Friday, September 24, 2010

Found Art Friday 23

from Chris Marker's film La Jette, (can't find the french thing to go on the e
Dears of the Blogoether,

It's an odd numbered late Friday Found Art and appeared out of the shimmer the offerings:
Two from Bonnie Hotz near Mendocino
we have no idea where this came from



A healthy outlook despite the circumstances from Buster Keaton


Okay, Art Ranger is hooked on electron microscope photos
GUESS WHAT THEY ARE

(your prize could be some wild honey, honey!)

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Wellness Wednesday


Some things Art Ranger likes about her life with boys:

well, they want to see what's inside your bandaid

Got her stitches out - they were blue

And they know when something is an "epic fail".


Random adolescent boys might make a poster like this hanging by used tape on the breezy pillar outside the music store:


Found art that couldn't wait 'til Friday

Boys pick out the best dog treats:



And they like to jump off stuff:




They love to get air:



 And they know how to run a bicycle:


and they'll want to get her back in the saddle


(Which will take some more nursing of her hip bursa)



Most of all, what the Ranger likes about her life with boys are moments like these





Friday, September 17, 2010

Found Art Friday 22

"Abso-cluckin-lutely on the photo!  Love that....and, isn't it technically a rooster?!"
From Richard Piscuskas from "You never know what you gonna see in L.A."
Well That's just right up our alley - except it seems to be out front, even

And this doesn't happen very often, but we have Andrea Villa in San Diego who saved up a series of FAF that just must be seen in one sitting or one fell swoop, as a super seeing of signage: 
 

OKAY  -  Watchout - not for the weak of gut now - the last picture is submitted by my fine spouse who has been doing more home chores to cover for Art Ranger's artistic contusion caused by Sunday's bicycle-collision-with-dog-event.
"OH MY WORD!" said today's white lab coat named Dr. Son
  
 Thank the great spirit we've been eating our broccoli because it looks like the ole bones held up.
Please savor the simple treat of walking while noticing.

Monday, September 13, 2010

My Dada Base

Monday's Manifesto:

Below are excerpts from our favorite art history "movement", Dadaism, which sprung forth with the aid of the Dada Manifesto, written and performed live by Hugo Ball in 1916.  In case this is not your area of general knowledge, the Dada movement was carried forward by many other artists, which opened the door to the Surrealist Manifesto, written by Andre Breton, and paved the way for the Fluxus movement, the Situationists, the "Happening", etc.  (Now we have the Lady Gaga).
Hugo Ball, 1916
from "Gas Heart" a play by Tristan Tzara
Hugo Ball brought his his rant to life, in a between-two-world-wars moment. A moment in which "The total number of casualties in World War I, both military and civilian, were about 37 million: 16 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 6.8 million civilians."from Wiki(ofcourse)pedia OMG! The artists were - (to put it in middleschool boy terms) "pissed off" about it and they wanted to crunch everything up and start truly anew. There is something fertile and poignant (even futile) about their uprising-like point of view in relation to today's idiotic deja-vu global-slugfest.

Max Ernst
Hugo speaks out:  "It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words."
Nam Jun Paik, played by Charlotte Moorman

To further douse us in this exalted history, here is Marie Osmond doing Hugo Ball's poetry!  
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/ball_hugo/Ball-Hugo_Karawane.mp3

A few years later, the Dada movement evolved through the works of other artists, including Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp etc: http://www.ralphmag.org/AR/dada.html

La Tonsure, Duchamp
"I don't believe in art.  I believe in artists"  Marcel Duchamp

Why does the Ranger love Dada?
Joseph Cornell box, sometimes lumped in with Dada
Because she can!  And because the more you look into things, the more absurd they are, especially today, and especially then and especially right now!  We feel fresh, able inspiration from this kind of kick in the pants art.  Beauty will come by accident, rarely on purpose.  Just be ready to embrace it.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Found Art Friday 21

Well, welcome to The Department of Homeland Inspiration.  Today's fresh produce:



kosmic Sisters, Separated at Birth, discovered by Gary Ghirardi while residing in Venezuela
which led to Food Display in Japan
Found by Esquire Anonymous
 Yes, it makes Ranger feel even more fulfilled about her electronic activities to borrow from a blog dedicated to abandoned shoes and other random items displaced in space.
Add caption, it says       
And Betty Radish shares her pet marine phytoplankton, diatom chains
You can begin to wring your hands about how there is more plastic than plankton now but at least we have these lovely images for our civilization scrapbook which make Ranger believe that all jewelry should be canceled for the love of plankton.

 Have a grand week and we mustn't be weak about it.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

The honey house

Dear Oblogopersons,
used Found Art from Madge
Art Ranger sifted herself too thin to make post last week, or was she just percolating?  Thank heaven one person even noticed. ( It's really easy to skip out on non-paying professions such as blogging or crochet or fishing).  Did you know that there is a computer app that purposely disables your internet access for hours at a time? It's called "Freedom" and many a home-based worker subscribes.  What the Ranger found instead, was honey harvesting.  For many many hours, her hands were incredibly sticky, as was every door knob and even her kneecaps.  The harvest marathon was as effective as being in a holy wilderness way past digital rome for preventing all computer and telephone usage.

bees managing honey
For what seemed like days, we extracted the viscous treasure by centrifugal force, cranking a machine by hand that spun the honey right out of its comb and slapped it against the sides of a bin while a few curious bees buzzed around.  Then came gravity and layers of filtration to separate honey from wax residue, relying on just the right warmth for the honey to flow.

The following collection of thoughts is Art Ranger's emerging essay/rant on bees inventing art:
mosaic of pollens in the light
uncapped honey ready for the extractor
Find the Queen?
Between the hive organization structure to the one mating flight that provides the queen with up to 3000 eggs a day for three years, to the hexagonal wonderment of "drawing out the comb", to the outrageous glory of the honey taste and texture, to the thousands of uses for the beeswax, to millenia of historical developments and small innovations that have been affected by either the honey or the wax. And of course, the essential work of pollination provided by bees which bless our food supply.  And how could we forget, the waggle dance. Through beekeeping, we are engaging with an extraordinary phenomenon in nature that gets all spiritual and miraculous. We must meet our maker.  It's tiny and fuzzy.  I'm sorry gods - are you listening?  Nothing holds a candle to the bees, not even the warm inside of a dog's ear.

HONEY
oh honey
right away, love comes up
the real true kind
kind of love
Not just anyone can call you honey and yet everyone needs at least a few people sometimes to call you honey or to be your honey
keep it raw
Honey can be put on wounds
or embalm some mummies
honey
is a color that we
may not deny
honey drips
honey flows
human ecstatic joy
of consecrated sweetness
Honey slowly
adores gravity
so we can see
liquid gold
what flowed through Egyptian god veins
and lovely milky skin
honey in a voice
a symbolic or symbiotic? set of insects, domesticated in your flavor
re-organized to your anti-microbial advantage
Honey nourishes hopefully with exceptional variety
Visitations to thousands of flowers
distilled to your spoon
or soaked into where your bread breathes

Okay okay we'll get to the intertwining of humans, bees and art (cradle of civ) stuff for another installment.
For example, a Paleolithic period cave painting from 33,000 B.C. already depicts a honey hunter.
Early images of bees in Egyptian art where honey serves as a kind of currency.
First examples of lost (bees)wax casting from about 3500 B.C., small three-dimensional animal forms unearthed in Israel, and Palestine - yes I said those two interlocking places in one sentence puzzle.
bird formed out of beeswax during a meeting because it was irresistible for the humans to warm and form
Lost wax casting coincides with the beginnings of the Bronze Age, which greatly amplified human tool-building capacity as well as kickstarting human artistic expression in the form of sculpture.

On and on she could go about the bees making a lot of something from bits of almost nothing.
Until you get STUNG !
Which means it's again time for humility.