Urmas Viik's Design and Tarmo Luisk's Natural Born Designer
	Ele Praks

	There is actually not too much to say about Estonian design. The reasons for this can be found in our policy on culture, education and the economy. During the last dozen or so years they have undergone drastic changes, and the best intentions have not always managed to survive the cataclysms of the transforming society. In any case, there are only a few designers whose work is, in fact, noticed, acclaimed and also industrially produced. Tarmo Luisk might be the first name to come to mind here. He is certainly appreciated. The employer values him highly and bothers to show his appreciation when the designer receives the prestigious annual award of the Cultural Endowment - in Estonia, the designer's name is unfortunately not at all a common sales argument. Luisk is a winner, a 'Natural Born Designer', as he calls himself in the title of his latest personal exhibition. This could be meant as healthy self-irony, but the name is justified. Urmas Viik probably does not identify himself as a designer. He is an artist without any ambition to offer his audience new, pretty, clear-cut and palpable objects. Nevertheless, Viik opened his exhibition in the Design Gallery, and at the same time that Tarmo Luisk showed his NBD at the Museum of Applied Art and Design. What's more, Viik's exhibition title was Design.
	In the stressed sameness of gallery and exhibition name, this still-proud word, although overused and in danger of being misunderstood, was forced to show meanings that are usually quietly left unnoticed. Viik refers to the excess of the artefacts, the aggressiveness of abundance. Viik says that the things surrounding us actually shape us. That 'it was not a matter of the quality of things, but of how inanimate matter at some point begins to design the living being'. Viik's sources of inspiration are the boredom of globalisation and the existential tremors of everyday happiness, the designed anonymity of airports and the anxious moments of the living-room. The first is generally perceivable, the second a personal David-Lynch-like experience. Viik resists the dictate of things, and is teasing, tender and vulnerable. He tackles his topic poetically, almost religiously repenting. Viewers, however, will not learn whether Viik manages to escape unharmed from between the worldwide supermarket shelves - they are forced to face their own living-rooms, marriage beds, pets and sink drains. Does Viik wish us to regret our goldfish and our sofa cushions? Does he want us to perceive our ridiculous impersonality flying in Santiago and Beijing and Paris? The theologian Toomas Paul wrote in one of our dailies that commerce has taken over the role of religion, which used to comfort and offer joy to people, that 'banknotes lose their value when they are no longer in circulation, and the same happens to God when he is no longer self-evident, axiomatic.' Viik's design exhibition questions the nicely packaged and wholesale social space as something deserving adoration - his 'things' as apparitions are present everywhere but by no means self-evident.
	Luisk does not reveal his aching. He is an invulnerable chap, an up-and-coming type, who easily wins hearts on the sunny side of the street, and temporary hiccups - should there be any - are overcome by his optimism. Things are no problem for him. He dismantles them, plays a bit and assembles again. The ponderousness of the utility item, the anguish of its worth and usage, vanishes during the play. The sofa becomes a funny playground, the lamp a light-footed toy, the wardrobe a pile of toy bricks waiting to be piled into heaps. Standing before Luisk's work, it is difficult to believe that this could ever go out of fashion, wear out or bother anyone in any way. It is impossible to get annoyed with Luisk when he ruins a hat or hangs tufts on a clock, because he is so utterly cheerful and sincere. He could easily set the armchairs on fire without irritating anyone.
	His things are earnest, simple and amazing, like the thoughts of a child, and certainly also self-evident and always in circulation. Luisk indeed comforts. And he does not invite you to consume more or furnish your living-room with his new designworks. It's rather sort of consolation in the knowledge that the unaffordably elegant haute-couture clothes in their exclusivity may be remarkably similar to a pauper's costume seen on a wasteland, that being human is after all more diverse than a greedy walk on an opulent shopping street. In fact it would have been exciting to see Viik and Luisk in the same exhibition room. One walking towards the sun, grinning, and the other beckoning from the shadows, because the world would be empty and bare if there were no shadows - after all, shadows come from people and things. Ele Praks (1969) graduated in 1995 from the Estonian Academy of Arts as textile artist. Since that time a freelance artist and journalist, in recent years editor at magazine Kodukiri.
	| Estonian Art 1/06 (18) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2006 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |