New Work and Found Object Art

Found Object Art:

Duchamp’s Urinal tipped upside down and then signed R. Mutt 1917

Marcel Duchamp’s urinal is probably the most famous example of found object art. It is hard to imagine today the amount of controversy this single piece generated in it’s time. Duchamp was making the point that anything can be art. All he did to the urinal was turn it upside down and sign a fictitious name R. Mutt to it with the date.

Found object art though is much older than Duchamp. The french called it art de l’objet trouvé and it actually started out being curiosities that people found on their travels and then displayed into cabinets that were especially made for this sort of thing called Curio Cabinets. The English were also mad for this type of thing. Any big museum will have furniture that includes a Curio Cabinet and you can take a look at one.

After Duchamp’s urinal, the whole area of found object art turned into something else where artists were taking everyday objects or discarded items and turning them into art. Okay to be perfectly honest I never cared much for found object art. It just never really spoke to me. I get the point of what Duchamp was doing but still in all, it’s a urinal. Albeit a pretty funny take, but…

Okay so now onto the present. My niece had these old farm windows that she had removed from her house. She stored them on her back deck. When I moved down here she told me she had them and she wanted me to do something with them. I gave the noncommittal nod. Every time I would go to her house, she would say “Aunt” and then give the directional nod to the deck with the old windows sitting on it. I would nod and then leave without them.

Then it just degenerated into her giving the head flip in the direction of the windows and me just giving the return head flick. Okay we were at an impasse. She had told me using old windows was all the rage in the art world, this of course immediately dissuaded me from wanting to work with them. But I love my niece so I went around and looked at what artists were doing with them.

Scale:

I found a couple of pieces that I thought were okay, but the art was never consistent even within the window frame. I had to ponder why some of the panes worked and some did not. Finally I realized what it was. The scale. If artist hit the scale correctly for what they were re-imagining the window pane for, then it worked. Now that was pretty interesting why would having the scale correct make a difference? Well it works the way the first star war’s movie worked. They filmed all those scenes of the fighter planes trying to take down the death star in miniature, but the scale was perfect. Everything was in correct proportion to the things around it so that your eye and then your brain believed what was in fact miniatures, as life size.

So back to the windows, when the artist got the scale correct for the pane size that the artist was working with, then the art worked and didn’t have the hokey made up look to it. Still I was not sold on the idea of using a found object. However, being a good Aunt, and tried of all the head flicking, I loaded four different sized frames into my van and took them back to the studio. They were filthy and I didn’t want to bring them inside until I had cleaned them up so I off loaded them into the garage.

A home in the garage:

The poor frames sat in my garage for a year. Of course there was a lot of tragedy going on in my life at this time so I can’t say I was that focused on anything else except everyday I had to look at those accusing frames: “DO SOMETHING WITH US, PLEASE!” they whined every single day. They were like slow dripping water torture, they wore me down drip by drip, day by day.

Starting to take the windows seriously:

Just to shut up their silent protest, I began the process of cleaning them up, removing peeling paint, repairing them and then I decided to re-stain them and give them an old Italian patina.

While doing this, I started thinking about what the purpose of a window is. I had to

Rainy Day Panes, NYC, hanging on a wall glass behind the emulsion

remove the panes because the putty around them smelled. So I began deconstruction the window which triggered really looking at a window and what it actually does.

One day as I was looking out my kitchen window I had an epiphany. I realized that a window was a means of separating realities. The reality of the inside and then the reality of what is on the other side. Since, I feel that the object the artist finds and then uses in a new way should have some reference to the object’s original purpose, these old windows really started to interest me, now.

These windows actually would the next logical step in my work. As I present ever shifting realities for the viewers to puzzle over and learn something about themselves, the windows could offer a way to present several realities at once.

What was I going to place in the panes?

Rainy Day Panes NYC, sitting in a window

I had a series of shots that I had done in New York City using my pinhole camera. Sometimes, I like to age my film and I wrap it in a a variety of materials and store it sometimes for months or in this case for a year and a half. I got the roll of film and took it to get it developed. The backing of the film and the negative had fused in some way so that the numbering was now etched onto the emulsion surface. I loved it and because I was shooting with a pinhole, where you have no idea how long to expose the film nor is there any way to adjust aperture or shutter, you never know what you will end up. The softness of the shots and the grain made them look like you were looking out through a window and it was rainy outside. I actually did shoot them out the window of my old studio in New York City.

I took the negatives and scanned them so that I could print on transparent decal emulsion transfer material. I soaked the emulsion in water and then slid it off the paper

Rainy Day Panes, NYC, flipped so emulsion sits behind glass sitting in a window

Rainy Day Panes, NYC, flipped so that the emulsion is behind the glass pane

backing onto the window pane. Thereby creating a new reality for the old window. Because the colloid emulsion is transparent you can turn the window over and see a reversed view, so the outside looks in. Referentially, you can set Rainy Day Panes in a larger window itself, so the found object references its original intent. Okay so this really worked for me, let me know if it works for you!