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.

Why Art Thou?

Hello from the Department of Homeland Inspiration. This week's postings will be Monday and Friday due to a Wednesday Art Ranger roadtrip. We already have one or two humdingers for this Found Art Friday. Feel free yourselves to collide with something marvelous and send it in. Today's essay has been simmering for a few years and is as close to a "manifesto" as Art Ranger has gotten. An earlier version is archived at www.thisibelieve.org.


I believe that Art is a kind of sustenance, not a luxury or a decoration. I believe in art’s nimble purpose in life and this is how:

I believe that art sends oxygen to the brain the way running up a hill or laughter can.

This might help energize the possibilities, provide insights. Connect the dots. Stir the soul.

Why is this a good and necessary thing for people and cultures of the world?

Why teach art? Why preach it? Why beseech that it be part of our education, our civic and private lives? Art can be as humble as a collection of moments noticed – on purpose - moments possibly made richer by a visual encounter, a certain snag of wonderment and attentiveness. Art is a practice like making bread. A discipline that requires unpacking the meaning of things. Letting the dough sit and rise. Exposing, stretching, and rearranging the necessary bits of soul. Artists must do this stirring job because nobody else will.

The fact that art usually has an afterlife and becomes some object or surface that stands still long enough to study, has made it extremely valuable as a body of core knowledge and skill. To look at the outputs of various moments and peoples in the history of civilization, and to keep on looking and looking at it, can make me dizzy with amazement and admiration. If the time is taken, it is to decompress layers of historical consciousness and overlapping life stories. Whether a Leonardo, or a YouTube entry, art still holds valuable deposits of the time period. Art is only a "masterpiece" by accumulation of appreciation. This may not occur exactly in an Art establishment because it is not just finished objects or framed things. Art is process. The right amount of spice in the soup.

To appreciate Art, is to consider Context, the back stories. Artists can be live sponges, filter feeders that digest context into a discernable object. Art provides, like no other discipline quite can, access to another person’s Point of View - the place where they are coming from, the shoes they fell into. And the receiver must stretch to think outside of self or machine.

(The Gleaners, Jean Millet)

I believe that training in art can be applied to a great variety of activities just by teaching us to look longer and wider and deeper and to acknowledge several ways of looking. This could help you design a bridge or invent a new shoe sole, or enable you to fix the doorknob without going to the hardware store. You may solve a problem by understanding its opposite, by acknowledging positive and negative space.

Art could help you hold the line some day or to see what another person means. They say that people who lead have vision.

To reflect on something slows it down slightly. To acknowledge fully the reflection of light off an apple is to be able to draw it. To draw is to see. And to be able to draw from.

Our human natures crave a combination of routine and unique moments. The desire to see something new makes brain synapses. When striving to create art, people become even more elastic and fantastic, because art might contain a micro-inspiration that can translate into action.

The term cutting edge – is actually sharp, effective. Telling.

I believe that Art is a potent messenger of emotional material often where words fail: the world could use more of that right now and always.

Yet why oh why is it probable and possible for so many humans to do perfectly well without art? And why is it that in America, we love Art after it has already made some place a nicer place, but we don’t often nurture it or make a place for it in our civic life? Well, it can be very inconvenient to be creative in our culture - so mass-produced and media-induced, all cellular and digital-like in caffeinated cubicles are we. But creativity is the last frontier of the brain folks. CREATIVITY. Everything else really is being done by machines, right under your feet!

Art is vital for random human pedestrians and culture seekers alike. It's a form of good nutrition and circulatory system for a community. It helps people to air and freshen their brains and mitigate the tedium of daily living, the long haul. Go on a walk for lunch. Art helps humans acknowledge their environs and emotional truths, thereby encouraging their stewardship.

Why do I continue to bother to make art? And why do I see it as performing a service. Having a mission. Art is the seat of my brain. The place where my eggs hatch. Simply what my being is best suited for. For others, it is a learned love. I see my job as a collector and connector of information, a transmitter from and to the surround. I am an employee of the spirit of focused wonderment.

Skills needed for our species to thrive and survive and perspire over ideas.

After many years in the field, what is at the heart of my art, what really gets the ball rolling, is to be moved by what’s already there - by seeing some odd thing in the world and registering it deeply. The dusty deer trophy at the gas station was wearing sunglasses. Or the silhouettes of twenty three homemade mailboxes all standing together. Both seen in nature and as the result of culture, there are images that blow my socks off with their complete complex beauty. It feels impossible for me to make anything as great as these images and yet these moments still inspire.

Recently I’ve witnessed a collection of revelatory moments during regular life that have provided the clues I need to carry on, and sometimes even make a living from my art.Example: one warm afternoon, I watched my dog resettle herself into a nap and looked down at her stomach where I saw the pattern from my rubber doormat left as an impression in her soft flesh. This flash observation helped solve a fabricating dilemma for a metal sculpture commission that had been dogging me for months. By stamping a pattern into thin slabs of oil clay, I was able to save miles of hand labor and have it look even better.

Art can be activated by the sound of frogs, or noting a tree branch following the contour of a hill. Or art may require engineering and cranes. Books and maps. Whether making or receiving art, there’s a tuning in that can be quietly beneficial.

Therefore, this public artist defines her mission in the department of Homeland Inspiration to further the cause of Art and to seek out and eek out its integration into the everyday lives of others.

Whether, a way of living in the world and paying a certain kind of attention to its passing, or whether you decide to leave some evidence of grappling with your time here - Go ahead - pick up a pencil, a camera, a toothpick? And have some art in your life today!