Here's one I just came up with but has been bouncing around in my head for months. I only know this because I could hear it bouncing around in my normally empty cranial cavity.....
Years ago, one of my first public art exhibitions was in front of a house I despised in a neighborhood I despised in a state I actually loved. I went out to every flea market, swap meet and junk outlet I could find and procured dozens of plastic pink flamingos with those wires for sticking into the dirt. I assumed at the time such an infamously cliche' thing could not actually be true of a region......but it was. Although I drove by hundreds of these pink plastic assaults on my aesthetic sensibilities I couldn't find any for sale at second hand type vendors.
I sucked it up, paid way to much, and purchased about 60 of the dang things. then I went to work. I fabricated a steel 'skeleton' for this display and began to construct a flamigo tornado. When the thing was completed and firmly set in concrete in my front yard it was the talk of the neighborhood. "How could such a nice guy construct such an insulting piece of sculpture?" It was vilified, I was vilified, I got hate mail, I got dirty looks .........I was alive again and these prematurely dormant creatures were also alive again and they hated me. I loved it.
The piece made the papers, it attracted gawkers and photo creeps without anything better to take pictures of, and it was never in any way vandalized. As time passed it seemed to grow on the neighbors and they started making hilarious suggestions as to how I might make this rather sick statement of decorative art more ill. I started to find lawn jockeys, concrete versions of dogs and cats and all sorts of kitsch being delivered to me anonymously as if now I could create a new and ever more despicable creation that would now suit a renewed interest in counterintuitive humor. I failed them and fortunately was soon after transfered out of the country again before such things as "no fly lists...lol".
Pam and I are hosting a roundup for the second straight year here at our ranch in July. I will pay postage of any passe', stupid, ridiculous, unnerving, relentlessly cute, and of course flamingo that anyone is willing to jettison from their "I can't take this kitsch any longer" junk pile.
It is my intent to do another weather anomaly frame as yet to be determined, and attach all of the garbage that I can collect, buy, inherit, or just trip over to do something called "The Burbs". I think it might turn out to be so fabulously disgusting that it could make national news if enough people from all over got involved. I promise ample space for credit to each contributor and will herein promise that it matters not what you like or dislike......I'll make it....lol.
I'm wondering if there are enough garden artists here with enough self-effacing humor to admit to sending me a lawn jockey or a flamigo or a grill from a Humvee....lol. I want this to be the most disasterously funny and tasteless parody of kitsch possible. Will you help?
hope all are well and safely protected from plastic flamingo droppings.
don
