ART WAR.

Art Rat (Serbian for Art War) was initiated in the spring of 1999 during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as a series of exhibitions by a group of students and professors of the Applied Arts and Design Academy of Belgrade at the gallery of the Belgrade Cultural Center and the independent Gallery 12+. [1] In June of that same year, Art Rat images were "digitally smuggled" out of Yugoslavia to the United States and shown at The Peace Action Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Art Rat had hoped to represent the nucleus of the future bank of artistic antiwar ideas for all potential users. The unique value of the original Art Rat idea was born out of an urgency, or, to use Walter Benjamin's terminology, an aura, and was meant to be reproduced and emancipated from a simple ritual function into a true social function. [2] With the main artistic image being the poster, Art Rat's works were designed for reproducibility, not simply an authentic image hung on a wall. The artistic function was based on politics rather than ritual. The goal was to involve artists from the rest of the world into the Art Rat antiwar campaign as well as to organize exhibitions abroad in order to create a free and open dialogue of not only the external dynamics of war, but the internal, emotional and intellectual dynamics as well.

Culture, if not defined as the constant revolt of an individual, can only be understood as yet another institution. The Art Rat antiwar poster project worked as a resistance and an action in defense of truth, justice and freedom. Art Rat relied on intellect, free-will and consciousness, communicated through the union of text and image. An example of such a union of text and image is Dorijan Kolundzija's "Cluster-Cola" poster (1999), which parodies images and texts found on a Coca-Cola can. "Cluster" refers to the antipersonal cluster bombs (outlawed by the United Nations) that NATO dropped on villages in southern Serbia. The bombs resemble small cans and have warning labels indicating their use and contents. Kolundzija presented this information as "ingredients" on his Cluster-Cola image. There is also a play on Coke's jingle "Can't beat the feeling," as the poster reads, "Can't beat the killing." In addition, the bar code on Kolundzija's image bore the numbers "24-3-1999," the date the bombing campaign bega n ... and the Art Rat campaign began. The Coca-Cola red bleeds into the ominous hues of gray and black textured with impressions of crushed cans and leather--a texture one might imagine seeing as a backdrop of Samuel Beckett's play Endgame. The original silk-screen was displayed at the Gallery 12+, as were the other originals, but in order to be an effective social force, the posters were produced on a mass scale and pasted on every surface imaginable all over Belgrade. Postcards, t-shirts, pins and small posters were also prepared for distribution by street vendors throughout Yugoslavia.

Art Rat is a response to violence through non-violence, based on the premise that evil cannot combat evil. Assuming that all violence is born in weakness, those who initiate violence are easily countered through social liberation and fearlessness. Art Rat is not simply pacifism, it is a fully engaged countering force. The aesthetic of Art Rat is play with the inner principle of optimism that these activities will end positively for their participants. Communicating with the elements of evil, the project assumes a humorous spirit; through the code of irony and laughter, it challenges a militant gravity and deconstructs the threat.

This play emerges from the postmodern sensibility of new generations. Art Rat is not a premeditated, calculated approach to some carefully constructed agenda, rather it is urgent and raw--untied. The immediacy of Art Rat's emergence in the time and space of what was euphemistically called the "air campaign," makes its authors "the actors" in a hastily staged artistic war against the ongoing apparatus of a true war. Daily, the sirens--perhaps more insidious than the actual bombings--instigated a back-breaking and agonizing psychological uncertainty of existence. Ridicule and artistic play was our way up and out, searching for truth as an imperative without which freedom is impossible. Art Rat, a project without a precisely defined theme or parameter, communicated and demanded the extreme inventiveness of its participants, both in terms of the communal and the individual.

Amid a censored media and damaged telecommunication systems it was difficult to communicate Art Rat's urgency. Borders were closed. Living among the sirens, it was easy to understand the deadly play of Art Rat. But abroad, through the black and white oversimplification of popular media, something quite different was communicated. A process of dehumanization, illustrated best in the now ubiquitous term "collateral damage," was at play, Through their personal connection with the Art Rat artists, Chad Faries and Ljiljana Komnenic, residing in the U.S., saw the potential of an artistic endeavor that could counter the media and re-humanize public perceptions of "Serbs." Art Rat's crucial audience was therefore outside of its sealed borders.

During a night of intensive bombing, Faries and Komnenic downloaded more than 25 images, about 500 megabytes in total, of graphic images by Art Rat. The process took about 12 hours, with repeated power outages and server problems on the Yugoslavian end. The files were printed and mounted for an exhibition at The Peace Action Center. The exhibition space not only countered the media with the Art Rat posters, but also through poetry of witness by Peter Whalen and Faries, who read works inspired by the Art Rat images and their activism in Central America and Yugoslavia. There was also a presentation by Faries in which he introduced a brief sampling of Yugoslavian literature and talked frankly about his work with artists and his activism in Serbia. Perhaps the most effective aspect of the exhibition was the direct Internet link to the artists in Yugoslavia.

In the center of the exhibition space sat a laptop with a live Internet connection to the Art Rat artists who logged in at 4 a.m. in order to answer questions from the spectators. The Internet presentation sought to establish a direct communication link with the artists in real-time in order to aid in the re-humanization process. The patient medium of the keyboard and screen text, devoid of audio, allowed a space for careful articulation. Rather than simply "chatting," spectators really thought about their questions, often rewriting them numerous times before sending them to the artists. At first, the questions addressed the images ("Why the incorporation of the swastika?") and other content issues. But as the night progressed, the questions became increasingly more intimate: "Are you tired? ... How is your family? . . . Are they bombing now?" The result was a fragmented stream of different voices totaling 15 pages of text, spanning an incredible range of sophisticated thought.

The combined exhibition space, which incorporated the spoken word, text, image and cyberspace, represented a true construction and reconstruction of a specific and intricate language of the evil called "war." Although the exhibition itself was successful, Art Rat as a poster campaign (aimed at serving a largescale social function), was met with much resistance and received little attention from the U.S. Although a massive local and national press release was announced, absolutely no one responded. The popular sentiment in America seemed to be that those against the war were for Slobodan Milosevic. Art Rat's presence in the U.S. was mainly at the level of exhibitions put on by other activists in Toronto, Dallas and San Francisco, plus a few art and literary journals. Another factor, although ultimately positive, was NATO's decision to stop bombing, which occurred a couple of weeks after Art Rat was initiated in America. As a result, political interests in Yugoslavia dwindled, as did any interest in Art Rat.

Although the poster campaign and exhibitions have ceased within Yugoslavia and internationally, the Art Rat ideology is still very much alive. The collective no longer uses the title Art Rat, but has directed the Art Rat aesthetic toward other endeavors--mainly opposition to the old regime and cautious support of the new. In the summer of 2000, for instance, the artists sponsored an Eastern European poster exhibition that included politically motivated works from Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Many of the artists served as artistic directors for the recent democratic campaigns and helped opposition candidates prepare for the December 23 elections. To be frank, the intensity of the Art Rat project--a burst of three months of massive output and organization--was exhausting, physically and emotionally, for all persons involved on both sides of the ocean. It was necessary for all parties, both military and civilian, to lay down arms and regroup. [3]

CHAD FARIES is a poet and PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. DORIJAN KOLUNDZIJA is a graduate of The Belgrade Academy of Applied Arts. He and his mentor, Bata Knezevic, created the Art War project. LJILJANA KOMNENIC holds an MA in Intercultural Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

NOTES

(1.) Art Rat center: Gallery 12+, vuka Karadzica Street, N[degrees] 12, Belgrade 11000, Yugoslavia. Tel: [phone].

(2.) Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans., Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in illuminations (Schocken Books: New York, 1968), pp. 217-242.

(3.) The other members of Art Rat are Sasa Bardic, Dusanka Komnenic and Ivana Radosaljevic.