November 08, 2009
UTNE READER

"Found Art" and Finding Yourself

That scrap of paper on the sidewalk has something to tell you

July/August 2002 Issue
By Jon Spayde, Utne Reader 
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at the end of the day, or taking a lunchtime stroll, or walking around the block, when something catches your eye—something lying on the sidewalk or atop the grass or in the gutter: a scrap of paper, a piece of cloth, some plastic or rubber gizmo, obviously abandoned, discarded, orphaned. For some reason, it’s calling your name. A little furtively, you kneel down and examine it. It’s grimy and worn, and you think twice about touching it.But you pick it up anyway, and right away it begins to work its magic. It’s a torn love note (obviously thrown away by its recipient). It’s a doll’s arm, wrenched from its plastic torso by some angry child. It’s the battered memorial of a special occasion: a concert ticket stub or a crumpled graduation ceremony program. If you’re really lucky, it’s something powerful enough to startle you: a passionate, misspelled rant about love, a lost-pet flyer with a photocopied image so crude that it makes poor Rex or Fluffy look rabid; a matchbook from a sinister-sounding bar in another state; some beautiful, indefinable something covered with foreign writing.Slipping this find into pocket or purse, you transform it into a treasure, and you transform yourself, too, into a saver of lost things, redeemer of trash, collector of "found art." You wonder if anybody else gets these weird urges to kneel down and pick up forgotten fragments of other people’s lives.WONDER NO MORE.You’re not alone. Finders and keepers are everywhere, seeking out the mystery and beauty of "found objects." As Jenn Shreve points out in a recent issue of Wired magazine, collecting found objects is a bona fide trend "that views society’s detritus as a means of creative expression." Web sites devoted to found objects are proliferating, a hot new zine called Found is wholly given over to picked-up stuff, and a sophisticated publisher—Princeton Architectural Press—has brought out two books based on collections of found objects, with a third in the works.What’s remarkable about found-object art is the range of meanings that it can inspire. From one point of view, filling Web sites and books and your living room shelves with stuff you’ve scavenged is the ultimate act of cool postmodernism: the appropriation and "artifying" of real objects. It’s an ultrahip updating of Marcel Duchamp’s display of an upside-down urinal, signed with a pseudonym and titled Fountain, in 1917. Reframing a fragment of commercial packaging into art recalls Andy Warhol’s earlier echo of the Duchamp aesthetic, pop art, in which Brillo boxes became sculpture. And the elevation of random detritus into art is in the spirit of the "pathetic" art of Mike Kelley, who displays pop-cultural junk as a satirical self-portrait of the artist-as-brain-dead-slacker. And it calls to mind the saucy self-mythologizing of British artist Tracy Emin, who puts her doodles and everyday mail into gallery installations.
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