The art of the find

Requiem for a Paper Bag celebrates the
discarded with tales of lucky bullets and
trash trawling

by JULIET WATERS

On a snowy evening, Davy Rothbart discovered a note on his windshield meant for someone else:

Mario,
I fucking hate you. You said you had to work then whys your car HERE at HER Place?? You’re a fucking LIAR. I hate you. I fucking hate you.

Amber
p.s. page me later.

He shared this note with friends who all seemed to have stories about odd but fascinating stuff they’d found: notes in library books, pictures of unidentified people, kids’ homework, bizarre to-do lists. And so the idea for the magazine FOUND was born.

Found art is hardly a new idea. Marcel Duchamp is generally credited with starting the movement back in 1913 with his piece “Bicycle Wheel.” But in the last decade, it’s really hit a groove. What is reality television but the found art of television drama? Then there’s the neo-frugality movement. I defy you after reading an issue of FOUND or visiting their Web site (foundmagazine.com) to resist the itch to visit a thrift shop. Over at art’s high end, when’s the last time you visited the Musée d’art contemporain without wandering through clutter, or seeing art made out of gum wrappers, string or tinfoil? A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed a critically acclaimed book made entirely out of magazine clippings (Woman’s World). At some point, new became old.

FOUND anthologies have always been collections of found art, mostly notes and pictures. Requiem for a Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed and Found Items From Around the World takes the movement in a more reflective direction. These stories were written specifically for the magazine, and if you have any doubts about its popularity, take a look at this small fraction of the list of almost 70 contributors: Andy Samberg, Jim Carroll, David Simon, Sarah Vowell, Billy Bragg, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, Chuck D, Seth Rogen, Jenji Kohan and Robert Evans (with a typically elegant three paragraph essay about finding his “motherfucking peace of mind.”)

It’s a fun book to read, but it’s also a learning experience. We tend too much to think of creativity as a process of coming up with new ideas. But as many a working artist will tell you, it’s usually more a process of discovering old ideas and making them new again. Artists are magpies. Whether they’re trawling through garbage or libraries, they’re almost always on the hunt for snippets of other people’s lives, or other people’s art to seed and feather their own work.

Many of the stories here are about small finds that have become bigger works of art. Mohsin Hamid tells a wonderful story about how, when he was a teenager in Lahore, an accidental bullet from a Kalashnikov lodged itself in his car roof. He carried it around for years as a good luck piece. After he lost it, he turned it into a plot twist in his first novel, Moth Smoke.

Miranda July writes about how trawling though trash or picking up pieces of paper is part of her artistic process. “When I’m writing and my writing’s not going well, I begin to feel desperate. I’ll take a walk around the block and something I see—or a conversation I overheard—or something I find on the ground always provides a spark.”

And Susan Orlean writes about her habit of trawling the middle of newspapers to read the small stories that nobody ever reads, and how one day she read about a guy stealing orchids. This weird little story led not only to her best-selling classic The Orchid Thief, but also to an even weirder film, Adaptation. “You have to be aware when you’re out in the world, tuned into the things that are happening all around you, truly taking notice—it’s the only way you can find these bits and pieces of lives that will lead you to the grand, the triumphant, the heartbreaking and the unexpected.”

REQUIEM FOR A PAPER BAG ED. DAVY
ROTHBART, FIRESIDE, PB, 235 PP., $21