A casual passer-by on Gusova Street may suddenly catch his heart: a man is hanging out on a steel mast sticking out of the roof of one of the houses! Who is this? Suicide gallows or a person in trouble ? ! It also happens that excited tourists call the police or firefighters. Well, the sculptor-provocateur David Cerny was counting on such attention to his offspring when he hung a sculpture of a man holding a beam in his hand on a street in Prague in 1997.
The unique sculpture, 220 cm high, is one of many works by the world-famous Czech sculptor in Prague. However, Cherny, who invariably shocked and often irritated his fellow citizens with his works, earned international recognition. The sculpture of the gallows ("Viselec") traveled the world and was "hung" at the Czech Cultural Center in Berlin, at the National Theater and at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in London and many others.
At an exhibition in Chicago in 2007, there was even an incident with the police, who came to "rescue" a potential suicide.
But was the "gallows" created only to cause fear? Some Czech citizens, as well as other representatives of the former Eastern Bloc, find a portrait resemblance to the sculpture with Vladimir Lenin and see in the work a political satire on the communist paradise, which ordered a long life. However, the sculptor himself claims that the figure represents the Austrian father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
The professor clung with one hand to the lifeline and seemed to hover over the abyss of the Unconscious, which he was one of the first to look at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. Continuing the game with the audience, Chorny offers another, more scandalous, interpretation: the sculpture symbolizes the isolation of the intelligentsia from the common people, who are alien to the slums of psychoanalysis.
The provocation was a success: interest in the work does not fade, and the proposed interpretations allow modern psychoanalysts to look into the secret corners of the minds of interpreters.
The unique sculpture, 220 cm high, is one of many works by the world-famous Czech sculptor in Prague. However, Cherny, who invariably shocked and often irritated his fellow citizens with his works, earned international recognition. The sculpture of the gallows ("Viselec") traveled the world and was "hung" at the Czech Cultural Center in Berlin, at the National Theater and at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in London and many others.
At an exhibition in Chicago in 2007, there was even an incident with the police, who came to "rescue" a potential suicide.
But was the "gallows" created only to cause fear? Some Czech citizens, as well as other representatives of the former Eastern Bloc, find a portrait resemblance to the sculpture with Vladimir Lenin and see in the work a political satire on the communist paradise, which ordered a long life. However, the sculptor himself claims that the figure represents the Austrian father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
The professor clung with one hand to the lifeline and seemed to hover over the abyss of the Unconscious, which he was one of the first to look at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. Continuing the game with the audience, Chorny offers another, more scandalous, interpretation: the sculpture symbolizes the isolation of the intelligentsia from the common people, who are alien to the slums of psychoanalysis.
The provocation was a success: interest in the work does not fade, and the proposed interpretations allow modern psychoanalysts to look into the secret corners of the minds of interpreters.
Translated automatically from Ukrainian. View original
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