At The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, a participatory art space, someone is looking for a missing pair of children’s pants. Someone else just lost their petition for divorce. Or maybe they left it on purpose.
Artists throughout history have seen potential in found objects: Kurt Schwitters used them in collages he called “Merz,” while Robert Rauschenberg used tires and taxidermies as materials in his 1960s combines. This year, Laura Quattrocchi opened “Lost Collection,” an exhibit consisting of lost items she gathered off New York City streets over the years––an attempt to find meaning in the flotsam of the modern world.
But what viewers of such work might not know is that they themselves often serve as co-curators for another type of exhibit: Lost and found boxes. Collections of personal items stripped of context, art museum losts and founds are often as paradoxically strange and beautiful, random and meaningful, as the art that surrounds them.
The treasures can be personal and even voyeuristic insights into the loser’s mind. “I had one person leave a notebook," Kim Schnaubert, the director of SCULPTURECENTER in NYC told us when we set out to investigate these collections. "You can sort of develop a little relationship based on your caring for a private piece of their thoughts.”
Other objects appear more random. Sad sunglasses, unloved umbrellas, solitary scarves, and orphaned outerwear are the most common los and found contents at SculptureCenter, depending on the season. But even ordinary objects seem to gain deeper meaning when in the context of a gallery, not unlike Duchamp's urinal.
Anything eye-catching? “There have been some pretty beautiful scarves,” she recounted. We asked what she thought that suggested about the museum clientele. “The people who are visiting SculptureCenter, based on lost scarves, are people who wear nice scarves. It’s an audience of people who select interesting scarves,” Schnaubert said.
Heather Hubbs is the director of the New Art Dealers Alliance, or NADA, a relatively new contemporary art fair that takes place in Miami (at the same time as Art Basel) and New York (in conjunction with Frieze). According to Hubbs, lost garments at NADA are “usually black.” Art fairs attract an artsy crowd.
And yet, the list of items adrift from their owners is sometimes little more than a catalogue of ordinary life: “Sunglasses, credit cards, sometimes a cellphone here and there, every now and then a garment of some sort, a jacket, a sweater.” Hubbs seemed almost disappointed. She sighed, “I wish I had something exciting, like finding a bag of cocaine, but no.”
At the Brooklyn Museum, a squeezy toy giraffe turned up as well as a bar of soap with a flower in it. “I don’t know why someone would take their soap out in a museum,” said Jessica Alpern Brown, who works in visitor services. Coat check clerks Valerie Vazquez and SarahDee Webber reported checking in a vacuum, goldfish, and “an apple with a bite taken out of it.” But the owners of these items all came back to retrieve them.
The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow sent us the following list of the contents of its lost and found:
1. baby bottle
2. clown wig
3. children
Artists throughout history have seen potential in found objects: Kurt Schwitters used them in collages he called “Merz,” while Robert Rauschenberg used tires and taxidermies as materials in his 1960s combines. This year, Laura Quattrocchi opened “Lost Collection,” an exhibit consisting of lost items she gathered off New York City streets over the years––an attempt to find meaning in the flotsam of the modern world.
But what viewers of such work might not know is that they themselves often serve as co-curators for another type of exhibit: Lost and found boxes. Collections of personal items stripped of context, art museum losts and founds are often as paradoxically strange and beautiful, random and meaningful, as the art that surrounds them.
The treasures can be personal and even voyeuristic insights into the loser’s mind. “I had one person leave a notebook," Kim Schnaubert, the director of SCULPTURECENTER in NYC told us when we set out to investigate these collections. "You can sort of develop a little relationship based on your caring for a private piece of their thoughts.”
Other objects appear more random. Sad sunglasses, unloved umbrellas, solitary scarves, and orphaned outerwear are the most common los and found contents at SculptureCenter, depending on the season. But even ordinary objects seem to gain deeper meaning when in the context of a gallery, not unlike Duchamp's urinal.
Anything eye-catching? “There have been some pretty beautiful scarves,” she recounted. We asked what she thought that suggested about the museum clientele. “The people who are visiting SculptureCenter, based on lost scarves, are people who wear nice scarves. It’s an audience of people who select interesting scarves,” Schnaubert said.
Heather Hubbs is the director of the New Art Dealers Alliance, or NADA, a relatively new contemporary art fair that takes place in Miami (at the same time as Art Basel) and New York (in conjunction with Frieze). According to Hubbs, lost garments at NADA are “usually black.” Art fairs attract an artsy crowd.
And yet, the list of items adrift from their owners is sometimes little more than a catalogue of ordinary life: “Sunglasses, credit cards, sometimes a cellphone here and there, every now and then a garment of some sort, a jacket, a sweater.” Hubbs seemed almost disappointed. She sighed, “I wish I had something exciting, like finding a bag of cocaine, but no.”
At the Brooklyn Museum, a squeezy toy giraffe turned up as well as a bar of soap with a flower in it. “I don’t know why someone would take their soap out in a museum,” said Jessica Alpern Brown, who works in visitor services. Coat check clerks Valerie Vazquez and SarahDee Webber reported checking in a vacuum, goldfish, and “an apple with a bite taken out of it.” But the owners of these items all came back to retrieve them.
The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow sent us the following list of the contents of its lost and found:
1. baby bottle
2. clown wig
3. children