I saw the Museum of Applied Arts so often that I almost didn't even notice it. Regardless of whether he would be in my sight while I was sitting in the garden of the Proleća tavern or while I was looking for a break on the bench behind the monument to Vojvoda Vuk, or if my peripheral vision would brush him while I was slipping down Carice Milica towards Zelenjak, I would always think that once I have to get into that building. I even once watched the workers repairing its roof through the window of the Palas hotel.
Almost a hundred years ago, the famous Belgrade lawyer and prominent member of the Jewish community, Jakob Čelebonović, built a palace there. A part of the city was called Varoš-kapija, after one of the four city gates that was nearby for centuries. The very building on the corner of Čubrina and Vuk Karadžić in the style of academicism still today reflects the ambition of wealthy families at that time to be part of the European elite. Architect Stevan Belić completed the project according to all the laws of construction art, but the face of the building, its permanent artistic signature in time, the facade, was designed by Nikola Krasnov, a Russian who is considered the most significant representative of academic historicism in Serbian architecture.
Since 1950, the building has housed the Museum of Applied Arts. One sunny day 74 years later, I came across there and instead of going about my business, like many times before, I entered Čelebonović's building.
Two and a half millennia
I walk into rooms that preserve evidence of the human tendency to give the objects they use an attractive shape and an aesthetic style - design. In the museum, the time span of the creation of such objects is fascinating - 2400 years. And there are 37000 of those items.
I certainly won't be able to see every one of those items. I decided on one of the galleries, the one with the unusual name "Inkiostri". It's actually a last name. Dragutin Inkiostri Medenjak was born Carlo Inciostri in Split in 1866. This man of Italian origin left an indelible mark on Yugoslav and Serbian applied art. He came to Serbia for the first time in 1905, and settled permanently in Belgrade in 1923. He changed his name to Dragutin, and added his mother's surname, Medenjak, to Inkiostri.
He traveled to South Slavic countries and collected folk ornaments and handicrafts. Based on this, he wanted to found a new decorative Serbian art. He was engaged in painting, photography, graphic design and furniture design, painted interiors, taught in Belgrade schools, wrote treatises on art, but the Museum remembered him as a pioneer of Serbian design.
A walk through the halls of the Museum of Applied Art somehow gives me a break from today, although the roots of the visual design of our world are right there, classified and exposed. I'm trying to figure out why time moves slower here than it does outside. It occurs to me that today we made a design out of everything. That we too have become part of the designed matrix. And this museum suggests to us that it used to not be like that.
The age of chastity
Here is also an ancient Greek coin from the deepest well of the past. Jewelry. I remember the Cretan vases and jewelry from Knossos. Cretan-Mycenaean culture, on whose shoulders we all stand, already had a highly developed need to enrich objects of daily use with an aesthetic process that is not in the very essence of these objects. The jug would hold water even without the pattern. But the pattern turns it into an object of admiration. I am free to claim that the same wine poured from an ugly glass into a beautiful glass changes the taste.
Designo in Latin means, among other things, to draw, to sketch. The Latin word traveled through European languages and millennia, to begin its global career in English in the 17th century - design, or, according to Vuk, design. It preserved something of the original meaning substrate, but the meaning has shifted. Design meant a sketch but also a design.
Objects of daily use, from wall clocks, tapestries, mirrors to cars, got their appearance based on design solutions. The designer has become a man who shapes everything human that surrounds us.
From the spoon we take out of the drawer, to the t-shirt we put on, to the cereal box, the milk carton, the fridge, to the TV or smartphone. It could go on and on until tomorrow. We are surrounded by a hyper-designed world.
But the matter does not end there. Digital reality is unimaginable without design thinking. And our body is increasingly becoming a surface and a mass that needs to be shaped according to useful ideals. Tattoos have long since left the dubious criminal milieu and become mainstream - one of the ways to design the body. Another, no less obvious, is plastic surgery. And the third intervention in our character, the virtual one, designs our digital image, which may or may not resemble us from analog reality.
In fact, digital reality is the realm of total design. Compared to it, objects from the bygone era exude not only beauty, but also chastity. I guess because they served people, while today people are largely slaves to the desired image of themselves and their surroundings.
Loading nostalgia
Our view of the exhibited objects is inevitably colored by a trace of nostalgia. In one corner of the museum, I found a canabae made somewhere in Central European workshops - that is, between Pest, Vienna, Prague or Novi Sad, at the end of the 19th century. He tempts me to sit down. The urge only speaks to the timeless appeal of the design. Masters of that time used cham wood, walnut, plush and brass. Kanabe is turned and upholstered.
If I close my eyes, I can see on it the ancient lives of classy men who bore the ladies with their hunting stories. Maybe kanabe remembers first kisses too. Recitation. Hand kisses.
A little further on, a plate hangs on the wall. Every beautiful plate catches the eye, but this one is still something special.
The museum explanation says that it was made in the "majolica" technique, which was named after the Spanish island of Majorca. In the 15th century, they mastered the art of making semi-ceramic painted objects glazed with pewter white glaze. The Italians first imported these items, and then started production themselves.
This example comes from Venice, it was made around 1700. Who ate from this bowl? On what occasion would such plates be brought out of their slumber in sumptuous sideboards, as the waiter brings them to the decorated table? I will never know that. But my unspoken question summons the soul of the host, whose face hovered over this plate. The museum chambers seemed to smell like a Venetian soup made from brown Roman beans called borloti or chestnut broth.
Robinson under the Ottoman vault
As a book lover, I am of course also interested in the design of old books. I stop next to a glass display case with a book printed in Buda in 1799. The illustrations were copper engravings by a certain JF Binder. And the book was called: The life and ecclesiastical connection of the famous Englishman Robinson Crusoe.
One of my favorite books as a child - and nowhere is the name of the author, Daniel Defoe. He published his first novel eighty years before this Buda edition when he was almost sixty years old.
I can't take my eyes off the letters and words. This is what our language would look like if there were no Wolf. A little dislocated, closer to Russian.
I continue my walk through the empty museum chambers at random. It's hot outside. Through the window I glimpse the bronze head of Duke Vuk. On a makeshift stage in the shade, sweaty actors imitate animals, and children sit in front of them and reward them with laughter. Mothers take selfies with fake smiles.
What I see will soon become part of a digitally designed world.
I'm going back to the museum exhibits. The pine ceiling caught my eye. It is displayed on the wall as a painting.
It was carved in the 19th century in Prizren, then still under Ottoman rule. Eastern decorativeness is inseparable from Western, a strict division exists only in our heads. The Mediterranean and the Balkans have always been a place where the life and cultural juices of East and West flowed into each other, making the world a more multi-colored, exciting place.
My life
I come across exhibits from the second half of the last century, from my parents' time. The picture, or should I correctly call it a fashion sketch, tells me that the fashion conceit of the present moment is a simple capitalist trick. Old fashioned design can still be beautiful today. This is what this dress, designed in 1958 by Zora Živadinović Davidović, says. And the country was designed differently. It was called FNRJ for short.
A little further on, in a series of posters, one that says it was made in 1969 catches my attention. I was six years old then. The XNUMX-year-olds thought they had won, but events would show that they actually suffered a defeat.
Western subcultural currents are affecting the youth. The Broadway musical Hair was shown in 1969 in Belgrade, directed by Mira Trailović. It will become much closer to my generation with Miloš Forman's film from 1979. According to the newspapers, Tito also saw the Belgrade production of Hair. Despite the long-haired actors, the pacifist message directed against the war in Vietnam fit into the official ideological matrix.
On the poster is written: "The first time in Yugoslavia". The poster is the work of Vladislav Lilicki. The text was translated by Jovan Ćirilov, and literary polished by Bora Ćosić.
I think that the colorfulness of the posters reflects the longing of cultural workers for Western diversity at the time, rather than the proverbial grayness of that time.
Drunk designers
As early as 1837, the Government School of Design was founded in London. In 13 years, the term to which we attribute the characteristic of the ultimate contemporary will complete two centuries of academic career. His victorious campaign was unstoppable. Today, designers are actually capitalist wizards who shake magic potions to hypnotize consumers.
A software designer plays with algorithms. The creator of corporate design creates a recognizable pattern for an entire company. There are terms that I can only guess the meaning of - social, ecological, media, political design.
How far it is from the artistic craft of Crete. From industrial, applied or decorative art, so from terms that later fell under the term design.
We have long been covered by the concept called Design Thinking. Someone is thinking day and night about what could be turned into a need for us and how to make us like it.
Classic design makes an object practical, aesthetically attractive and symbolically valuable. As I leave the museum, going out into the hot Belgrade evening, I think about whether the symbolic benefits of design are more important to people than the practical and aesthetic ones. Branded shoe, expensive car. It's a language. At the same time, both the shoe and the car can be boring, even ugly. And uncomfortable. But they make the face and body of the owner attractive in the eyes of the slaves of the symbolic language of design. Status is economic power expressed by design. And design in that case is the art of dazzling.
I read that urban planning is a special kind of design. It is construction aesthetic surgery applied to the face of the city. As I descend towards the Green Wreath, behind which Belgrade emerges like Mordor on the water, I have to assume that the local surgeon is responsible for the scene I see, persevering and drinking a lot, refusing to admit that his hands are shaking.
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