Sometimes people get their art thing going, to the frustration of other regular “non-artsy” folks. I consider myself pretty much in the latter camp, but I can see how it would kind of interesting to observe what happens when an object leaves its intended domain and becomes something different in the process.
For example, the steadfast wheelbarrow of consumerism, a shopping cart, is tossed into a river where silt slowy grabs hold and plants embrace the submerged cart as an underwater foothold. The act of removing it and tossing it in a river has changed the pupose, intended or otherwise, that said cart serves in the world. Hanging that shopping cart from the ceiling, still covered with clinging vegetation, kept company by other repurposed siblings of its own kind, in a gallery is somewhat interesting- for about an hour. I find myself unwilling to lablel the shopping cart hanger an artist. But that is neither here nor there.
What is interesting to me is when something like this can take hold of a person, moving from a casual artsy observation to a quest for a system of recognizing and classifying the artifacts of the observation, a modern day Aristotle categorizing the plastic and metal specimens that escape or are stolen away from their cart corrals. So here I am suspending one possibly obsessed potential artist from a virtual ceiling for your observation. I won’t begrudge any who fail to recognize the artistry in it.
My shopping cart example wasn’t invented, it is real, or an idiot-savant brilliant spoof. [Strayshoppingcart.com] is the website detailing the system used to categorize stray shopping carts, with two major classes and 33 total subtypes. There is even a field guide available for pre-order from Amazon to help determine if the shopping cart dumped in the bushes is a Close False (type A/1), perhaps a victim of Simple Vandalization (B/12), or just Edge Marginalization (B/16). Don’t wait for the book to be published, because [flashcard type pages are online] right now.
It leaves me scratching my head and wondering, so it must be art, right?
Cool. I like “Plow Crushed” myself. As someone who once..er..located a shopping cart at least 30 miles from any spot where one might expect to find a shopping cart, I can sorta appreciate this.
As for art in general, I’m not sure if this is what you were getting at or not but I have another example. Once upon a time, I was mowing my yard and a rock shot out from the lawnmower and hit a beveled glass table I had on my deck. That table shattered into a billion pieces. There wasn’t a piece of glass over 1/4 inch left. What a mess. Oddly, there was also a caterpillar infestation in my yard at the same time. I cleaned the remnants of the table by sweeping them into these old clear tupperware containers I had. When I was done, I had about a dozen clear tupperware containers full of millions of pieces of glass and lots of caterpillars just strolling around on the glass. It was surreal.
I’m not even sure what I really took from it at the time, but it did just make me sit there and reflect in the way that a piece of art might. Just sitting there, watching all those caterpillars walk around on all that glass.