Prague: A Czech artist has re-modelled a traditional London double-decker bus into a mechanical sculpture of an athlete doing push-ups to celebrate the Olympic Games opening in the British capital on Friday.
David Cerny, whose past works have enraged European politicians and who sought to poke fun at rival artists, has installed the bus outside the Czech Olympic House in London’s Islington borough.
Cerny bought the 1957 bus from a man in the Netherlands, attached two huge arms, an electrical engine and a lot of wiring and suspension tools to make it into a piece of art named London Boosted.
GROANING VOICE
The mechanisms inside make the bus move up and down on bright red arms and raise the chassis into various angles, while recordings of a groaning voice and video projections in the windows add to the spectacle.
In 2009, Cerny revealed a huge puzzle-like object, called Entropa, in an EU building in Brussels that pictured European countries in unflattering ways. It made for a dramatic start to the Czech Republic’s EU presidency.
Bulgaria protested for being shown as a squat toilet, Germany was a Swastika-like web of highways, including moving cars, France was covered by an “On Strike” banner and Britain was missing altogether.
In the Czech Republic, he once painted a Soviet tank – which was serving as a monument of the 1945 liberation of Prague – pink.
Cerny once also put up large replicas of guns and posters in London in the 1990s, calling on people to observe a “Day of Killing” to control population growth, as part of an art fair.
In that context, the London bus seems uncontroversial.
“We will see how long the athlete can work out for,” Cerny said. “He will be the biggest sportsman there.” – Reuters
See the bus perform its magic on video