Salvation Artist

Bitner jokes that, “Every page has satisfied me at least once,” but he tells me that it “was never intended as jack-off material. I always thought of it as a sort of Kinsey Report, and not Juggs.” In a culture that loses its collective shit over nudity and swearing on television, there is an abundance of amateur porn. Dirty Found gives this innately American contradiction a place in the sun, and by extension, the reader’s. “As time goes on, though, what we’re learning is that there might be a phrase, or one short sentence, or an illustration that seems to work it’s magic on a some readers. It’s always a different thing for different people, and they usually divulge it in hushed tones”

In many regards both Found and Dirty Found are forms of folk anthropology, a chronicling of the fears and desires of humans, but without the burden of academic interpretation or context. Bitner thinks of the magazines “as a big show-and-tell project. All we do is open up the letters you guys have sent our way, sit down with some cheap beer, put some pages together, and send it off to the printer. There’s “not much in the way of critical thinking over here; we’d rather be drinking Maker’s.” Archaeologists scrub out meaning from old trash. Dirty Found presents new trash and leaves us to make our own conclusions.

Bitner toured the west coast in a van this summer, driving all the way from San Diego to Seattle, during which I caught up with him and saw the show in Los Angeles. Along with him were Arthur Jones, and his booking agent/friend, David Wilcox. Each one takes a turn operating a PowerPoint slideshow and narrating the finds in a respectful, but satirical fashion. A series of sketches on used car sale slips are shown one by one while Jason points out details, such as the design plans for the “Lady’s Man’s Choice in condoms: The Bro-Ham Mark II,” that include a sound system, bumper, headlight, reverse light, and most impressively, the scrotobelt attachment system. Bitner ponders aloud the meaning of a drawing of a penis with an organ grinder’s monkey inexplicably hugging it. It is never forgotten that these relics came from an individual and Bitner and the other narrators make every attempt to get into the mind of the creators.

“The Dirty Found tour was just like a band tour, only we had boxes of magazines and surveys rather than a drum kit and Marshall stacks.” Before the show Bitner had the audience fill out a questionnaire asking about people’s dirtiest finds, stories of being “caught in the act,” and a quiz to name a depicted sexual position. Once all the slides have been shown, the results of the questionnaire are shared and, like the show as a whole, are alternatively hilarious and gross. He includes the audience participation because, “here we are sharing other people’s lives, and we felt it would be right to share some of our own at the same time.” Among the most shocking results of the questionnaire are the abundance of individuals confessing to having slept with a teacher or professor and that nearly a third of respondents have been caught having sex by the police.

In between his work on Found and Dirty Found, Bitner has found time to work on a few books. After setting aside found Polaroid’s for the last several years, he has collected 600 images for a book that will be released this November in a limited run of 2,000 copies. “There’s something especially awesome about Polaroids because you know that there’s only one shot like it in the world.” It is to be the “fanciest, artiest project we ever put out, special for people who like fancy, arty books.”

Also in the arty vein, is Bitner’s upcoming collection of photographs from Princeton Architectural Press coming out next spring called LaPorte. While lingering over his pie at a diner in LaPorte, Indiana a few years ago, he noticed classic 5x7 portraits hanging on the pie case. He inquired about the photos and was introduced to a collection of proofs left over from a portrait photographer active in the 1950s and 1960s. “[The photographer] basically documented this whole town. Any announcement or celebration, they would go to this photographer, and go into the dressing room and make themselves look as perfect as possible.” What emerges is a collection of regular people presenting themselves in their own ideal at different life stages: Christenings, high school graduation, marriage, and anniversaries, all hand-colored by the photographer’s wife. Bitner’s ethos behind the book mirrors that of Found. “I’m not an artist or a photographer or anything, but I’ve seen so many photos over the course of my life. I’m never going to make anything as good as these, but maybe I can share these.”

Bitner is too hard on himself. He already has produced work as good as the pictures he found in LaPorte by virtue of having produced the work at all. It’s not in store for all of us to be artists, but many among us are without even knowing it. It’s the art of Jason Bitner and Davy Rothbart, as well as all the folks at Found to cull out creations from society’s detritus. He is a salvation artist; a noble line of work if you ask me.