=Found photos, or trash photography=

Artists, since Dada, have been working with the idea of creating an anti-art that would defy all aesthetic conventions. Duchamp's readymades, Tzara's recipe for creating a poem from scraps of a torn up newspaper pulled randomly from a paper bag, and Schwitters's practice of gluing trash to canvas are early examples. Each exercise, in a different way, has failed. Such attempts at anti-art are a problem more in the visual arts than in the literary. With literature it is comparatively easy to create a piece of "non-art." All you have to do is write something no one will ever read, that is unreadable by virtue of its violation of all the fairly strict rules of verbal code that structure sense in written language. And herein lies the key to creating a piece of visual non-art, although with non-verbal art the problem is a good deal tricker.

The crucial problem with artists creating anti-art has always been as obvious as it is unavoidable as it has been so far insoluble. Anything an artist does is bound to be aesthetic. Even if it is made with the conscious intent to be as ugly and as offensive as possible, the product produced by an artist is bound to exhibit, the closer one looks, a basic compositional structure that renders it, if not conventionally beautiful, then conceptually meaningful, and therefore, "art" on some level, even if it is parodic. The problem is the artist's eye—and to a lesser extent, the viewer's eye.

Marcel Duchamp, being a really smart whip, recognized the problem straight off. He sought readymade objects of "visual indifference" but his bottle-rack, his bicycle wheel, and his urinal have despite his best efforts at banality nonetheless been elevated to the same reverence and placed in the same airy realms of fine art objects as the Mona Lisa. We see a beauty and meaning in them today that Duchamp purposely sought to avoid. He failed. And he failed because he was an artist trying to make anti-art. He could not help but choose even against his own will an object of symbolic meaning and therefore aesthetic appeal no matter how hard he tried. But the failure comes not only because he was an artist, but because he was a human being. 

Even a non-artist asked to walked around the block and gather up street trash as material to glue randomly to a sheet of card stock with the intent to create a piece of non-art would not be operating by purely random, non-aesthetic operations. Like a seagull, he or she will be attracted to certain pieces of garbage—wrappers, flyers, packaging etc—and these are the pieces that will be "chosen," even if the choices seems to be at random. Give him a palette of paint or a box of crayons and the non-artist will make "art" even if it's of a kitschy clumsy amateur variety,  just as the artist will, in spite of his or herself. What the non-artist creates will be of interest, even if it is interest of a low order.

The problem lies partly in the human propensity to see meaning in meaningless patterns and it lies partly in our in-born tendency to see only that which attracts the eye. It's the same phenomenon at work when you notice the vanity plates of passing cars on the highway. Without thinking, you pick them out, noticing the phrases and acronyms on these plates whizzing passed you at speed without making any conscious effort to rescue them from the blurry sea of traffic. Unfortunately, these conjunctions are virtually impossible to avoid no matter how random the anti-artistic construction, verbal or pictorial.

How then can one avoid creating art? How can we avoid the tyranny of meaning and aesthetics? How can one create a true anti-art? 

It may well be impossible, given the way our minds function. But one possible approach, at least from the artist's side of the equation, would be to record and present to the eye what we do not see. The world is full of stuff we don't see. It's the uninteresting stuff that forever eludes our eye. But how do we see what we don't see? It's not just a matter of looking harder or in directions we don't usually turn. Any direction we turn, anywhere we point our eyes we are failing to see what eludes our vision by the fact of our now seeing it. Have we just set ourselves another insoluble problem?

One way to capture the unseen is to take a camera, close one's eyes, or, if walking out of doors, turn one's face away from whatever direction the camera lens is pointing. The key is don't look. Don't regulate the movement of your hand. At any point whatsoever, hit the shutter button. Develop the  photo without any cropping, color adjustment, focussing, etc. This is true non-art. Random. Anonymous. A record of something you didn't see or imagine. 

Visually, the subject is very likely to be of zero interest. That is your goal. Banal, blurry, boring, perhaps partially obscured by the photographer's thumb—it should ideally be something hard to look at, a visual analogue of the found text, which itself is impossible to "read." 

To the extent that the (non)artist has succeeded in one's aimless aim, the found photograph will be something that eludes the eye even when one presents it for viewing. It should defy the human mind's compulsive pareidolia. A gallery showing of such pictures should leave no impression on the viewers mind whatsoever. It should be instantly forgettable no matter how many times you see it. To insure no one will ever consider the result "art," the artist would do well to destroy the piece unseen by anyone.

If artists are really serious about creating "non-art" and not simply making a gesture, not merely attempting to be provocative or aesthetically passive-aggressive, or childishly shielding themselves from all critique with an adult version of "I'm rubber you're glue" by preemptively declaring their art is "bad on purpose," they will create a body of work unsigned, unseen, unknown that remains forever invisible  whether they erase it themselves or display it in plain sight

But what would be the point? 

What's the point of creating anti-art in the first place?

Does there need to be one?