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I have now presented my poster to the class about my window farm. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to learn about window farming. Showing my window farm to people gives me an opportunity to educate others about creative gardening and producing/buying local organic food.
I was asked many times today about what I was going to do with window garden now that the class project is over. My garden will live on so do not worry. My window farm will be moving with me to a Boy Scout summer camp that I run. There it will hang in a window in the dinning hall. With this prime location I will have around 1500 people walk by it during the summer and I am sure that many of them will stop to take a look.
The possibility of having 1500 people learn about local food is an exciting idea that I cannot turn down. Exceptionally sense most of that 1500 will be middle school kids. Teaching kids at a young age is the easiest way to make meaning life changes.
And after camp the garden is moving with me to Chicago where I hope to expand it.
I hope that many of you are think about making your own window garden, and if you do please let me know. Here are a few things that I have learned from making my own can could help you.
First, herbs are the best to plant in a window garden because many of them do not grow to big. This style of gardening is not good for large plants. Also herbs allow you to continually harvest them without completely killing the plant.
Second, do forget to water them. The bottles themselves are not very big and with that they cannot store a lot of water. I have to water my garden every two days or it will quickly dry out. I learned this the hard way and my lettuce has not fully recovered from it yet.
Last, come up with a design of your own. You could simply build one close to mine or you could be creative. Being creative with your garden makes this project such a fun to do. A good friend of mine is now making one out of old sections of plastic plumbing of different sizes. Some of the pipes even have right angles in them so he can be even more creative with the design. He is planting wild flowers in his.
Over all this has been a fantastic project. I have truly enjoyed designing and building my garden and learning about environmental issues at the same time in class.
I keep mentioning this concept of “Found Object Art,” which I figured was pretty self-explanatory, but after doing more research I have found that there are multiple interpretations for this concept so I would like to share my findings to clear up any loose ends.
What is found art?
Art that is found. Most contemporary artists now interpret this as rediscovered, refurbished, repurposed, or reused. It may be that you are looking at something left on the side of a street, thinking, “Why did they throw that out? It just needs a paint job.” You, the artist, find an irresistable object in a store, on the street, in your friend’s garage while you are helping to get ready for a yard sale, or under your bed.
Some found objects are created in the fury and frenzy of artistic creation. In the excitement of creating a found art piece, some artists deconstruct items in their home or will use objects in their immediate vicinity to assist in evoking emotions felt at the time or powerful concepts. Found Object Art is created by the use of everyday or truly found objects, given purpose and significance by those who find and conceptuallize them into artwork.
Is Found Art Modern Art? History into Contemporary Art
Found Art is thought to have practicing origins from the artist Marcel Duchamp, whose readymade works were controversial for the turn of the twentieth century. He created such famous works as Fountain and Bottle Rack.
Around the time of Pablo Picasso’s cubist phase of creation, Picasso also employed the use of found objects, such as La Petite Chouette (an owl constructed from found objects), which was made from household and building materials, including screws, pliers, a missing piece of a sauce pan, and pliers. The piece is said to have sold in 2000 for over one million dollars. Picasso’s piece was grounded in expressing the emotions he felt at the moment of creation.
Female artists had their hands in the beginnings of found art as well. Louise Nelson created unique three-dimensional sculptures from wood in the 1930s.
Dadaists (ManRay as a prime mover) and Surrealists incorporated found objects into their practices. Post-Modernists or Contemporary works carry on the tradition today with variants and combinations of preoccuring art movements, with new subgenres, such as Steampunk, Assemblage, and Junk Art. Both Found Art and its subgenre Assemblage have a relation to collage, of which Picasso is a famous practitioner. Rauschenberg’s paintings are a dynamic combination of flat surface with protruding found objects, resulting in a common connection between everyday life and art as more than association.
Duchamp, Hirst, ManRay, Picasso, Nelson, Koons, Scwhitters. These are but a few of the names that assisted in the success, persistence, and development of Found Art as a movement.
The development of Found Art can also be seen in mainstream consumerism and the efforts of society to Go Green. Used Rubber USA, an intriguing example, takes used tires and reuses them, in the form of stylish wallets, ID holders, briefcases, and other forms.
Found Art is Not True Art? The Critics
Throughout its development as an art movement and practice, Found Art has faced criticism. Duchamp’s Fountain (an unusable urinal) was rejected in 1917 by the Society of Independent Artists as not true art. There are still those today who view Found Art and other related movements as a not a true form of art. Yet many, like Damien Hirst, suggest that even traditional forms of art are truly Found Art. (Paint is transformed into its medium by scientific and biological means and placed on a canvas, given significance by the artist and the viewer.)
There were those before the Modern art era who recognized the potential of turning everyday objects into fine art. We see it in the conceptual, aesthetic, and philosophical writings from the Greeks into the modern period. But what is Found Art?
The beauty of this movement is that is left up to the artist, who gives the found object its own life through the artist’s concept. An object that has undergone its own period of existence and use has its own readymade signficance of which the artist taps into or chooses to ignore.
KEY: FOUND ART CAN INCORPORATE ANY FOUND OBJECT. You don’t have to use items that just look neat, get messy, get creative, throw in something that smells funny, do what you do.
Read more at Suite101: What is Found Object Art? An Overview http://artsociety.suite101.com/article.cfm/what-is-found-object-art-a-simple-overview#ixzz0n8uNnDTu
So, now that we’re all experts in found art, what is Assemblage art???
Assemblage Art
Art form in which natural and manufactured, traditionally non-artistic, materials and objets trouvés are assembled into three-dimensional structures. As such it is closely related to Collage, and like collage it is associated with Cubism, although its origins can be traced back beyond this. As much as by the materials used, it can be characterized by the way in which they are treated. In an assemblage the banal, often tawdry materials retain their individual physical and functional identity, despite artistic manipulation. The term was coined by Jean Dubuffet in 1953 to refer to his series of butterfly-wing collages and series of lithographs based on paper collages, which date from that year. Although these were in fact collages, he felt that that term ought to be reserved for the collage works of Braque, Picasso and the Dadaists of the period between 1910 and 1920. By 1954 Dubuffet had extended the term to cover a series of three-dimensional works made from primarily natural materials and objects. The concept of assemblage was given wide public currency by the exhibition The Art of Assemblage at MOMA, New York, in 1961. This included works by nearly 140 international artists, including Braque, Joseph Cornell, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. Several of the works shown were in fact collages, but the breadth of styles and artists included reflects the wide application of the term and the sometimes fine distinction between assemblage and collage. The ‘combine paintings’ of Rauschenberg, for example, fall awkwardly between the two, being essentially planar but with often extensive protrusions of objects. The inclusion of real objects and materials both expanded the range of artistic possibilities and attempted to bridge the gap between art and life.
The ancestry of the assemblage can be traced back to the artistic and literary environment of late 19th-century France. In his later poetry, especially Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897), Stéphane Mallarmé adopted a technique in which poetic fragments were pieced together in unusual semantic and typographic arrangements. Guillaume Apollinaire later extended this method in his Calligrammes (1918). By emphasizing the visual appearance of words their traditional role of signification was both enhanced and expanded. In the same manner assemblage emphasizes the visual or tactile qualities of formerly utilitarian objects while nevertheless exploiting the perception of the banality of such objects. In the visual arts, one of the most notable early attempts to use non-artistic materials can be found in Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged 14 (1880–81; bronze version, London, Tate). In an attempt to achieve greater realism, Degas included a real muslin skirt and hair ribbon in the bronze version, and the original clay and wax version also included a horse-hair wig.
“Assemblage art is non-traditional sculpture, made from re-combining found objects. Some of these objects are junk found in the streets. It is doubtful that this form of art could have existed before the 20th century. We needed copious junk to have this art form…It expresses an attitude or statement by the artists about our throwaway society…” <–KEY!
We currently live a throwaway society, where over-consumption and wastefulness is the norm. One way to curb this horrible trend is to, uh, do something about it! Captain is my attitude and statement, what’s yours?
….and that is the art lesson of the day 
Anyone can create a found object art sculpture. “Found object” = something you found, simple. Well I didn’t find the items that I’m using, I would love to create more works from found objects in the future, but for the time being we’ll stick to waste. Waste in this instance is coming from my household. I live with two other girls and one guy. So far, I have collected two bags of aluminum cans alone, they were sorted out the last two times that I made recycling runs. The last time I made a stop at Howie’s was over a week ago, and for some reason our recycling bins are not full yet. WHAT?!?! This is new, we usually fill up those suckers in five days flat. I hold the weekends accountable for our surplus of waste. We live in a spacious pad and folks like to come kick it, so we oblige. With them, they bring their beer cans and beer bottles, soda bottles, pizza boxes, wrappers of all sorts and once even a mannequin head was found in the fireplace. We kept it, named it Marge and she resides on the mantle (or occasionally in the cupboard as a nice surprise to those of us intending on getting a dinner plate).
Anyways, this project is deeply tied into a personal and spiritual stance I have towards the footprints we leave on Mother Earth. I would prefer my footprints to be decorative and vibrant, like a drag queen, only minimal and calculated. In my personal opinion, reusing waste can work to to renew experiences and perspectives. If art is a reflection of ourselves, meaning we project ourselves onto the artwork of someone else, then our interpretation of the art is based off our own lived experiences and perspectives. By creating art, you are participating in the transfer of visions, ideas, and a legacy of potential new stories to be told and shared with future generations. Through this creation, I have become closer to the objects I use.
This project has been a labor of love, it has been meditative and conducive to relaxation techniques. I have also forced more accountability onto myself when it comes to my waste habits in particular. It has helped me to rethink consumption and adjust my lifestyle with personal changes. The time and dedication that this project is taking, makes it more than a chore, it has evolved into a new way of life. Consider this: no new clothing (GASP!), reducing purchasing in general (YIKES!), reusing more, creating a budget, planning for future expenditures (WTF?!), limiting/managing impulsive buys (I can be an impulsive shopper), et cetera….
Taking these things into consideration has led to a more creative approach to how I address waste and other things that seem to have lost their value; through this new outlook or lens per se, new worth can be created for these items. Its personally revolutionary when your previous way of life is strictly cradle to the grave, it brings new meaning to “value” and getting your money’s worth.
Below are some EXTREMELY cool links that demonstrate how others around the world are reusing waste, creating art (quite officially) and taking part in a more renewable and titillating array of options when it comes to waste/recyclables. Take a peak through the ones that interest you The description of the site is below the link.
*If you can’t automatically click on the link, hit Ctrl and then click it.
Recycled Art Projects
Involving students in art is a great way to instill an awareness of how discarded items can be used again and again for many different purposes. It’s also a great way to help students realize that “new” is not necessarily “better.” We can bring beauty into our lives through art and musical instruments created from salvaged materials. It helps kids (and adults!) understand how much we throw away in the course of a day, a week, a month, and a year.
Blog: ~ S.C.R.A.P. ~ Scraps Creatively Reused and Recycled Art Projects. Scrounge art projects that reuse and recycle items into Art.
Indian art movement ‘lets’ things get reused
‘lets’ is an Indian collective art movement that seeks to reuse things that were thrown out.
It’s a physical manifestation of the adage ‘one man’s trash…’
There are some cool refurbishments.
Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008
From Waste to Art: Using and Refusing Plastic
For artist Dianna Cohen, a leftover plastic bag is a piece of her art. And now, it’s not only her canvas but her vehicle to alert the public about the dangers of the ubiquitous material in our lives–synthetic organic amporphos solids–better known as plastic.
Blog: an urban family trying to have… little eco footprints
I’m Tricia. I live on a small urban block in Newcastle (Australia). I once dreamed of living closer to nature; having space to grow food; having a teeny little ecological footprint; and being part of a community. I thought that meant leaving the city, but now I know I can try to live that dream right here. We don’t have Little eco footprints yet – but we’re having fun trying.
Hunter Waste Education Group (HWEG)
The Hunter Waste Education Group (HWEG) consists of local and state government educators from within the Hunter Region, NSW. These educators work in the environmental field, specifically in waste and sustainability education.
HWEG members work together to identify, develop and foster regional partnership project opportunities for member organisations. HWEG members also share information and resources. In this way HWEG can offer better-resourced and more regionally consistent education projects to members of the Hunter community.
A NetWaste initiative and proudly sponsored by SIMS Metal, WASTE 2 ART is a community exhibition and competition that shows creative works made from reused and recycled waste materials. The purpose of the project is to encourage the concept of REDUCE REUSE and RECYCLE whilst changing attitudes about ‘rubbish’ and what waste we all create on a daily basis.
Upcoming post will include PICTURES and more information on the progress of my project. Till then,
Peace.
