source : http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051230/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_austria_posters_5
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| VIENNA (Reuters) - Posters depicting Queen Elizabeth having sex with the U.S. and French presidents were removed from Vienna's streets on Friday to defuse an uproar that embarrassed Austria as it prepares to take on the EU presidency.
The images, splashed on scores of electronic rolling billboards, showed two naked female models wearing masks of President George W. Bush and the Queen, and a male model with a President Jacques Chirac mask, posed as if engaged in a sex act. A second poster, among 150 from around Europe and organised by Austrian curators with partial state funding, displayed the lower torso of a woman sprawled in knickers adorned with the European Union's circle-of-stars emblem. Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel had appealed to the artists to pull the posters after opposition leaders and the media blasted them as pornographic, sexist and a blow to Austria's reputation on the eve of its EU presidency, starting on Sunday. Tanja Ostojic, who created the knickers image, resembling a controversial 19th-century painting by Gustave Courbet entitled "Origin of the World", complained of "public censorship". Spanish artist Carlos Aires, responsible for the Queen-Chirac-Bush trio, said he "suddenly had this image of three decision-makers having an orgy while everything around them collapses". But while Aires and Ostojic said they were disappointed the public had not "engaged with the artistic message" of their works, they agreed to remove them to avoid detracting from the others involved in the "euroPART" project. The art promoter 25peaces, which commissioned the project, said the images were meant to "reflect on the different social, historical and political developments in Europe" and that the fuss over the sex posters distorted the entire undertaking. The controversy exercised newspapers around Europe. Germany's Financial Times-Deutschland headlined its story "European group sex in Austria" and Italy's Corriere della Sera said the images were "not necessarily the height of good taste". Left-wing opposition leaders accused the government of using 500,000 euros (340,000) in taxpayers' money to fund the project via a cultural agency. The government said it had no part in choosing the images and did not know their content in advance. The poster series is to be shown until the end of January. |
