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)