MixedMedia

One of the delights in taking a meander to – and through – a good antique or salvage shop is the discovery of once functional objects that have been shorn, busted, unmade and unusable. Yet a glimmer of their former utility is there – something to suggest that it should, or once would, do something.

I’ve found a few of these items from time to time – most recently fragments of wooden pulleys from the early 20th century. I took a stab at polishing them up, combining them with bits and fragments of other items and creating non-functional objects that nonetheless hold some sway over the imagination for the suggestion of practical use. Here are three – all with the briefest – almost automatic – remaking, with paint, paper, and found objects such as old rope, metal wire, and drawer handles.

What I like about how they ended up is the hint of adventure – a globe perhaps, or a nautical device of some kind – perhaps a leveling tool or compass. Combined, they could be used as unessential props in a gypsy pirate fashion shoot or some retrofuturistic Victorian space odyssey – Jules Verne meets the Wachowski brothers if you will. Perhaps they might be found one day in a waterfront curiosity shop, there behind the shrunken heads, in front of the figurehead from a 17th century galleon – collecting dust, awaiting their next reincarnation.

The poem that is the subject of this box – a steamy summery kind of musing, complete with blueberries, olympics, and humidity – is taken from the Fall 2006 ESOPUS magazine. Even though the poems, written in the ’80s by Vincent Katz, are about a breakup, I found them to be much more immediate, intimate, urgent. Vincent showed these to his father, who drew up some accompanying illustrations. These have nothing to do with the box.

The box itself, as shown here, is incomplete. It was left out on the front lawn of my Vermont neighbors on the Fourth of July, in an effort to get rid of it among the throngs that come each year to join us in celebration of nationhood and community. No one took the box by 4:00pm, so I did. I later came to find out that Ferg (my neighbor) inherited the box from his sister, it having been given to her by their father as an upright means for her to store her dolls dresses. It was the perfect story to encase the collage that I’d been working on.

The collage itself is standard issue: layers of text and images combined with paint, pastel, and other media and sanded repeatedly and treated to build up a lacquering effect. A few surfaces items added to make the depths “pop” a little more – in this case the butterflies. These works are always somewhat automatic: the buzz and flow of the sander as it explores hidden depths, shying away from vivid contrasts and shoving deep through overly dense areas of paint, searching for textures to reveal. The imagery isn’t entirly arbitray, though it has artifactual qualities: two eyes but no nose. Does it matter? No, the meta themes are intact, all hovering around the livid discoveries of adolescence.

What remains is something to hang, or to place, within the box. The collage presents the backdrop to the story; what will be its subjects, the characters given meaning by their only visible reference points?

A few summers ago I experimented with thin, 3/16-inch plywood to produce textural finishes on top of which anyone could compose a visual engaging, personalized collage. I then took the dried mixedmedia work, sanded it up a bit, and wrapped in an arresting detail/section from a magazine cover. I composed little packages of collage items in cellophane envelopes and tucked them in, sealing it all up with those clear plastic sticky dots. It was a fun and whimsical product that I haven’t really had the time to pursue further.

The steps are pretty easy:

1. Prepare and texturize one side of a large surface of  3/16″ plywood. Let dry.
2. When dry, cut the plywood into 4×5 postcard-sized pieces.
3. Find some interesting, card-weight magazine covers that are large enough to enclose the postcard when folded (at least 8 1/4-inches tall).
4. Glue the plywood, untreated side down, to the bottom edge of magazine covers. Use a brayer to achieve a firm, consistent application. Let dry.
5. When dry, fold the magazine cover into the correct postcard cover shape. Unfold when crisp lines are formed and trim off the excess magazine cover.

Voila! You’ve got a nice gift ready to send to your friends who love collage! Personalize by enclosing a few collage items that you think they’d enjoy.

A post over on Tales from the Hood (??) got me hot under the collar about aid, and used stuff. Basically, the writer – a self-avowed humanitarian and aid worker – is saying Americans have these embedded (and unique) cultural norms around stuff – specifically the resale of used things that the writer dismisses as junk. For all kinds of reasons, the skinny is that extending this “hand-me-down” cultural value to foreign assistance is dumb, and counterproductive. Without taking on the international aid dimensions of this argument, I felt it (ridiculously!) necessary to come to the defense of  the re-sale, appropriation, and re-use of other people’s stuff. Here’s the screed, only slightly edited.

“First, it is incorrect to state that used stuff is junk. Used cars, used clothes, used tools – unless they’ve been abused and are being off-loaded by a huckster, there is much value to be derived in used good. What perhaps underlies your assertion is a tacit recognition that the quality of goods produced by the global economy today is poor, and as a result there isn’t much value to trickle down the reuse value ladder. Nor does the cost of these goods new warrant much benefit over the cost of them new.

Continue Reading…

As a mixed media artist, I’m always on the lookout for intriguing, clever, playful, whimsical ways of using ordinary materials to bring delight to the urban experience. A few recollections came to mind recently – principally as a result of a cool project I learned about during the annual MIT IDEAS Competition retreat I attended this week.

The project that got me thinking back to my days of RAOC (random acts of collage) is a “kite mapping” project that will engage youth in Brazil’s slums in surfacing the narratives of place where they live. The idea is one part arts engagement (cultivate narratives of place), a second part technical (use sophisticated technology to document narrative), another part advocacy (application of evidence to legitimize place). Of course, I’m crazy about using collage as a means for story-telling. Like Rauschenberg, I believe collage best replicates visually how we perceive the city.

I won’t go into more detail; you can learn more about “My City, My Future” (aka ArteRio) here. But here’s my point: an “owned” city space is a healthy city space.

We as the ambulatory denizens of urban settlements claim public space each time we move through it, yet we rarely leave evidence of that claim. When we do, its either harmful (waste) or viewed askance (graffitti). One generally must be a “professional” – sign-maker, architect, landscape designer – to have the privilege of shaping urban space.

And yet the delight and surprise we encounter when we come across the legacy of a Nina, Keith Harring, a Bansky, or a Shepard Fairey is part of what makes cities great – and ultimately a safe, welcoming, familiar, vibrant, exciting place to call home. Public art has never been, and should never become, the playspace of technocrats and establishment programs. And there may even be a bit of a renaissance in this “claiming” of public space by young artists working in a startling range of exciting media, which I wanted to catalogue briefly with three examples:

• Dispatch Work uses, inspires others to use, and documents in-fill of cracks and fractures, opened recesses and crumbled away facades with delightful lego work. Recent work includes Improvisal Design in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
• Tape Art is a public art and education collective that uses the line, as it can be drawn with tape of any color, to bring rigorous visual work into public and private spaces. Check out their river of art.
• Blu! has created stunning large-scale animations in the UK and Brazil using the cityscape as canvass. MUTO is their piece de resistance (I think).
• And who doesn’t love the work of the little people in London, left to (of)fend for themselves amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life. The micro-macro relationships are jaw dropping.

Its an exciting time for the urban artist and a great time for us to think and push the boundaries around art, participation, and community development.