Found art Friday 18?

This week's Found art Friday has turned into a group juxtaposition. All these images are allowed to influence eachother because they are here together, delineated and yet permeable, flat yet malleable, digital yet deliberate.
Photo Key
1) Lady Gaga's Corset
2) Bedouin Tent
3) Danger High Voltage, by Danger High Voltage
4) Random fashion designer who died recently
5) Jim Lindenthal, Brown Pelican
6) Dog at Surf contest by Peattie Paul

TOPKILL

Hubris come home to roost:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrHxqwn4t7E

Thank you Noah, for strumming in the background.
Share your plug designs with Art Ranger please.
Peace somehow.

Found Art Friday 17

Surrogate of Cynthia

Okay Blogorifics, thank you for checking in at Department of H. I. ! We were looking for a portrait of "Cynthia", the new single-celled organism, whose parent was a computer. She arrived in the news this week, but so far they seem to be keeping her away from the Paparazzi. This brought on a brief micro-organism appreciation search: Face it! - you and google are in love too! How in the world could one build sculpture as great as those forms? This is why we keep seeking out the sometimes futile seeming practice of Art.

Just when the Ranger thinks that the world is drab or used up or she's lost sleep over ten mile long and three mile wide plumes of oil in the Gulf evergushing. Then other beings in the world come through:

From Dear Aunt Madge, a favorite title:


Summer reading list? Our son believes in the "Idiocracy" that he downloaded/uploaded to his I-Touch. "Welcome to Costco, I love you" he repeats. (And we hadn't heard the L word from him in a while).

This FAF Found on a walk by a friend living in Oakland:


Ba humbugger, and yet the irony does speak, says Art Ranger.
A tad of this going on here?: "Artist" mantra is a heavy mantle, sometimes. Many artists nowadays trying hard to resist the stereotype of being sanity challenged or being so identity-enclosed. Picasso himself - would he even be that arrogant? Related to this subject, see Art Ranger's foundational essay "Why Art Thou" by scrolling down to "Pages".

Same friend collects this image, where a gallerist in Bay Area who uses shape of hole in wall as inspiration for doorway. Chances are that this business person committed an artistic act without caring if he or she were "an artist".

Go forth and multi-task my friends, and find some art along the way!

Late for motherhood/ Big Useful Birds III

How can you not be late for your M(other)s Day post when

Motherhood does equal m + other, ongoing and forever

Part tedium, part exhilaration

A humbling and bumbling occupation of unquantifiable dimension

M+otherhood = where you are you, plus slices of you and him

Woven into other living miracles such as children, who open you up

To see that you too are slices of this old that and some odd new

Tough part that you don't understand yet

To be able to be a m(other) or to have been m(other)ed is honor enough

To never have the same alone

Motherhood is m + other because

it is, we are

one and not one

once umbillical

On Mothers Day proper, we were being visited by my mother, Phoebe, who sees that we have furniture polish on nearly every surface and a lot of paper themed napkins for all occasions. So my children can have Christmas angels in their lunch in March.

My mother Phoebe is afterall named after a kind of bird, which was also the name of her grandmother, who knew how to laugh yet not how to stop. Her father, the legendary Erle, died too young and was the handsomest man in all the land, according to my grandmother, Lanelle. From Erle, we were passed down a watercolor painting of two men loading a green canoe at the edge of a lake. Erle was a chicken and hog feed salesmen who traveled a lot and brought home little changelings and runts from the farms he would visit. The chickens would follow Phoebe around the yard and learned to untie her shoelaces and lay an egg directly into her hand. One year arrived a white Turkey she named Pinky (but that’s another story). Anyhow, the aforementioned mother, now 78 and 10/12ths, is not only full of energy of a steady, fun and lively sort, but she is FULL of sayings such as this:

clean as a pin

warm as toast

dark as pitch

From which we spun

Edition 3 of BIG USEFUL BIRDS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXLzPvpXDw0

Found Art Friday 16

Blogoring along, first I want to share some favorite quotes from this week's information universe (remember when they called it a highway).
1. Martha Stewart being interviewed by Deborah Solomon in the Sunday NY Times Magazine: Do you blame the S.E.C. for your ordeal? ... " I cannot spend my time holding grudges. I could be crazy right now, O.K.? But I am not".

On to the images of the Found Art Friday Variety. The cliche "a picture is worth a thousand words" speaks to Art Ranger. It saves a lot of keyboard work. Then there is that whole other happening when words are put next to images or inside of images:

Little Gamin Gott was checking her mail, longing for a letter

I will if you will

A man leaves his computer on the roof of his car and drives off. His laptop ends up on the Golden Gate bridge for a day of commuting. And lastly, in conjunction with Wednesday's post with correspondent, Lettuce Pray:
2. directly from BP 's website concerning their "response to the Gulf": "they are progressing options to stop the flow of oil through interventions via the blow out preventer (BOP)" The Ranger is struck by the irony in the name of this imaginary tool they've not created. "preventer"? That ship sailed as they say. ((If they even slightly believed themselves, they'd call it a Blow Out Preventer, or perhaps a Stopper)).
IMAGES KEY
1) Art Ranger in San Diego, from the "Delivery Vehicle" series
2) Pet Silly
3) , 4) Jim Lindenthal
5) Tom Mescall (data recovered)

Lettuce Pray Speaketh

Local Locavore Lettuce Pray has this to say:

We have an important and slightly uplifting environmental message for you!

Recently, we got our hair severed at Oasis Salon in Salinas. They have been collecting clients' hair for months for an inventive enterprise that uses discarded hair from all over the world to create mats that help sop up oil spills. (You know how hair soaks up anything we give it).
http://www.matteroftrust.org/programs/hairmatsinfo.html
This news temporarily helped us to stop wringing our hands or prematurely pick our own leaves while we mourned the Gulf of wild losses underway. ((Finefolks, can you fathom this BPrig thing? !!!!!!!!! And they aren't even pretending they know what to do or ever will know what to do about it. Maybe some little dinner napkins and bubblegum and shoeleather or flipflops mixed with licorice will plug the gusher. As recently as yesterday, we heard on the radio something about trying to plug the hole with random sounding items and some GOLF BALLS! OMG)) PLUG BABY PLUG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Please baby - Get me a holy in one - or perhaps the Department of Homeland ______ will come offer some duct tape assistance. More (toothbreaking) food for thought. While reading in MarketWatch about the hair mats, a reader comments: Hay works much better. It's easier to come by. It's easier to spread. And it's easier to gather up once it has absorbed the oil. The fishing boats that are stuck in port can use their nets to gather all the oil soaked hay. That puts them to work. Bp can pay them for their time and for new nets. Companies that make fishing nets will see a surge in demand to replace oil damaged nets..."
But Lettuce Pray has to think about the amount of tractor fuel involved in "making hay" and probably even how the helpful hair mats are one tiny whisker in a blobulous overstepping of human earthpresence. We, as a vegetable, do enjoy our oil and vinegar dresses, but this spill seems/seams a disaster of first world order which could remind us of distasteful disasters (we usually have done on "third world" countries).
Oh me oh my ... Let's all Rise Up and sigh all at the same time ..... and perhaps shave our heads in honor of an endangered Kemps Ridley sea turtle.
Peace Somehow!

Found art fifteen

Boy Gets Stuck in E

Well, Well come back to the Department of Homeland Inspiration's FAF fifteen (just saying that causes me to spit at my scrreeen).

I'd rather get splashed by Robin Brailsford's doglegs:

From Diane Gage (who brings us poem of the week)
Security boxes for rock roses:
(sheesh i hope they don't detonate some day)
and uh rock:
And from good heavens, RubberNeck Anonymous, a dismember of our community:
Right now, we are going to see some Found Art relayed via words, since sometimes you are driving an automobile with your own hands and there is no camera available at the moment of revelation. Why are some images so irrevocably rememberable? Yet most are part of a steady tedium of flow, layered over and never to be called forth again.

1) She is driving home from somewhere and going up the familiar regular hill with an old landfill on one side and a municipal golfcourse on the other and it's a crisp clear morning and she sees that the roadside beautification and safety crew wearing orange vests has painted a new outrageously toothpaste sparkle white line designating the shoulder of the road. As she motors up the hill, her eyes note that the new thick white line travels over a lump which at close range, she sees to be really a dead possum, squarely pasted over with a clean white line atop its rigor mortis belly and onward with the road edge. An on purpose accident?

2) Yesterday, she goes to the bagel store drive-up window and as she's calling out her baker's dozen, talking to the sign that talks. She accidently looks up at the signage on the side of the building and sees a birds nest nestled right there in the big red lightbox block letter a on the building, a bird's nest messily yet gently layed right there in the lower loop of the a, the egg-shaped oval of the a, protected by it's overhang. Not in the big B lower loop, not in the little top hut of the e, or the open-armswing below, not even the upper oval of the g and certainly not on the dangerous shelf of the L, Just nested in the a, what a lovely place to wait. Then she drives forth to pick up the order, and while catching the $2.53 change in palm, she looks up to the Bagel sign on the other facet of the building and sees yet another nest nestled in the oval of the a. And that is enough to trigger the memory of our honeymoon (very nearly twenty years ago) in Kansas (that's another story), when there was featured prominently in the o of the Bowling Alley, a very large strawbuilt birdsnest gathered there to brighten the 100 degrees in the evening heat that basted us while we walked back to our motel with a purple crushed velvet bedspread, in the middle of a wheatfield with a broken piano.

PEACE be with you
and Art on the Range

Art Ranger from the hip in New York

A few highlights

Art Ranger was a guest performer/participant in a celebration of the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins: http://ag3.griffith.edu.au/node/5 which brought her to The Big Apple last week. The conference was really interesting and full of "boundary swaying". She's still digesting it.

‘On the Airplane, I do a chance operation and open to a page from Madeline Gins' book, What The President Will say or DO that says HOW TO HAVE AND NOT TO HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN and the man from the financial sector with overly whitened teeth who sits next to me cussing like a baby about his secretary’s seat selection for his precious sleep before his presentation says, 'what‘re you reading?' I say “Increase vicinity. Weave in drowsiness. Face washcloth. Infest flatness. Dry all dust. Turn leather. Use non-extension ladder. Tape honey-dew melon to head. Sphere away. Open spaces.”. And BAff, the man's head hits the traytable and he begins to sleep like a baby perhaps sparing his secretary an abusive conversation.’ (quote within a quote from Melissa’s “talk/performance” given April 30^th at Barnard College)

After a badly folded neck-challenged night in planeair, she is stumbling around Grand Central Station with too much luggage. How can a lemonpoppyseed muffin taste so good in a train station underground? Where newspaper front pages are framed on the wall daily so you can look up at it for a few minutes while time passes. Finally, the so annoying luggage gets left at The Biltmore Hotel for $3.50 a day along with the people’s from the Hypertension Society of America Conference. She walks to The Museum of Modern Art, because it’s an iconic thing to do to check up on your industry. Outside at 10:38 a.m. on a Thursday, people are waiting in line to go see art and even talk about art while they are in the line. The Art Ranger is feeling the LOVE and also some culture shock, that such a thing could actually be happening before her very ears, realizing that all this amazing interest in the field could change her job description. And she wondered whether the African sculptures on the portable table out on the corner may turn out to be her favorite visuals of the day. One of the things inside MOMA currently is Marina Abramovic, a performance artist, New York based, but from the former Yugoslavia. Learn about her hugely brave and provocative body of work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovic . She sat at a small table in a large concrete rectangle surrounded by cameras and their light deflectors. She was wearing an ultra-thick ultra-red ultra-long dress, sitting motionless, staring at a member of the public that would like to engage in this with her. Doing something like seventy hours a week of said staring/being/sitting there for three months. The performance is entitled “The Artist is Present”. Hmm, is she really present in there? Or just there and not there at the same time? Fascinating the most are her facial features plus why and how to do this? – one reason she says is because people say – you can’t do this – and this becomes her open doorway to do it anyway. Her work is part of a necessary and mesmerizing tradition of trance, rigorous voyages of the mind for art, so there. What is present ness anyway?

Art Ranger’s favorite moments at MOMA were as follows: a soft song started emerging on the fourth floor weaving about the galleries in the modernisms and abstractions area, a singing with no particular words just present and peaceful. Finally to see that the sound was coming from a guard, a youngish young man with a close-cropped beard and grace in his navy blue sport jacket with badge and shiny buttons. In his hand a crumpled napkin seemed to help unfurl and keep reigned in the subtle songfulness. The art on the walls was merging and sometimes ill-competing with the exhaustive quantity of people in the space pacing past the collectible objects, but the song was truly transporting more than any one piece of art on that floor.

Lee Bontecou’s room was really great to see. A lot of other things too.

Cut to Hotel Jane: The Ranger had hurriedly booked a cheap hotel with some internet outfit, then looked at a google map at the wrong scale and thought for a second that her hotel was going to be a motel along the Longisland expressway on a dusty road with bad lighting and chewing gum wrappers. But actually, this inn was inches from the West End hwy and full of actual breeze and air. Their notepad says: “one night, or a whole lifetime” at Hotel Jane and how there is no such thing as a free bottle, and yet all water wants to be free. It felt like being on a ship and in fact once was a seamens hotel, even briefly housing Titanic survivors. Where Twentysomethings in too big maroon bellhop costumes with spiffy hats are there to serve you, a real elevator boy with a greasy black metal squeaking door and a lumpy taxidermy monkey dangles over the corner of the sturdy brass keys at the front desk. Smiling servers in striped shirts serve Café Americano with a square of chocolate and a croissant that tastes like it was really made this morning.

Walk one half a block and there is amazing found art all over the streets. At all hours of the day, a very dizzying and dense radium of possibility. Amazing looking restaurants. Fancy sunglasses people. Flipflops people, every kind of body. Everything moving moving moving.

So after the talks at the Guggenheim Museum theater, we went to the free donation evening in the museum proper. A photography theme. We strolled around talking with recently met colleagues from fields of art, poetry, philosophy. We saw one of Warhol’s films, where he just left the camera on looking out his window for days on end. It was really “boring” but we couldn’t stop looking at it. Somewhere along the slightly slanted circular, corkscrew ramplike stroll trough the Guggenheim, was an offer of one philosopher to another, a piece of dental floss, so several of the people that I was with began to floss their teeth as they strolled through the museum. Ranger thought this was amazing and amusing and it reminded her of her father Bob, who might do something like that.

Somewhere in the Malevich room, one of the philosophers, whom I already admired for her talk about how things are getting “highjacked by big pharma”, mentioned that her grandfather had practiced some dentistry on Picasso and that he had proudly kept a Picasso drawing in his office from the trade.

And the philosopher said something funny about how Cubism could be related to the experience of receiving dentistry, drilling and sawing up things inside the head. And so it goes … (all this art gazing and flossing evidently happened while elsewhere in NY that guy was busy parking his naughty toy that didn’t work).

Art Ranger brought her new camera, "Vixie" along. She put together this mashup of The subway platform and the Arakawa and Gins "Bioscleave House":

Back to the laundry of life now.