Fertile Ground

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED NOV. 2, 2006

As a teenager in Glen Ellyn, Ill., Jason Bitner worked at a recycling factory. His job was to separate the glossy paper from the newsprint, and as he sorted, he would happen upon bits and pieces of people’s personal lives. “I’d get these little glimpses into my town,” says Bitner, 32, seated in his tiny Tribeca office at 349 Broadway. “An elderly woman’s shopping list, a husband’s note to his wife.”

Sixteen years later, Bitner has made a career of collecting cast-offs. With his friend Davy Rothbart, who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., the pair launched their first project, Found Magazine, in 2001. Using materials they’d found themselves or snagged from friends’ refrigerators, they patched together a zine.

Word got around about the first issue, and readers began contributing their finds, such as love letters (“Dear Jessica, I have a couple of questions. 1. Would it be to early to start holding hands?”), to-do lists (“…weather stripping, write some fucking letters already, sun-dried tomatoes, goat cheese…”) and notes passed in class (“Be careful cause your purple panties were showing”). Then there are the snapshots—cute, puzzling and bizarre.

Hundreds of such found items are on display at Apex Art in Tribeca, as part of “Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing,” an exhibit curated by Andrea Grover. Found itself has become a many-tentacled enterprise, with something of a cult following. Along with live performances and art exhibits, there are books and CDs, and an X-rated version of the magazine called Dirty Found.

Found’s circulation is about 40,000, and the Website (www.foundmagazine.com) gets some three million hits a year.

“We’re trying to point out similarities between our lives and other people’s lives,” says Bitner. “Like when you see a really tough break-up letter, you think ‘Man, I remember when that happened to me.’”

One such note, found in a Los Angeles airport, begins: “I think this is it for us,” in scribbled block print. “It has been for awhile. You don’t even know how much of a tremendous loss this is for me.” The letter goes on for some time, written on the back and front of a airplane sick bag. A collage of oddities adorns the walls of the Found office. Children’s drawings and home-made porn are there in equal measure, and the room is dominated by a banner-size drawing of what appear to be mating rats, a blown-up version of an old find.

In September, Bitner moved his office from Chicago into the Tribeca space; his partner, Rothbart, heads Found Magazine from their Midwest base.

After years of combing through submissions, it takes a little more to surprise Bitner than it once did. But he says every few days he receives something that blows him away. To illustrate, he pulls out a Minneapolis find with the header “Monthly Budget.”

It is a carefully itemized, typewritten list. “Rent: $600,” it begins. The conscientious listmaker goes on to account methodically for cable costs, phone bills, transportation expenses. Then, just after “Food: $500,” comes “Liquor: $600, incl. bars. ($20 per day),” followed in rapid succession by “Laundry: $30, Crack: $600, and Attorney: $250.”

“It’s really telling,” says Bitner, laughing. “There’s basically like 20 words, but you get a good idea of this person’s life.”

Other finds are intriguing because of what they don’t tell you, the backstory they hint at but do not reveal. Like the dollar bill a reader in New Jersey found. It reads: “Saige, I am sorry. I do miss you and I love you. Love, your Mom. May 18, 2005.” The words are poignant all by themselves, and then one wonders, why are they written on a dollar bill? Was the argument about money? Did Saige spend the dollar without seeing the note?

Bitner admits that there is an element of voyeurism to it all. But years of scrap-paper snooping have also changed the way he sees the world.

“I don’t think of myself as being so special anymore,” he says. “You start to see that pretty much everyone is dealing with the same emotional complexities. We just present it in different ways.”

“Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing” at Apex Art, 291 Church St., to Nov. 25. Tue–Sat, 11 am–6 pm. 212-431-5270, www.apexart.org. On Nov. 8 at 6:30 pm,, Davy Rothbart performs a reading of his favorite finds. On Nov. 15 at 6:30 pm, Jeff Howe speaks on “art and crowdsourcing.”