Found Art #5: Long Lost Loves

So, like most of the pieces that I've been so blessed to happen upon, this piece is a somber reminder of affection, rememberance, and joy. It comes in a package rife with complexity, with a low-rent vibe to a high-class memory, arts and crafts notes, and a dash of super-realism. Let's take a gander. Just two bits!

So it has been kind of a long time since I have had the pleasure of reviewing a leaflet of life like you see here. I know that it isn't hanging in a public space in Venice, and it doesn't have the backing of a lengthy writeup in the New Yorker, but can we discount greatness simply due to lack of praise? Surely virtue can't be graded on the appeal to the masses- or more accurately, to the appeal of an inclusive slice of the populace more concerned with crumpled archival paper than with looking for new great visions of visceral emotion- possibly under their own spotless heels.
So we've got here a positively ghastly image of two youths, age unknown. The age of the two, which must be in the early 20s or even late teens, amounts to a morose underpinning to the image and the object itself- as we must remember that this piece is real, and found, and not created for an audience, at least, one such as it has attained.
The this appears to be a digital image, as is evidenced through the zipatone coloring and rather primitive print quality. It was obviously of great personal value, which we can see in the lamination it has recieved. It was laminated rather cheaply though, possibly not due to lack of care for the image, but more likely due to the lack of experience in the one doing the work. There is considerable flash remaining at the bottom of the piece, lending even more to the notion that the creator of this piece was more concerned with the preservation of the image that with the artisanship of the device, though the singular tragedy of what we have here is shown in the inadequacy of skill.
Focusing more on the subject, we can see that this was probably a prom photo, or more likely, a photo taken at arm's length during some at least semi-formal event, probably right before the young soldier was sent off to a far away land to protect a people he'd never known. Yes, I assume that the young man in the photo is the soldier, as most soldiers here in Korea are men, for obvious reasons (Um...I guess). A joyous moment, which is now preserved in digital form somewhere, with endless reproduction possible, and with unfathomably better quality at discount price.
The image has been somewhat preserved in its plastic shell, which appeared to be scotch tape at first, but upon further notice was actually revealed to be a matte-finish lamination of sorts that I've never before seen. It rains here. A lot- and the image had probably been on the gound for several days to allow sufficient water to penetrate the sides and smear the ink in such a fashion to blur the outward edges but leave the center intact. The result is a dubiously ghastly image, one that was meant for perfect preservation but in the end, is almost forgotten. It is not so much a cheap photo as the physical representation of memory. A clouding, swirling confusion surrounding the core thought- and as is the nature of memory, only the most salient of points remains- the relationship.

Most of the pieces I find are usually found almost completely intact, with bits missing here and there, but are never actually self-contained works. The image here, rather, is fully intact- and while all of the ink is present, it is highly confused and blurred. There is far more story here than I'd anticipated, a story that we all know. In fact, while writing this, I've come to remember the long lost loves in my own life that have been reduced to scraps of thought, obfuscated moments in a whirlpool of my conscious life. Needless to say, I'll never let this one go, as it serves to be a concrete representation of the effects of time on our most precious resource.

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