What do Uskok, Art and Design Have in Common?

You may have noticed large letters in various bookstore window displays if you’ve recently strolled through Tkalčić Street or the Krvavi Most area (The Bloody Bridge area). If so, you’ve been looking at the ART DIZAJN (ART DESIGN) installation by Studio Rašić, which will be exhibited in the window displays until Saturday, February 12^th. In using the terms ART and DESIGN in their work, Studio Rašić question designers’ and artists’ relationship toward their environment, society, consumerism, politics, the economy, recession etc. Is a designer at the same time an artist? Where does that line lay? Where is the line between cultural and commercial creativity? Do such creative activities contribute to the economy?

The bookstore staff remarked that they’ve never before been such an interest in an exhibition which they usually set up on a weekly basis. They add that the “more courageous” passers-by such as grade school kids or pensioners enter the bookstore armed with questions such as: “What is consumerism?”, “Why has USKOK  shut you down?” (The Bureau for Combating of Corruption and Organized Crime is a Croatian government institution. It is a State Attorney office specialized in corruption and organized crime.), “Are you a design-specialized bookstore?”

The authors of the installation concept and design STUDIO RAŠIĆ: Ante Rašić, Marko Rašić, Vedrana Vrabec

Read further for excerpts from the “Street Life Art Design“ text, about the ART DESIGN installation, by art historian Željko Marciuš

“Stepping out of my own studio on Zagreb’s Upper Town Street (Krvavi most, the Marija Jurić Zagorka bookstore window displays), Studio Rašić broadens and attempts to erase the pre-defined hard-soft lines between art and design through the ludens of life, playing with and dismantling, while at the same time connecting, the terms Art and Design. Partially broken down to syllables in the bookstore’s transparent window display, they turn the chance passer-by into a visual sign fraught by meaning.“

“We can intentionally interpret Art Design as art in design, possible design in art, or a total obliteration of the line separating art and design, which it seems, was Studio Rašić’s fundamental intention. The street life, its rhythm interwoven with smells, sounds, sights, architecture, vistas, communication and movement, reflected in this window display, has been transformed with this unpretentious and completely urban exhibition, thus serving to elevate and color a seemingly perpetual everyday drab zone. Hence when you’re moving among the urban geography, watch your step and where you set your sights as all window displays aren’t created equal, even though it may seem so within this progressively unreliable, fast-paced, yet still static-dynamic empirical I-form experience and set-in-motion space, time and shape – the world’s appearance in its visual mask.”

authors of the concept and installation design

STUDIO RAŠIĆ: Ante Rašić, Marko Rašić, Vedrana Vrabec