story of Nazi cruelty. (Read it here.) The other photos are of another weird, but not-Černý sculpture called “Wild Women of the Forest.”
We also came across several more stumbling stones. The second one in this batch tells of a 10-year old boy who was murdered at Auschwitz.
Finally, do you remember when I posted a photo of a huge butterfly on the side of a shopping mall? I caught it in action today, and I thought a video might interest you. As you can see, the butterfly is actually an airplane with butterfly wings.
More weirdness to come in future blogs. I’m going to be doing some similar explorations this week.