![\"Monhegan%20Island%20007.JPG\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/09\/Monhegan-Island-007.jpg?resize=231%2C175&ssl=1\")
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One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments — often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash, and the like) — by individuals, designed or improvised with materials at hand, working with others less by design than by happenstance. They can be found in outdoor public spaces, wooded ravines and forests, wild patches of cities and countryside, abandoned industrial sites. Remaining little documented, they appear not to exist at all except when directly encountered, which is something that usually happens by chance.<\/p>\n
Even calling them \u2018artworks\u2019 can be problematic, since they may not be created with the intent of being recognized as art, or made by \u2018artists\u2019, and certainly not as part of the \u2018art system\u2019 (as Bourdieu, Luhmann,<\/a> or Stallabrass<\/a> would define it). Insofar as they assert the (past) presence of those who have crafted them, they can be read as forms of graffiti, or a kind of resistant creativity akin to the guerrilla gardening<\/a> movement of urban space activists. Marking out a space as different and significant, but leaving behind little direct evidence of the intent underlying them, they may convey an aura of mystery, playfulness, childlike wonder, or the more serious character of a sacred space or shrine, but until they are turned into a public topic (as has occurred with the fairy houses on Monhegan Island<\/a>, where I just spent a few days, and about which more in a moment), they remain ambiguous and a little unplaceable within the systems of things that make up the recognized world. They are anomalous or ambiguous objects, which makes them relevant to the recent discussion here of objects versus relations.<\/p>\n And then one finds similar sorts of things being done by nonhumans — bowerbirds, for instance, whose males form bachelor pad<\/a>-like structures out of all manner of objects<\/a> (twigs, sticks, moss, stones, acorns, shells, flowers, fruits, butterfly wings, pieces of metal and plastic), paint them with natural dyes, and even resort to vandalism<\/a> of rivals’ displays, in their pursuit of females through the ostentatious presentation of their own practical and creative skills. Television’s green archdruid David Attenborough<\/a> argues here<\/a> that these ought to be considered art<\/a> no less than any of Andy Goldsworthy’s nest-like object structures. (These are<\/em> conscious works of individual craftsmanship, unlike the anonymous works I’m interested in, but their authorship scrambles the much more stubbornly held cultural boundary between the human and the nonhuman.)<\/p>\n
\nSomewhere at the outer boundaries of this category of objects\/phenomena one finds self-conscious artworks that are unsigned but that contribute, through documentation or personal narrative, to an artist\u2019s work\/oeuvre (or the ‘signed’ works, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty<\/a>, that are land art’s defining moments); or functional markings like the rock cairns<\/a> that are sometimes used to indicate trails in national parks and public lands (but sometimes these also exceed any such functional intent and spill out into the category of anonymous creativity); or religious\/spiritual constructions like the \u2018medicine wheels<\/a>\u2019 and other circular stone formations constructed by \u2018New Age\u2019 visitors to public lands in the U.S. Southwest (which I discussed and analyzed in chapter 7 of Claiming Sacred Ground<\/a>); or perhaps the various forms of crop formations<\/a> found around the world (but most concentrated in Britain), which remain enigmatic despite some of them being claimed by so-called hoaxers (i.e. crop artists) and despite a certain commodification they get within the tourist industry that caters to the \u2018croppie\u2019 subculture.<\/p>\n