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Check out the Photo Album series to see what I do with found photos
castoff magazines and left over electronic junk and mechanic stuff I buy .
I have a history of making small art objects.
My history of making "smallartobjects" in NYC began for me on 1960"s when I first saw Objects of Desire Meret Oppenheim.
Object. 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon. Cup 4 3/8" diameter; saucer 9 3/8" diameter; spoon 8" long; overall height:
2 7/8". (c) 1936 in an Art book in high school art class almost 50 years ago . The history of small art objects goes way back in
time before that obviously, perhaps to the beginning of language magic, religion, ritual shamanism and is the source of obsession
& button collections & it probably end us up as a society with buttons we will place on or in our bodies to simulate or increase
our intelligence IE: Telephones that can see & speak ( A Virtual Slave Brain ) which later might be used to control others such
as a form of house arrest & population containment a new form of prison much like the present "Urban"Public High School" system
where the inmates are sequestered or segregated by class from the world at large.
See what I mean.
After I collect some found object it becomes "junk" I decided that it is a "privet object" & it becomes part
of a personal vocabulary.
The object can be some number of brand new consumer electronics devices which I will transform into material for
there function or for there form in combination with the other material I have chosen to assemble in to an integrated
totality with an entirely new meaning and function .
"One persons trash is another persons treasure"
Often found objects such as a discarded tools or material, metal toy any old authentic debris can become something
"I must keep" ( a crackerjack toy an old stamp broken denture or glass eye cufflink that sort of stuff many types of things
because I simply like something about it & must keep it for future to use in a collection of objects saved in many labeled
see through plastic shoe boxes and in what may seem to some an illogical heap on my desks & kitchen table and other
work spaces.These 'Materials" increase in value to me as I think about them ( in various combinations a chicken & the
egg process ) building many imagined things with them usually with some memory of a concept as a guideline or blue
print that grows an increasing story line or super real or an imaginary personal history of associations just because it
" fits" that concept or feeling I am aiming for.
Sometimes a concept or a joke a memory of a poem or a painting or film or a person becomes a hoard or a quirky shrine
or a finished work that "says something" back to life.
I buy parts and precision jeweler's tools & electronic surplus to add effects such as movement ,light, sound and logic to
the things that I make, often following elaborate plans that I have drawn in my many note books some times it ( the parts)
stays a heap in my home like a bad habit a symptom of an obsession with more pressure on me to make something from it .
Why? I guess the answer is a minor mystery to me too but I feel with more & more time some thing always comes of it.
When I was little my brother & played in a house grave yard in Southern California during the summer we found many
" abandoned " objects some in huge piles sorted by type say a 6 foot pile of keys door keys cabinet keys mountains of keys,
6 foot piles Glasses old shoes and piles of hats and on occasion heaps of musical instruments which we would "play" old
records I still have some of the old 78 rpm records and one of the keys as a keep sake.
The stuff was in an abandoned air field we "discovered it " while riding our bikes around the town what it actually was is a small
city of the "confiscated " homes of the Japanese Niece's homes and some sort of salvage operation was done periodically because
this was after the war we never saw any one ever it was just us scrounging around and playing like we were the last humans
in earth a popular them of the eras SI FI films once we found a sword and a big felt lined Nights of the Royal Order of Columbus
& so there we were squeaking a violin and marching around In a clowney kid perade using some dead guys stuff kind of like
we were Burgerlers or Pirates on a imaginary dessert island.
(The fact is this is happening to some one some where still today.)
The one thing I will never forget is the house after house of heaps of keys & eye glasses many more than the considerable
windowless houses propped upon the smelly black creosote rail road ties baking in the sun and because with reflection the
human losses that the quantity "abandoned" personal items represents the result of refugee property some times they burn it,
the way slum lords do one home at at a time we think little of the losses as kids. Kids can't know.
( The truth is I am an Inventor & pack rat & will probably die a pack rat ) It's all about the stuff. In a way the stuff is changed
by being added up in an assembly that tells a story or depicts a feeling is all it's about . Although it may as well be under
200 feet of Atlantic Ocean for all the good it does any one but me if nobody ever sees the things. So I am making this web
site to share the things I've made of the stuff I've found & saved ...
"One persons trash is another persons treasure"
"This is the most important Small art object ever made ."
Do you know why ? Make your own or buy our handy kit...ED
MoMA | exhibitions |Objects of Desire Meret Oppenheim. Object. 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon. Cup
4 3/8" diameter; saucer 9 3/8" diameter; spoon 8" long; overall height: 2 7/8". The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Purchase see also: Portrait Poetic Object http://www.moma.org