Frankenkultur

Found’s latest offering is a 7-inch single of modified thrift-store cassettes similar to the work of Optigan champion Pea Hicks in his legendary mid-’90s CD compilation Lucas and Friends Discover a World of Sound, Soundsfromthepocket.com’s two CDs of Found Sound, Otis Fodder’s 365mp3 project (now archived at www.ubu.com) or his earlier exhaustive nine-volume Party Fun With Recorders, not to mention the entire subgenre of found plunderphonics lurking on the Internet. And don’t get me started on the Internet. Disappearing old-style media are providing enough to chew on. From Charles Phoenix’s invariably delightful shows of estate-sale 35mm holiday slides to Rick Prelinger’s laborious preservation of ephemeral film, from Ian Philips’ Lost collection of missing pet posters to the quasi-legal TV CarnageDVD compilations of celebrity humiliations, cable-access star turns, infomercials, and snippets from best-forgotten ’80s afternoon TV specials, it seems like much of today’s most exciting art is being scraped off the bottom of America’s Nikes and held up in a decidedly un-unironic light.

Not so surprisingly, the result of all this underground pressure has allowed collage to seep back into the lower echelons of the art world, particularly in the sticker-fun neopsychedelic bicoastal art-school generation of the last couple of years. More deliberate reinventions have also been popping up — Liz Rowe’s recent residency at the Brewery’s Raid Projects resulted in a series of monstrously self-replicating grocery-store fliers as visually dazzling as they are subtly critical of our culture’s frenzied consumerism.

None of this kind of work makes an appearance in "Lost but Found," which never claims to be comprehensive. Petering out after some mid-’80s work by Llyn Foulkes, the show manages one final shot of virtuosic artmaking from — who else — dumpster-diver extraordinaire Robert Rauschenberg. His 1971 suite of Cardbird prints consist of eight carefully reproduced crushed cardboard boxes vaguely resembling avian wildlife. Each box — down to the corrugations and stains — are photolithographic copies of the trash-picked originals, produced in an edition of 75. Not a rarity, especially here in L.A. where they were printed, but trust a drunken dyslexic to find a conceptual path between Duchamp’s righteous witticisms and Schwitters’ sophisticated sensory-driven synthetic formalism, while pointing out a direction for anyone wanting to reinvigorate collage as a contemporary high-art technique.

Lost But Found: Assemblage, Collage and Sculpture, 1920–2002 | Norton Simon Museum, 411 West Colorado Blvd., Pasadena Through March 28