Mr. Cai is known for his artistic strategy of what critics call appropriating common types of explosions as found materials for his art, the way Marcel Duchamp appropriated found objects, such as urinals and snow shovels.
When using such complex naturalistic stimuli as found materials, they often differ on a variety of dimensions beyond those that are the target of any given study, and those differences can introduce confounds that can make using multiple, naturally occurring items untenable given the goals of the study.
Picasso showed how to use the newspaper as found material, literally ripping it off to serve fresh and ironic purposes.
Language as found material is the basis of a daffy 1967 newsprint-style piece by Eduardo Paolozzi, a kind of clip art montage from the days when the information highway was still a country lane.
Art, as Mr. Byrne sees it, can "filter real stuff or present it from a particular angle so it appears to function like a metaphor for something else"; and he's frequently used bits of reality as found material in his work: the song "Once in a Lifetime" grew out of preachers' sermons he'd heard on the radio; just as the people in "True Stories" have real-life antecedents in newspaper stories.
Brice Dellsperger's extensive series uses cinema as found material, which can be manipulated, perverted, and subverted.
"Isa Genzken: Retrospective" opening at the Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 23, will feature Ms. Genzken's most recent assemblages, which sometimes make brilliant use of junk (as well as newer found materials) and sometimes simply, and possibly deliberately, look like junk.
Painted or drawn in ink on found materials as diverse as cardboard, discarded doors, orange crates, telephone bills, printed book pages and manila folders, Mr. Young's work often concerned itself with cacophonous, urgent representations of urban strife.
Rooted in the Coachella valley, commonly associated with the over-the-top music festival, the artist forms his works around a collection of found materials, as well as the vibrant Hispanic culture in the Southwestern region.
Rose's work is rooted in Abstract Expressionism and 19th-Century romantic landscapes, but it dips into nostalgic use of found materials as well as contemporary mergers of painting and sculpture.
Thus, the Demiurge arranges everything in the best way as far as this is possible, which means, as far as the character of the found materials permits.
