David Cerny is the Czech sculptor best known for a series of provocative public installations that have generated official responses ranging from condemnation to international press coverage. His "Piss" sculpture features two mechanical men urinating on a map of the Czech Republic. A pink Soviet-era tank appeared painted in a Prague square in 1991. His work tends toward political provocation and a dark strain of comedy that is distinctly Central European in its sensibility.
Man Hanging Out appeared in 1996 and depicts Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand from a building on Husova Street in Prague's Old Town. The figure is well-dressed, calm in posture, apparently unconcerned by the situation. Passersby who notice him from street level occasionally call emergency services. The sculpture has been up for nearly thirty years. No rescue has been necessary.
The work has been interpreted as a comment on intellectualism, on the precariousness of thought, on Freud's own project and its relationship to the culture that produced it. Cerny has not been consistent in endorsing any single reading.
The Rock Paper Scissors angle the WRPSA art series finds here is the composure under apparent crisis. Freud's figure is in a position that most people would experience as an emergency. He is experiencing it as something to wait out, in a suit, with good posture. This is related to what competitive players call a "cold throw" — the ability to play cleanly in a match where the stakes are high enough to activate the body's stress responses, and to produce the same quality of decision-making despite the pressure.
The figure hangs from a building in Prague. He is presumably still there.