Is yard decoration a folk art? Are carved pumpkins folk art? If you buy commercially manufactured plastic pumpkins and arrange them in your yard, or hang them from trees, is this folk art? How about strings of orange lights gracefully draped around the porch railings? How would you define folk art? Does it exist in the USA?41 responses total.
yes it does. Lots of things fall into that category. rugs, chairs, blankets, paintings, dishes, dolls. Pumpkins I suppose could be considered folk art, but they last so short a time... NO. Lighted mass produced pumpkins are not folk art.
according to you. stinky.
Hey. *someone* artistic had to design those mass produced lighted pumpkins. Does something cease to be art when it is mass produced. What about "prints" or multiple sculptures made from the same mold? (Dont tell the DIA that their "thinker" out front isnt art just because it isnt one of a kind)
does he have pumpkin head?
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Re #3: Yes, the mass-manufactured pumpkins may be 'art', but they are not 'folk-art'. Any more than mass-produced "home sweet home" samplers are "folk art". The first one was, and the copies are art, but the mass-production takes it out of the "folk" category. IMO.
I am reading a book on folk art, which can be defined as something communal,
based on tradition, but allowing modifications. Yard decorations are in that
category. If someone decided to put a large statue of a dinosaur in their
yard in October, it would not be recognized as a Halloween decoration, because
it is not traditional. Traditions do change. The Halloween tradition used
to be just things associated with death (bats, spiders, witches, ghosts,
gravestones) and pumpkins. It seems to be spreading to include harvest
festivals as well - cornstalks. This year I have noticed a new genre of what
I think it supposed to be scarecrows, which are not related to death or
pumpkins. These consists of store-bought creations with straw (real or
plastic, in various colors) sticking out where you would expect hands and
feet. Today we saw orange pumpkin-faced ghosts. There is also bleeding of
traditions between holidays. Christmas lights - and now pumpkin lights.
Pumpkins hung from trees (and plastic eggs).
What other sorts of Halloween decorations are new in the past few
years? We are seeing a lot of plastic orange happy faces with smiles up to
their ears.
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How many shithouses are big enough to contain a sense of community?
I have been using scarecrows and cornstalks as Halloween decorations for decades. So did most of the neighborhood I grew up in. I wouldn't call them a new genre of decoration.
re9 :points at the whitehouse.
Neither would I. Scarecrows have been a traditional scary halloween around here since the 50's. Corn shocks are more associated with Thanksgiving but have been as much a part of halloween as well. Carved pumpkin for halloween, pumpkin pie for thanksgiving.
Why are scarecrows being tied to trees? The folk art book considers the arrangement of purchased objects to be part of folk art, including how you decorate your kitchen. Certain objects are considered appropriate for the time and place. I have noticed rows of plastic pumpkin-like round flat objects on sticks arranged around bushes at 3' intervals in the same fashion as flowers, or fake flowers, or little windmills. I don't see them in straight lines across the middle of the yard, or around trees. There are accepted conventions of where to put things. Also accepted categories of objects for certain times. Christmas decorations have to do with light and cold (and the north pole - do people decorate with penguins as well as polar bears?).
Haven't seen any Christmas penguins. Maybe in Australia they do that.
mervyns used to have a christmas penguin in their stores for the holiday.
I noticed that in the Detroit suburbs there is a new genre of large mostly white inflated plastic objects that can be Santa Claus, or a snowman, or even a white polar bear. So penguins may be the next Christmas beachballs. Are people leaving some of their Halloween decorations out until Thanksgiving, such as the pumpkins and scarecrows and corn shocks? Christmas lights are now sometimes left out all year, but not the santas - a separation of the 'religious' and the 'shortest day' aspects of the holiday? Nov. 1 (All Souls Day) was originall the start of winter in prechristian times. Feb. 1 was the start of spring. The solstice came in the middle of each season. May Day started summer (longest days). Christmas was mid-winter. New Year's day was when you sent cards and gave presents.
you *sent cards* in pre christian times?
I often put up my Christmas lights early, to take advantage of good weather, but I don't light them until after Thanksgiving. By the way, is there a source for weather-resistant X10 modules? I was using an X10 lamp module to control my Christmas lights last year, which worked great until water got into it and it died.
Not that I know of. You obviously cannot keep water out of the connection between the plug for the lights and the socket on the module if that is exposed. I presume what you want is to protect the signal receiver and control circuitry. I would think you could do that by just putting it in a box that protects it from being sprayed directly with water. That could be a box that is only open at the bottom, with the module set near the top. We don't use any receivers outdoors, but do have them in the (unheated) garage for controlling lights outside the garage (the original switches for controlling lights outside the garage were in the garage, not in the house). The garage interior is exposed to winter weather except for being protected from water. It is possible that "applicance modules", which control a mechanical switch that controls the load, might be more resistant to weather than the dimmable controllers, but I haven't compared their circuit layouts and components. Those in our garage are dimmable wall-switch modules, and they survive OK.
What I tried was putting it in a plastic bag, and tightly taping the bag to the cords. But water followed the cord into the bag anyway and killed the module.
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The Halloween story temporarily at Westgate has pumpkin and witch pinatas. The gift store has a few haunted houses but it primarily already mostly Christmas oriented. You can decorate your tree with all teddy bears. The florist shop has an artificial orange leaf tree with lights.
Re #20: that would not permit the unit to dry out. Water could get into the bag but could hardly evaporate from the bag, and temperature fluctuations will cause condensation on the interior of the module. I would recommend the box open at the bottom. You might even add a small (3W?) lamp next to the module to keep it warm.
TOnight we went out for a walk to look at trick or treaters. There were very few, rather a shortage in fact. Three witches, one geisha, and a group including a pirate. One householder was so desperate for them that when we stopped to admire his exquisitely carved pumpkins, he insisted on coming out to say hello then went back in to bring us two trays of goodies - plastic fingers (too small to go over mine) and candy necklaces. Jim took one to be polite. Jim's street has more decorations than all the others around here combined. The sixties duplexes were all dark as were most of the seventies chicken coops. Jim's neighbors had a lot of lights (orange, or even Christmas multicolored or large snowflake arrangements). One witch on a porch chair holding a large stainless bowl which turned out to be empty as someone had dumped all the tootsie rolls on the porch (Jim fixed this). Some ghost lights in the bushes. A huge variety of real carved pumpkins. Mostly the traditional sort of face, but one skull, one cat, and a few flying witches against cutout circular backgrounds. One big M. Yesterday we saw a squirrel carving a pumpkin.
We had 83 trick-or-treaters tonight.
I had to go work before it got dark. :(
For about the tenth year in a row I'm living in a place that got no trick-or-treaters, but that's largely because of the particular houses or apartments I've been in, not due to any widespread shortage of children (that I know of, anyway..)
We had many fewer T&Ters than even other years when the weather was worse. We were wondering if perhaps there were more parties to keep the kids in.
When I was little all the kids on the block (about 30 apartments in 3-families) expected to get candy from all the neighbors on the block. I recall being very surprised when one elderly woman across the street did not answer her door, but it turns out she was probably afraid. At some point after that I was assigned to sleep at her apartment to keep her company. That was back when people did not move very often and we were a community. Were there any homemade costumes among the 83 kids, aruba? We saw lots of little commercially-costumed kids while at the library and Westgate. Little girls dressed as pink and purple princesses and ballerinas and really young kids in one piece costumes, brightly colored, with some cartoon character's head painted on the hood (which they were not wearing, it dangled). To identify them you had to walk behind and look at the dangling hood.
az sym e
There were a few homemade costumes, but to tell you the truth, none stand out in my mind.
We saw some home-done stuffed shirts while walking around today, headless and filled with straw. Is this art? Is cake decorating art? Is it art if you model your pumpkin carving on something you saw in a magazine?
Using models does not invalidate art. I'd class cake decorations as art.
So why is it art if you copy a model by hand, but not if you mass produce it?
It IS art if mass produced. That is known as "mass produced art". It is values accordingly. In fact, it sells better than individual works of art.
How can it be folk art if you follow a model?
I think our pumpkin at work was folk art. Five of us contributed bits and pieces to it -- we made a tableau inside the pumpkin of the pit and the pendulum with a gourd/pumpkin body and some made and some bought elements. It was quite fun. (I was not the artist, although I did scooping out of pumpkin duty and did some other scut creative duties.)
Re #36: by not having such a narrow definition of art. Also, by not trying to lump things into two simplistic categories of art and non-art. Every copy of an original work of art is art, just not *very* original art (it is, of course, original art in the sense that no duplication can be perfect).
Art is whatever art critics say it is. If you don't agree, they'll ridicule you. I carved pumpkins too far in advance of Halloween, so they weren't in very good shape by October 31. I put them out with the "compostable" waste this morning.
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whore.
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