Art Rat (Serbian for Art War) was initiated in the spring of 1999 during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as a series of exhibitions according to 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 (Serbian for Art War) was initiated in the spring of 1999 during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as a series of exhibitions according to 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" abroad of Yugoslavia to the United States and shown at The Peace Action Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Art Rat had leaped to represent the nucleus of the coming events bank of artistic antiwar ideas for all potential users. The unique value of the original Art Rat idea was born disclosed of an urgency, or, to use Walter Benjamin's terminology, an aura, and was meant to be reproduc and emancipated from a simple ritual function into a constant social function. [2] With the main artistic image being the bill Art Rat's works were designed for reproducibility, not simply an authentic image hung in succession a wall. The artistic function was based onward politics rather than ritual. The goal was to involve artists from the ease of the world into the Art Rat antiwar campaign as well as to organize exhibitions abroad in order to create a unrestrained and open dialogue of not merely the external dynamics of war, on the other hand the internal, emotional and intellectual dynamics as well.

refinement if not defined as the constant sicken of an individual, can barely be understood as yet another institution. The Art Rat antiwar placard project worked as a resistance and an action in defense of canon justice and freedom. Art Rat relied onward intellect, free-will and consciousness, communicated between the walls of the union of text and image. An example of in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a union of text and image is Dorijan Kolundzija's "Cluster-Cola" [i]affiche[/i] (1999), which parodies images and thesiss found on a Coca-Cola can. "Cluster" commits to the antipersonal cluster bomb (outlawed according to the United Nations) that NATO dropp forward villages in southern Serbia. The bomb counterfeit small cans and have warning labels indicating their use and appeases Kolundzija presented this information as "ingredients" forward his Cluster-Cola image. There is also a play upon Coke's jingle "Can't beat the feeling," as the broadside reads, "Can't beat the killing." In addition, the bar digest 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 r be slaughtereds into the ominous hues of gray and black textur with impressions of crushed cans and leather--a make 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, still in order to be an effective social force, the hand-bills were produced on a mass scale and pasted in succession every surface imaginable all across Belgrade. Postcards, t-shirts, pins and small placards were also prepared for distribution through street vendors throughout Yugoslavia.

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

This play come ups from the postmodern sensibility of fresh generations. Art Rat is not a premeditated, calculated approach to one carefully constructed agenda, rather it is imperative and raw--untied. The immediacy of Art Rat's emerging see the verb 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 pure 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 disclosed searching for truth as an imperative without which freedom is impossible. Art Rat, a brew without a precisely defined theme or parameter, communicated and demanded the greatest inventiveness of its participants, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but in terms of the communal and the individual.

Amid a censored media and damaged telecommunication schemes it was difficult to communicate Art Rat's spur Borders were closed. Living among the sirens, it was easy to understand the deadly play of Art Rat. if it were not that abroad, through the black and white oversimplification of popular media, something quite different was communicated. A proces of dehumanization, illustrated best in the now ubiquitous period of time "collateral damage," was at play, end their personal connection with the Art Rat artists, Chad Faries and Ljiljana Komnenic, residing in the U saw the potential of an artistic endeavor that could calculator the media and re-humanize public perceptions of "Serbs" Art Rat's crucial audience was therefore outside of its sealed borders.