NO MORE FOUND OBJECTS

Hello, and welcome back to the WIPU podcast. It's Sunday 16th February 2025 and I'm going to head straight into this week's text because it's a bit of a chunky super essay It's called no more found objects and I just want to say straight off the bat that that is kind of clickbait It is an open-ended question I am thinking allowed here about the way that found objects appear in creative artistic parenthesis in 2025 what they're doing in the grand scheme of things and also in this moment against the internet all of that and while I have come to some conclusions by the end of this text those are soft thoughts so it is very much an open-ended conversation so if you have burning opinions that you want to share with me, I'd actually be really open-tearing them I know I say that basically every week or like, you know, that's the implied wisdom every other week but with this one I do actually really want to hear back about what people think because yeah, the thinking is still ongoing so I'll head straight into it and I'll give you the emoji at the end so please stay tuned please stay tuned to the end because then there'll be the emoji but yeah item one white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting a black snooker ball screwed into a chunky silver bike chain resting on an ikea blue top item two white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting a marble slab the size of a small fridge with a slim fit white linen dress shirt flat against the floor poking out of the bottom item three white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting lottery tickets scattered under perspex over the floor we tramp all over it item four white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting clean x tissues crumpled and scattered one by one through the gallery's bright but narrow corridor item five white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting a ring binder full of cutouts from a late 90s early-naughties teen magazine item six white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting rubber chicken with a bundle of battery operated fairy light stuffed inside it the battery pack is training out the art hole it is hanging from the ceiling item seven white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting a ribbon of laminate flooring fashioned into a bow and mounted on the wall item eight white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting one and two pence coins in a plastic folder nailed to the wall plastic miniature items dolls, clothes, dyes, monopoly pieces, key rings, tiny toys in a plastic folder nailed to wall slips of paper from fortune cookie fortunes in a plastic folder nailed to wall toothpicks and matchsticks in a plastic folder nailed to wall silver teaspoons nailed to wall sharp teeth nailed to wall wicker basket nailed to wall walled wisdom ladder nailed to wall vintage Porsche car catalog nailed to wall net curtains nailed to wall razor blades nailed to wall unopened envelopes nailed to wall fossils and bones nailed to wall item nine white walls concrete floor natural lighting five snow globes in a row on a concrete bench each have a tiny miniature playing card inserted in them suspended in the snow globe liquid item ten white walls park a floor fluror bright lighting wax grapes in a bunch arranged around and on top of a mirror on the floor the mirror looks like it is a weird jagged shape item eleven white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting the icing from ice gems arranged on the tip of a plastic music stand plastic battery operated tea light candles in a circle around a curing coffee machine on the floor a flattened out amazon box in a frame a coffee table with a genuine actual bird's nest in the middle of the bird's nest is a black and white photograph no bigger than a business card of an ear item twelve white walls concrete floor fluror bright lighting plastic bottles with the air sucked out of them sealed with duct tape item 13 i was in the crit the other week and someone announced that they didn't really like or enjoy that so much art at the moment is made at a found object my body physically reacted i nearly actually lurched forward in agreement yes yes i too feel like there is a lot of found objects in art at the moment lots of found images found text i don't enjoy it i feel like i don't know what it means what it says about the culture what it says about the mood and temperature of the art world at large but then i like some of it i deeply fuck with some of it then some of it irritates me i don't know where the line is and it's making me itch i don't know how i feel about the fact of it as a palpable resurgence ah yes that i don't like item 14 the week before that i was looking around some of the bloom's breed galleries with my seminar group on a condo themed school trip we found ourselves in brinette colman looking at xxx a bundler metal object pressed into a cube placed on the floor a group of crystal dawn ob still attached to a small square of words from their respective doors arranged in a vertical line and slotted into a plastic wall mounted container no one was particularly impressed with the work it was pretty sparse weird objects we couldn't think we couldn't quite figure out what was going on or why these strange objects were here how they were related to each other they were familiar and yet made strange the galleries must have heard us complaining to each other about the confusion me maybe loudest among them he put his head out of the office and asked if we wanted the intro yes yes please well the metal cube was a collection of objects pressed together until they were the size and shape of the inside of the artist locker at the metal workshop they use over in new york that space the inside of the locker that's the size limit of the work they're able to make there because the workshop is communal shared they can only make what they can fit in that locker so this sculpture is pushing up against the limits of that interior spatial question reverse Rachel white read many Rachel white read talking to space real estate property capital the limits of the artist's ability to produce when that is maybe literally an artist's job and the means of production for that work are controlled by external forces mysterious unnamed and the dawn ob's were bought on ebay the artist browsed online auction lots and thought it was curious that the dawn ob's and locks were for sale like this this is exactly how they were listed how they were sold how they arrived with the little odd squares of woods to attach to here that's talking about where value sits in the lock mechanism and the dawn ob rather than the door itself I guess that can be extrapolated out into a wider comment yes I guess but I wouldn't know at that point I stopped listening because I was having a thought about found objects and value and where value sits in this conversation about found objects so I turned around to my seminar group and said there was a sedric file ksa that they might find interesting about objects and spaces and meaning I would send it to them item 15 brief rewind to April 1917 Marcel Duchamp or was it art history cannot agree it is entirely likely that Duchamp stole this idea from Elsa one friday lorring hoven an artist working with found objects at the time but Marcel Duchamp took a photo of his new artwork fountain a porcelain neuronal signed arm up it was published in a dada journal called the blind man the ready made was born an everyday object raised to the status of art by the artists act of choice and then ah avant-garde landmark art history the rest the act of choice artists have transformative power anything they drag into the galleries transforms from real object into art object item 16 in 2020 sedric falk wrote an essay for mousse magazine called transactional objects full of context in voided sites he writes about the practices of four artists caroline lazard immatub arcy ocon camoran roland and abbasaheddie he links their practices up producing a model for an updated conceptualism these are all artists that make work with objects in a way that feels adjacent to the ready made but their work is elusive mysterious there's something going on with opacity rejecting coherence or legibility refusing the terms of display in exchange something fails that refusal short circuits a transaction highlights it gestures towards it questions it it's not about the actual act of transaction but more the idea of it the conditions of it the fact that this is all taking place in an institution that is like a nail in the coffin because the institution values the aesthetic or vibregester this is all working in minimalist conceptual reflexive but the thing being undermined ultimately is the institution itself the value it assigns the value it holds the function this value performs the institution is the thing that makes the object ready made and all that is being ditched sharpish sedric says it fancier it is all being problematized as various refusals are enacted i mean i think i think that's what this essay is about sweeping generalizations etc item 17 art is caught up in a representational paradigm art is the practice of image making untouched and unblemished by the blistering he of real life art is able to take anything literally anything until absorb it, go blib blib blib blib blib blib. Produce it as an image. of the thing it was before. The image is not necessarily an image image, like it doesn't have to be something that is explicitly a picture, two-dimensional permanent visible or even physically in existence. It can be mental, volatile, fugitive. It is ultimately just a kind of sign, a proxy, an other, a representation. The whole process of art making, conditioning things and objects into art, not fashioning them into image. The image is it. The only thing that is ever forted out the other end of this process, art is a practice of making images. Everything becomes image. The objects value, function, use as object, falls away or becomes part of its image. Image image image. Item 18. In making objects slash thing into image, is it also about making it strange? Is the process of art making also about kind of a strangeness from reality, from use, from function, from purpose, from familiarity? I just don't know. Item 19. It's worth saying that fountain was the starting gun for the New York Dada scene. Nebulous and sprawling thing. Anti-art, nonsense, rejecting sense, absurdist, irrational, refusing certainty, refusing coherence, refusing the bourgeois conventions that made up the formal traditions of art. Whenever that was anyway. Refusing accepted definitions, refusing art's representational paradigm, turning it into something absurd, undermining it in that absurdity, using the absurdity to question the very category of the thing they were refusing. Art that was also anti-art, art that hijacked art itself and turned it into a bastard thing that could dismantle or attack the original from the inside. Manchurian candidate, kinder. Item 20. I read that essay by Cedric Falk a couple years ago and it has been burning a hole in the back of my head ever since. Every time I see an object in a gallery, a found object, an object that could be arguably categorised as a ready-made, I get this essay heartburn. It has become difficult to sort through the points made in the original essay and the points I have bastardised and run away with in my imagination. Item 21. Objects can be made into gestures and through these gestures they can speak. Two or more objects can gesture towards each other, speak to each other, speak over each other, conversational, choral or contradictory. Item 22. Item 22, I've lost track. Item 22. I'm left with the suspicion that to refuse the act of making something, to literally just choose something you were found in the world, to drag it into the gallery, to select active choice. That is both a refusal of and an affirmation of art's representational paradigm. It's critique of the gallery, the aura of failure and confirmation of its trans-formational power, real life into image. It is still anti-art, it is still conceptual art. Is that a short circuiting? Can something actually straddle both categories? If it does, then does that dual thing still constitute a bastard thing? Manchurian candidate. Does it still attack from the inside? Item 23. White walls, concrete floor, fluror bright lighting. A cabab shop sign, but the sign is empty. It's just a box with lights and two pains of transparent plastic. There are a bundle of white used towels piled in the box instead. Item 24. A plastic cabinet with thin shelves. On each shelf there is an oven tapass item burnt to a black and charred mass. Oven ship, curly fry, singular, sausage roll, potato smiley face. I speak to the galarist who says that it reminds her of mayonnaise, how it is both delicious and then also objects and repulsive simultaneously. I think about that Hannah Black, this is crap, essay, how the object is cycling back into the culture in a big way and yes mayonnaise is object, isn't it? Item 25. Grey roll out carpet, enormous freeze white, enormous white freeze tent. One boof is just full of inflatable penguins. They waft on the breeze as people walk past. Item 26. An enormous engine is sliced neatly into delicate chunks like a beef wellington. It is presented to us on a metal table. I look through the gaps. Item 27. I silver plaque on the wall with black round font. Writing reads, short term letting for a period of six months or less. It's strictly prohibited at St John's Court in accordance with the terms set out in the lease hold agreement. This includes Airbnb style lettings. Item 28. In 2009, E-Flux published an essay by Hitoche style called "Indefense of the Poor Image". The poor image is a low fire grainy copy, lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances. The poor image has been ripped, squashed down to the lowest most blown up pixelated resolution, trading clarity and definition for speed and visibility. Its lack of resolution indicates its status as a copy, as a bootleg, a fake. The original is sharp, clear, rich and exclusive. But all this hinges on a weird image class-divided rich and poor, or image privatisation, the real deal, the fake. Poor image is popular image made and seen by the many, passing through many hands, circulating. In 2009, I guess there was a cultural turn. High res fetish got swapped out in favour of velocity, exchange, speed. It almost sounds tripe because memes are all very ye oldy to us now. Virality is banal, but that's what it was. The poor image had value because it circulated and constructed a network through its shared history. Item 29. I spoke to someone about this resurgence of found stuff just to check I wasn't losing the plot, seeing patterns and signs where there was nothing. They nodded sagely and said, "The vibe shift?" Yes, of course. Item 30. Not to be tried or dumb about this, but ready made also means found image, not just found object. And that's interesting. I don't know when this happened, but I feel like I see more images than objects. Object feels like original image feels like copy. Is that just a symptom of subliminal marketing strategies? Is that the only lasting effect of the post digital discourse of art after the internet? The rarity and aura of the object? Is that object oriented ontology? Item 31. Between 1980 and 1992, Richard Prince produced a series called Untitled Cowboys. He was an aspiring painter working as an ad clip off for Time Magazine. He began refotographing the cowboys in Marlborough cigarette ads, cropping and blurring them in such a way that they were, they, cropping and blurring them in such a way that they are now images that feel like fever dreams. A copy, the artwork, of a copy, the ad, of a myth, the cowboy. Prince's cowboys are hallucinations because ads are hallucinations. Symbols are hallucinations. Social desires are hallucinations. They are also anti art ready made. A hilarious theft from the banal world of advertising. Heisted up and framed like fine art. Lowbrow made highbrow. Found image exploding the thing from the inside. And the thing there is arts rarity or sanctity or exclusivity or separation from the image world of advertising or American icon, national myth, hero, symbol. Item 32. Andy Warhol. Item 33. At the end of 2023, in an interview for 032C, an artist called Anna Victoria Zinich spoke about the digital vibe shift. Images are assigned meaning when they enter into a network of other images. We are in a kind of weird liminal space between web 2.0 and web 3.0. Stuck between a version of the internet where everyone interacts on social networks and a version of the internet that is totally decentralized blockchain crypto. That decentralized internet has largely failed to come about or failed to stick but Twitter and Instagram now X and meta are actually culturally dying. The ground is dissolving underneath us and we have nowhere to jump to. We are trapped in this digital barzac of web 2.5 where images are made and immediately mean nothing. Anna Victoria Zinich speaks around the idea that the low-fired died because big brands co-opted it. The poor image stopped being a critique of capital but then it hasn't necessarily been supplanted by the rich image in an equal switch. It's more like they murder. and value is found in oscillating seamlessly between high and low in a discordant contradictory way. The cleanest example is in fashion. This is a quote, "You wear a fake Gucci bag, brandy maleville top, auto-linga pants, some vintage piece and everyone knows you get it." She's talking about anti-fashion, a way of dressing that undercuts or refuses accepted definitions of value, trend cycles, or maybe anti-style, something a bit more knowing. Within, none without seamless oscillation. It's the collaging of all these elements that is crucial. The conversation, bops and bounces in the way interviews often do, but these points about fashion are sharp, prophetic. The image maker of the future will probably be the person who has the most highly sought after taste and always gets it right. Item 34. I feel silly for asking this, but I want an answer, so it feels worth asking, "Who is seeking that taste?" Like, highly sought after, but by who? Is it just about timeline visibility in app user transactions, general virality, mutual agreement that this is good taste, trend setting cutting edge, or is that demand related to freelance creative employment? Who do brands want to work with? Contract in for a creative direction role, strategic alignment, spawn con, gifting, come to our fashion week party, walk our runway, and if that is the image maker of the future, what kind of image is that image maker making? Are they making image images, pictures, two-dimensional permanent visible physically inexistence? Or are they making signs, proxies, others, representations, conditioning things into art image? Item 35. Plaster magazine opened a pop-up shop in Soho, selling objects by artists, ashtrays, jewelry, hats, brands, new brand-new plaster merch, all curated by the plaster team. I stopped by on my way home from work. There are three shelves and two rails, plaster merch and ceramic bowls, earrings and a jewelry stand, £300, but scattered around the shop where all these art adjacent to books, night-bitch by Rachel Yoda, a collection of interviews with Martin Kippenburg as friends, a monograph by Proxy for the King of Weird Art Bros, an Andreas Gerstke coffee table book. They were just nestled in amongst the mugs and lighters. It struck me as odd. It felt like an odd thing. It shouldn't have felt odd, so the oddness felt odd too. I described it to a friend and she said, "Oh, sexy books." Like, yeah, books that are there to accessorise and make everything feel a bit sexier. I've bumbled and browsed through hundreds of shops that use sexy books, sexy items, to make one menswear shop intelligible against the wider landscape of identical menswear stores, to reinforce that, yes, this shop sells homewear goods and this is what the goods would look like in your house. Boyfriend couches in top shop, the original peanut gallery, incense burners, skateboards, hay crates, zines on coffee tables in the urban outfit as changing room. We are a visual species. Ads have always been about communicating subliminal desires. Sexy books, sexy objects, you can curate items to communicate things to a potential buyer. This might look like a collection of twirly candles and gildan t-shirts, but this is a shop that sells things that are connected to the art world. Item 35. Do you remember when Instagram was full of everyone posting photos of books and flat whites on the salvaged wood table tops in coffee shops? Yeah, yeah, flat lays. That's a job now. That's gainful employment. User-generated content. Item 36. Back to do shops fountain. The ready made is raised to the status of art by the artist's act of choice. Where is the line between artist's act of choice and curatorial selection and arrangement? Item 37. The algorithm knows I am a 25 to 30 year old woman living in London, a woman who still calls herself a girl, despite no material evidence that that is the case. I am shown lots of things that align with this understanding of myself. An account called Girls Who Cluster. Pretty shots of intentionally selected and arranged clutter. Water Shell Cums. Mints in metal tins. Vintage hand mirrors. Hand cream in metal squeezy tubes with continental European looking labels. Rosary beads. Hair clips. Silver dishes. Photo booth strips. Marvis toothpaste. French pharmacy liquid bubble bath. Dictique candles. Ribbons. Marjella replica. Eurings in scallop shells. Every so often this account posts a Cluster's favourite gift guide with product recommendations for things that could feasibly fit in one of these cluster shots. Everything is linked and shoppable. Item 38. It has always been about the person with the most highly sought after taste who always gets it right. It has always been about positioning, arrangement, fashion, ads, marketing, copy, content, comms, PR. If objects and images have resonance, it is because ad agencies clapped their hands and said, "Speak." If they speak, they voice nothing more than bland consumer desire. That is where all of this sits, somewhere between positioning and desire. Item 39. I brought my work home with me one evening this week. I explained what I was writing to my boyfriend. I said, writing this text felt like wading through soup, trying to pick up soup in your hands and grab onto it. I told him about fountain, transactional objects, the vibe shift, and teart. This poor sweet man said, "Most people don't think this kind of art is art. Most people think art is a painting, a sculpture. Art is the kind of thing where you know it when you see it." This is stuff that is made in niche circles for niche people who circle jerk about how clever they all are, how they all get it, close loop, naval gaze. If you know, you know and they know, but who cares? But what about the artistic act of selection? He shook his head. I asked him if he thought the emperor was wearing any clothes. He said, "None at all, not a stitch." Item 40. I am experiencing great mental tension. I believe in the power of anti art. I think advertising should be illegal. I think good taste is a kind of aesthetic fascism. I see a thousand images a day and I do not remember a single fucking one of them. I want all objects to disappear. I can think of so many artistic practices that use found objects in constellation arrangements in this exact way I'm describing that I deeply spiritually enjoy. But I also think there is something here on the table in amongst all this stuff that feels bad. Item 41. Is this a symptom of the material conditions artists face in the actual real life world? They can't afford a studio to make stuff. They can't afford the time to actually make stuff. Practices are made smaller and smaller until the assemblage is a shrewd hand for the fact that art making takes place via proxy in theory, concept and gesture. Item 42. Is this all Instagram's fault or is TikTok ruining society? We are all image makers. We are all curators now. We curate our feed, our lives, our existence. So arrangement is the visual language we are most fluent in. Item 43. Is this because of tumblr actually? The aesthetic trickle, micro trend, Pinterest, trend, forecast. The way vaporwave got mainlined into the system. Back then we were all fascinated by substances rather than objects. Goo, Angel and lubricants and water and jelly and metallic surfaces and marble because cyberspace was so insubstantial, so absence of substances. We were all scared or excited that the body would get spirited away by the machine. Objects disappeared and we stopped thinking about images as copies or representations and met an image registered developed where it was about networks of images. So the poor image became the image, then the divide between original and copy disappeared. Images no longer existed as singular but plural. Within networks, aesthetics, discrete coded groups that formed a kind of image language, the process of fashioning image images into images contracted, trend cycles contracted, everything went micro. Yeah. It sounds like tumblr's fault, doesn't it? A aesthetic death, image cycle, met an image register. Circle jerk. Item 44. Is this all about hauntology? The future is dead capitalism killed it so we recycled the culture produced by the past. We chew up the old food left on the plate, spit it out into a new shape over and over and over, old broccoli, old rice, old chicken, put them on a plate, constellation arrangement. Look at my found dinner installation, a masterpiece ready made, ready meal and social comment, highly critical. Item 45. Dada and anti-art was about art that collapsed the category of art itself from the inside. Hijack the form, bastard thing, Manchurian candidate. It rejected or refused art, voiced a question about whether it really existed, whether it was separate from real life in the first place. It still did that from within the realm of art. This wasn't a failure, this was the strategy, a detourment, a rerouting, a hijacking, grabbing the steering wheel and turning the car around, away from bourgeois conventions, formal traditions, categorical standards, but the thing didn't collapse from the inside. It never does, it exploded out, expanding the properties and potential of art into a brand new conceptual medium. Art was now a nominal thing rather than an intrinsic thing. Now a distinct medium, it could be regulated, categorised, assigned its own set of conventions, formal traditions and standards. Item 46. It seems to me that everyone is always proclaiming the end of something. The end of painting, the end of art, the end of this text, I can only hope. The end is always a turn, rerouting, nothing ever dies, it only drifts off in a different direction. It will only get so far down the road and then someone will declare the end and it will drift right back. Normally the signal that the end is nigh is when advertising jumps on it as a means to produce fat stacks of cash. When it has enough cultural cash aid to be of interest to corporations who value it as a viable means of enrichment. Sexy books, found objects, mutually indistinguishable menswear shops with plants, books and record players hidden amongst the rails. The end is nigh, it was good while it lasted boys, we've had a nice ride but visual merchandising exists, time to turn, sharpish. Item 47. I wonder what comes next. I tell you what I'd like to see. Disappear the object entirely. Make artworks in gestures, actions, secrecy, defiance, like Sarah Bolton swallowing a pearl, like Lydia Uramane getting a tooth pulled out, a 24 karat gold tooth surgically implanted in its place. Cameron Roland, mortgaging away the doors of the ICA, John Cage Silence, Suprematist Black Squares. Collective affect, happenings, weird unexplained phenomena. Maybe someone could gesture at destruction as the only emancipatory form of production, burned down the Blavattnick building, the white cube parliament, as performance art, of course. I'm interested in things that don't or should not exist. Things on the edge, lying, destruction, the void, no more seamless oscillation, send in the Manchurian candidate. It's time for an end. And that legitimately is the end of the text. Thank you for listening. That was 4,600 words of thinking through writing, voicing a question. I wish my questions could be more concise, but there you go. If you have any thoughts of your own off the back of this text, like I said before at the beginning, I would really be very interested in hearing them. Do you think that found objects are recirculating through the art world at a greater level? Do you see more found object art or found image art? What do you make of it all? Where do you sit? What are your found theories? Please let me know, right in an answers in on a postcard, because yeah, I'd really like to have a conversation about this and work through some more of what I think and what you think. What we all think, but yeah, they're still not resolved in my mind. Please can I have an emoji please and can I have, I'm going to be honest, I want a version of a black square because of those supremacist black paintings, the Malovitch, Kazemir Malovitch's black painting. That's my Roman Empire. I think about like supremacist black square paintings all the time. It's heartburn, reflux, they just come back to me, every so often I'll be on the bus thinking about things and it'll just occur to me and I'll be like, "What's that about?" So please can I have that? I was like my answer to what comes next. Yeah, I'll have that on the Instagram post, please and then I'll leave you to the rest of your Sunday, because there's now 35 minutes, which I thought it would be longer, I can't lie, but yeah, go on, happy rest of your Sunday and I'll see you next time, bye!