Found Art 43

Welcome to another justaposition of  "found" art Friday.  Forty Three, what an under-appreciated  number.  So '"found" art' - what does that mean? And when is Art trying to be profound and when is art just discovered or uncovered or lightly witnessed?
 For instance, from Gary Ghirardi in Caracas,Venezuela, Ranger asks permission to include:

yes - sure - careful it looks dangerous but it attacks flies with the smell of rotting flesh and then uses the flies like bees for pollination. No killing involved but the house smells bad for three days...that is how long lasts the flower. short and sweet. 
Ranger is just dizzy over the design of the squiggly lines.  A printmaker's dream.  She wishes for more images to have smells. 

And arrives this from Richard P who remembered it all the way from the land of his root stalk in Vilnius, Lithuania

An invented tool skillfully crafted to do something functional dutiful and beautifully bow to open the fortress

Justaposition - our new accidental word grab to go alongside juxtaposition, yet more to Point of View - just where are you standing?  Con text with empathy.  And there is such a thing as the perfect rock.

The word "found" is fond, also foundation, sometimes fun, diverting, or haunting or fundamentally odd. The origin dictionary adds spokes to "found" such as fortuitous, by chance.  And found, to establish, from fundus, bottom.  Around we go.  The R of Art - the doors kicked open by this:

Dada -Marcel Duchamp's "Readymade" from 1913

Over the year plus of Found Art Friday image gatherings.  Despite being filtered through many mediums in order to reach you, and despite not being an actual old carved worn wooden spoon, the FAF images often have this going for them:

From the Japanese:   "Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.

It is a beauty of things modest and humble

it is a beauty of things unconventional

And why does it still feel worthwhile to study and collect and savor images?  For starters, let us sing the cliche anthem A picture is worth a thousand words to the tune of Twinkle Little Star.
May you have a week with twinkle room.  The Ranger will be in the snowy homeland of Colorado, but she has prepared offerings for you during her machine absence and painful re-entry into a ski boot ankle visegrip for the sake of exercise.

Image Key:  1) Google from England   2) Anony Mouse   3) Gary Ghirardi in 2010

4) A chihuahua   5)  Aunt Madge

Found art 42

Yet again, we meet for Found Art Friday here at The Department of Homeland Inspiration.  

One day, a participant sent some images and mentioned having discussed/argued with another friend about whether it was actually "art" or not.  Eureka! said the Ranger.  The gold is the wondering.  In thrall with the fluidity of existence and the technologies we employ to record/share some attentive moments:

Those three images were from Jim Lindenthal in Pacific Grove.

And from way over in the Atlantic ocean, Bridget Skjordahl

calls it "Warrior"

While the Ranger is digging the diagonal.

From a friend in the Bay Area, we have yet  another category of "patina", the deliberately human stressed etch tracings.

And then there is "making art" on purpose by using your hands and reorganizing some materials. Or are you just establishing a "point of view":

(Okee dokee, Art Ranger is ready for a Journalism assignment in the Middle East)

Even though artists are really more like funnels, or upside-down cones. 

Or are they just sieves or thought clusters or windows on the world?

And we leave you with a quote from John Berger's (1980) collection of essays About Looking: The Uses of Photography, quoting Susan Sontag's (1973) On Photography : "Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up and thicken the environment we recognize as modern.  Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood."
(Now look at us now)

Looka Book

In the process of researching what is necessary to make THE TINY MOVIE that keeps getting huger, about the economic situ, Art Ranger is reading this.  Small sips is all you can take.

Here is a book that I believe everyone should read (unless you are already perfectly clear about how to explain our economic conditions) unless you could interpret and repeat it to your mother or your kid or your flowerpot.  We all need to understand the way the economy (is rigged) because it is not about the past, but about the present and future as well.

Treat yourself to sentences like this: "Just looking at Palin up on the podium doesn't impress me.  She looks like a chief flight attendant on a Piedmont flight from Winston-Salem to Cleveland, with only the bag of almonds and the polyester kerchief missing from the picture."

And if the Tea Party baffles you with the success of their jaw-dropping over-simplication agenda, this book gives some great insight.

And furthermore.  Don't know about you, but we fell for that Allan Greenspan Yoda wizard thing during the nineties anyway. OMG, we didn't know he dated Barbara Walters!  You'll see illustrated, how he was the biggest cheerleader for white collar criminals ever.  Irrational Exuberance indeed!

And most importantly, you will be able to laugh some while you learn,  just because of the writing.

So please get on Amazon right now and buy it used and pass it on.

Found Art 41

Here it already is.
First, a triplicate from Jim Lindenthal:

http://montereywildlifephotography.blogspot.com Check out Jim's regular blog right here.  Great for birders and photography folks alike.

Sometimes Jim finds human birds, such as:  "Monday in Monterey"

and his mascot, Happy Crappy

               

You won't believe what happened next.  The chore of going to a doctor led the Ranger to see something like this:

Which led to the thought, as a babyboomer:  We've got to do better than this, people!

Which gave birth to this:

and this and even this:

And for seating:

fancy design outfit, whose name I forgot to note

One last thing:  we accidently ended up with this in our wallet:

T A R P funds perchance.

Have a reduce re-use re-new type of peace week?

Found Art Friday 40

Here we are my friends.  You found the Art and we, the Ranger, compile it on Fridays.  So how is it that some artists can find things in the world look like their own stuff?

Two images from Aunt Madge in Colorado that remind us of what she might make:

What shall we name this vehicular composting mineral exchange?  Bessie, Francis, Omar?  What this lovely lump of "human vs. nature" conjures to the Art Ranger is the irrepressible process of "patina".  How surfaces evolve over time and exposure to elements, versus the purposefully applied "art" patina, versus the accidental chemically stressed patina. The word patina in our etymological dictionary: Incrustation on old bronze. Is adapted from French "patiner", to skate. 

it's for sale

This final image, from Susan Needleman: Morning Has Broken 

takes patina to its ephemeral ode, changing over time  yes

sky can tell a hunk of metal a thing or two about color

Have a fruitiful week.

Dr. Knot: retrofits, repairs and originals

This week, husband mentioned the Tax word.  This has caused us to do a lot of other things instead, such as replace the dead wiper blade on our back windshield. Or edit video from 2005. This story is an example of how Art Ranger witnesses that there is a tremendous range of "art" and you never know where or when it may manifest. 

Early in our fifteen year lifespan in San Diego, the Ranger was ambling along on 29th street and saw a curious and sparkly sight atop a flat roof of an unassuming white stucco, building.  Many spinning objects, zig zagging the sun,  and making it hard to concentrate on driving.  One day, she stopped the car and took in the scene: Dr. James Knot, Dentistry.  Inside were hand crocheted doilies and a lamp made out of seashells and maybe an orange hooked rug.  Down the hall was the dentist, an elder gentleman with thin redgrey hair and a homemade looking magnifier epoxyed into his eyeglasses. Sitting in the window, was a fishtank that contained a set of clacking teeth bubbling underwater to entertain the goldfish and frogs and patients.

Several years later, when our offspring appeared, we had to move to a home with a washingmachine that was in the same neighborhood as the curious dentist.  The choice for their toothcare was clear and not based on anything rational except how eccentric it was going to be.  During the children's first toothcleanings and Dr. Knot introduction, I strolled down the hallway lined by shelves containing hundreds of sets of teeth, castings of many years of many mouths in a slightly yellowed hydro-cal plaster, all at eye-level and poorly lit.  Very casual.  Very mummy.

Wow I was wowed!  And it only got better as the children's teeth got worse.  One day, Dr. Knot was wearing an American Flag bandaid on his nose.  He explained his recent skin cancer removal and somehow shared the fact that as a kid, he had accumulated 52 cavities which made everyone feel great about their own teeth.   As the dental work continued, so did the Ranger's admiration of his whirligigs. Through our dialog regarding dental adhesives, casting materials, and sculpture; we became colleagues of a sort.  People who like, and probably need, to make things with our hands.

In January 2000, Art Ranger had an art installation of "Paratools" (celebrating y2k paranoia).  For this occasion, we commissioned Dr. Knot to create a set of teeth made out of corn kernals.  He took to the job, and fashioned them using cherry jello and play dough as the gums, and embedding the kernals in place according to shape.  He came to the  art opening wearing a hat with a rattlesnake hatband. We strategically placed a set of his business cards on hand saying: 

Dr. Knot, Dentist   

If you got 'em  floss 'em

Here is an interview (boiled down to 5 minutes) featuring Dr. Knot in his retirement after forty years of whirligig making and dentistry: http://vimeo.com/19504445