Author: fiona.bartl

As I continue documenting these small scenes, these frozen moments of unplanned composition, I’m realizing how much they mirror the act of photography itself: a moment held in place, briefly meaningful, before it disappears. Some installations I find are funny. Some feel tragic. Some are just confusing. But all of them whisper something, even if I don’t always know what.

Here are two recent finds. Both from the same day in Graz, one in the morning on my way to university, and one in the evening, just outside my apartment.

Observation 1:

Graz – near university

A small child’s scooter, lime green, plastic, low to the ground. It’s locked with a heavy-duty adult bike lock to a thick black metal railing, surrounded by full-sized bicycles. At first glance, it’s funny. Almost absurd. Who’s going to steal a toddler’s scooter? Is it really necessary to protect it like a prized vehicle? But then I paused, and the image changed.

There’s a tension here. Between play and control.
The scooter is a symbol of freedom, of chaotic childhood energy. Something designed to move, to glide, to roll fast and fall hard. But here, it’s immobilized, chained to the structure of grown-up life surrounded by gears, spokes, regulations. It’s being treated like a real object, forced into the system of locks and fears. On one hand, the lock says “I care about this.” But on the other, it says “You can’t go anywhere.” Is this about safety or control? It’s like the scooter knows it was meant to move, and now it waits. A toy, arrested in motion. Childhood, on hold. Or maybe I’m projecting. Maybe it’s just locked up so a kid doesn’t scream about their missing scooter. That’s the thing about these moments: they leave just enough room for you to wonder.

Observation 2:

Graz – evening, outside my apartment

Two bottles on a scratched-up electricity box on a sidewalk. One Bronchostop, a cough syrup. The other Jägermeister, a dark herbal liqueur that’s usually anything but medicinal. The arrangement is almost too good. So perfectly misplaced that it feels staged. Was it a coincidence? Or a statement?

It’s one of my favorite finds so far because it’s so loaded with contradiction and yet it’s silent. It doesn’t explain itself. But the metaphors are loud. There’s something incredibly human about these two bottles standing next to each other. One is meant to heal, the other to numb. One comes from the pharmacy, the other from the bar. But both get poured into your body when something doesn’t feel right.

It made me wonder:
Was this someone trying to take care of themselves, but giving up halfway through the effort?
Or someone who mixed both on purpose, convinced that health and hedonism don’t have to cancel each other out?

Maybe the Jäger came after the Bronchostop. Maybe it came before. Maybe they belonged to two different people, and this is just the city making art while no one’s watching. But there’s also a strange sense of sadness here. Like someone meant to fix something, but didn’t get there. The bottles feel abandoned, like forgotten decisions.

In my last blogpost, I reflected on authorship and the fine line between staging something and simply witnessing it. I came to the conclusion that maybe it doesn’t really matter whether something is planned or found what matters is whether we see it. Whether we stop long enough to ask: what is this doing here?

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking more and more about the things I don’t stage. The ones I don’t plant, but stumble across. For almost a year now, I’ve been documenting these accidental arrangements, small moments of unintentional beauty, absurdity or tension in public space.

I wasn’t planning on doing anything with them. But lately, the thought of making them visible of sharing my lens kept resurfacing. So I created an Instagram account. @notsosureifart

It was the first name that came to my mind, I didn’t overthink it. But after I sent the first few follow requests to friends, one of them texted me and said:

“Wait… does that say Not so sure I fart?”

Oopsie, I maybe should’ve thought about it more. If you read it too quickly or without spacing it, it becomes an entirely different kind of expression.

Not so sure I fart.

Honestly, quite funny. The more I thought about it, the more I started to love it. The accidental comedy, the embarrassing randomness of it all, it fits. It’s exactly what everyday installations are.
They’re moments that aren’t quite right, but also kind of perfect. So I’m keeping the name. And I’m starting to post.

First Observation: Pizza Meets Banana

Let’s start with one I captured in Vienna’s 10th district, at the base of a long, grey staircase. The space itself is cold, textured, structured. Concrete blocks. Worn yellow line. Functional. Urban. But then there’s the placement: A pizza carton flattened out. And on top of it, almost centered: A dark, wrinkled banana peel. I didn’t touch it. I didn’t adjust it. I didn’t even pause for long. I just saw it, lifted my phone, and walked on. But even in that moment, something clicked. There’s a kind of accidental balance here between nourishment and neglect, fast food and fruit, indulgence and decay. Between the printed, branded flatness of the pizza carton, and the organic curve of the banana skin. One is processed. The other is natural. One has color, text, identity. The other is just… a leftover. But together, they feel like a quiet comment on how we consume, discard, and overlap things in the city. There’s also a weird kind of irony in how the banana, typically seen as the “healthy option,” looks so much more dead than the pizza bag does. And the placement right next to the last step of a descending staircase adds an unspoken tension. It’s not centered, not theatrical, but it has just enough presence to stop you if you’re paying attention.

This is what I love about these kinds of moments:
They aren’t trying to say anything.
But if you choose to listen, there’s often something to hear.

By documenting them, I’m not claiming authorship. I’m just noticing.
And now, I’m sharing, on the web.

If you stage it, is it still real?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve placed stalks of: painted, raw, standing alone, staged with people. Each time, I tried to do as little as possible, to gently nudge an object into public space and observe how the world would respond. Sometimes people noticed. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they cleaned it up. Sometimes they let it be.

But one question kept hovering in the background:

“If you place it there yourself, is it still an everyday installation?”

This tension between spontaneity and authorship is where things get complicated. Can something still be considered accidental if I deliberately construct the illusion of accident? Or does that act of construction cancel out the magic?

The Charm of the Unplanned

Part of what makes everyday installations so captivating is that they’re unintentional. They feel found, not made. They are, by nature, unscripted like pizza carton, an empty bottle of broncho stop of a childs toy. No one planned them. No one curated them. And yet they resonate. They offer beauty without trying. That’s their entire point. So when I place a celery stalk on a ledge, even if it looks like a found object, it’s not. I put it there. It’s performance dressed as randomness.

This brings me to a quote I’ve kept coming back to throughout this process:

“Art is what you can get away with.” – Andy Warhol.

In other words: if I can make you believe that a piece of celery has somehow ended up in the perfect spot, framed by shadows, echoed by textures, charged with unspoken questions then maybe the illusion is enough.

But is that honest? Does the viewer deserve to know that what they’re seeing is staged?
Or is the not-knowing part of the experience? The audience becomes part of the scene without realizing it. Their reaction or lack of one completes the piece. Which means: even if the object is placed with intention, the experience remains authentic for those who encounter it unknowingly. Maybe it doesn’t matter who placed it. Maybe what matters is whether someone paused to ask, “What is this doing here?”

Between Found and Made

I think the answer lies somewhere in-between. Yes, I staged it. But I also let it go. Once it was placed, I didn’t control the story anymore. I didn’t explain it, label it, or guide the viewer. I just watched. In that sense, the work sits in a liminal zone:
Not quite found, but not fully imposed.
Not completely real, but not fake either.

What I’ve Learned So Far

If this experiment series has taught me anything, it’s that every gesture carries weight, even the quiet ones. Especially the quiet ones. People might not always notice. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t work.

Sometimes, the art isn’t in the object, it’s in the act:
Placing. Waiting. Watching. Wondering.

After the staged group performance at FH Joanneum, I wanted to try something else:
What happens when you don’t stage anything? When you let the celery fend for itself, with no curated audience, no fake note-takers, and no performative hype?

Originally, my next plan was to place it at Graz Hauptplatz—a public, central, neutral space not wrapped in art-school context. But vecause of the recent tragic events, it didn’t feel appropriate. The Hauptplatz is covered in candles, photos, and flowers. I didn’t want to insert something playful into that space.
Art needs awareness of timing, not just space. So when the weekend took me to Vienna, I had new ground to explore.

MuseumsQuartier, Vienna

Despite the name, the MuseumsQuartier isn’t a museum. It’s more of a cultural hangout zone: cafés, restaurants, and chill-out steps. There’s art in the area, yes but it’s not a gallery space. It’s normal/neutral ground. People are here to eat, talk, flirt, scroll, argue, read. Not necessarily to interpret what’s leaning against a wall. Which made it the perfect place. I chose a spot just next to a café, leaned the celery against a low ledge, and took a seat a few meters away. Funny thing was I was on a date and it was actually a great conversation starter (or red flag, depending on your perspective).  Maybe my celery actions is a solid warning label for what to expect lol.

Over the course of about an hour, nothing happened. People passed. People sipped coffee. Dogs trotted by. A few kids played on scooters. It wasn’t touched it wasn’t thrown away. It was just invisible. And that, in itself, said something.

This experiment reminded me a lot of the first attempt at the Hornig Gelände Graz. That time, the celery was also unannounced and unguarded but it was removed by staff who saw it as misplaced waste. Here in Vienna, it wasn’t removed. It wasn’t even acknowledged.
No one “cleaned it up,” because no one saw it as something out of place. Or it just didn’t matter enough to trigger a response. In Graz, the space was highly structured everything there was supposed to have meaning. So something like celery broke the code. In the MuseumsQuartier, everything is casual and chaotic. A bit of randomness blends in.

In other words:
In Graz, the celery stood out just enough to be erased.
In Vienna, it blended in so well it disappeared without needing to go anywhere.

Rampenlicht oder kein Rampenlicht

This made me think about how visibility isn’t just about contrast, it’s about context. Sometimes, trying to stand out in a chaotic environment only makes you blend in more.  Maybe the celery was too quiet for the MuseumsQuartier. Even without a reaction, I still count this as a successful attempt. Sometimes, indifference is louder than critique. This celery had its moment. It stood in a city that didn’t care.
And maybe that’s not failure. Maybe that’s freedom.

After my previous two celery interventions I wondered:
What if the problem wasn’t the object at all, but the audience? What if the celery didn’t need to change we did?

So for this third experiment, I shifted my focus away from the vegetable itself and toward the reaction. Not natural reactions. Staged ones. Because in the end, most of us look to others when deciding how to respond to something unfamiliar. Curiosity is contagious. Confusion, too. You probably know that classic social experiment: Place a few people on a busy street and have them look up.
Before long, passersby will start doing the same, searching the sky for meaning, even if there’s nothing there. There’s a term for that: social proof, the idea that we take cues from others to determine what’s valuable, interesting or worth paying attention to.

The Setup

The location: FH Joanneum campus, in the space between buildings 152 and 154. It’s a place where students and lecturers pass through regularly. I leaned a regular (unpainted ) celery stalk against a wall. Then, I recruited three classmates who were in on the plan.

Phase 1: They simply stood around the celery, staring at it.
Phase 2: They had notebooks and pretended to take notes.
Phase 3: They began discussing it out loud, commenting, theorizing, asking questions 

Nothing much happened. Some students walked by without a second glance. A few others looked over, maybe puzzled, but didn’t stop. One person slowed down, looked for a few seconds, and kept going. That was it. We didn’t draw a crowd. We didn’t cause a scene. And that was kind of fascinating.

Design School as a Buffer Zone

Here’s my theory: because we were standing on a design campus, the entire act was already halfway normalized. If three students are gathered around a wall, admiring something random, could just be another weird student project, right? We’re in Communication Design. We’re supposed to be odd. In another context, a shopping mall, a corporate place, maybe we would’ve drawn more attention. Maybe people would’ve been curious. But in this setting art is expected.

Afterward, I asked my classmates how they felt during the performance. And to no surprise: awkward They felt awkward, almost embarrassed.
Pretending to be fascinated by a vegetable even as a joke made them feel weird. Honestly, I love that. It meant the experiment didn’t just act on others, it acted on us.

We were simulating awe, but still feeling something real: discomfort, playfulness, curiosity. Maybe that’s the fascinating part of performance art, it turns everyone involved into both subject and audience. This experiment made me think about how often we borrow meaning from others. How much of our interest is truly self-generated? If a crowd forms, we assume something important is happening. If no one reacts, we move on. So what happens when we manufacture the crowd?
Does the art become more “real”? Or more absurd?

The first celery experiment was subtle, almost invisible. It disappeared quietly, without leaving a trace, except for the one it left in my thoughts. So I started wondering: What if I made it less subtle? What if I made it scream and shout? My idea: use acrylic paint to cover the celery in white. Not to disguise it, but to emphasize it. To make it feel intentional. A deliberate object. Not something you’d accidentally drop but something you’d place with a purpose. If the raw celery was too “real” to be noticed as art, maybe painting it would help it cross that threshold.

The Second Intervention

A few days after the first experiment, I returned to the Hornig Gelände. This time, I placed a celery stalk painted entirely in white on the same platform. It stood out a bit more. Not dramatically, but enough to catch the eye if you were even half paying attention. It looked altered. Like it had been part of something. A prop, maybe? An object waiting for a role? And then I waited again. This time, the celery stayed in place longer (nearly two hours) before disappearing. But unlike the first time, I couldn’t find it in any nearby trash bin. I looked. I checked multiple locations. It wasn’t there.

Art, Theft, or Cleaning Duty?

Where did it go? Was it thrown away again, but elsewhere? Did someone find it interesting and take it home? Was it considered more valuable now that it was visibly “modified”? Or had it become just another strange object that didn’t belong? Guess I’ll never know. There’s something symbolic about painting an object white. It cleans it, purifies it, turns it into a blank canvas. The celery wasn’t edible anymore. It wasn’t just organic waste. It had been separated from its origin. It had become something else even if no one knew what that something was. In a way, painting it felt like a quiet attempt to legitimize it. A way of saying: “This is not trash. This is something.”
But who was I trying to convince?

Does Intention Matter If No One Knows?

That’s the question that kept returning. If no one knows the backstory, if no one sees the act of transformation, can intention still carry weight? Maybe the white paint worked. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe someone admired it. Maybe someone laughed. Or maybe, again, someone just wanted to clean the space and threw it out without a second thought. Either way, I had changed something. Not the world but the celery.

Sometimes inspiration doesn’t come from a museum, a theory, or an artist talk. A few weeks ago, I was walking past a Billa during my usual weekly errands. Outside, near the entrance, I saw something strange: a single celery stalk resting awkwardly on the pavement. It didn’t look like it was meant to be there. No bag. No shopping cart nearby. It was just sitting there.

For a brief moment, the scene triggered a quiet tension in my brain: the visual oddness, the randomness, the accidental arrangement. This is an everyday installations. The kind of moments that only become visible if you’re looking for them. Maybe this wasn’t a mistake at all. Maybe it was intentional. A comment on waste, on food, on placement. I had no idea. But it stuck with me. That’s how this entire experiment series started: with one stalk of celery that looked like it was trying to say something.

The First Intervention

I wanted to find out what might happen if I took that accidental composition and recreated it intentionally. I chose a space I knew would be full of movement, design, and people looking with “open” eyes: the venue of Designmonat Graz “Hornig Gelände”.

The idea was simple: I placed an untouched, raw celery stalk on an elevated surface in a central part of the space. There were exhibitions happening around it and workshops taking place. People passed by. The celery was unlabelled and unframed. And then I waited.

I came back to check on it a few times. At first, nothing happened. A few people walked past without even noticing. No one stopped. No one questioned it. And then after about 20 minutes it was gone. Just like that. My immediate instinct was to look around. Had someone taken it? Had someone seen it as a threat to cleanliness? I checked the nearest trash can. And there it was. Alone, discarded, lying sideways on top of a bunch of trash.

The Performance That Never Happened

The moment had so much quiet comedy to it. The celery so confidently placed, so stoic had been removed without a trace of hesitation. It hadn’t caused a scene. It hadn’t been documented, photographed (by someone else than me) or even acknowledged. It was simply deemed “not supposed to be there” and swiftly deleted from the scene. But to me, this was already a kind of result. In a strange way, the act of being ignored and then disposed said more than a dramatic reaction ever could. There’s something deeply poetic about a stalk of celery trying to perform trying to “be” and getting shut down before it could finish its sentence.

Art, or Just Trash?

This experiment reminded me of how contextual fragility works in art. We say “everything can be art,” but what we mean is “everything can become art if framed properly.” This celery had no frame. No title. No spotlight. It lived in a curated environment, but it was never invited in. And so it failed. Or maybe that failure was its success.

It made me ask:
Would it have survived longer if it were labeled?
Would someone have Instagrammed it if I had printed a little plaque?
How much does presentation matter when the object is this banal?

In the first semester, my blog entries were all about thinking: observing, analyzing, questioning. I explored the blurred lines of what art is or could be. Everyday installations. The role of context. Insiders vs. outsiders. The idea that art may not be about objects at all, but about perception, intention and attention.

But theory can only take you so far.

This semester, things are different. Now we’re asked to do something. To test our ideas. To fail. To get our hands dirty, literally, if necessary. These next blog entries are part of that next step.
You could say I took the idea of “experimentation” quite literally.
I went outside. I placed things. I waited. I watched.
I used a very ordinary object, a stalk of celery, and treated it as a kind of artistic tool. The goal? To observe how people respond to something utterly mundane placed in the “wrong” context or perhaps the right one, depending on how you look at it haha.

What happened wasn’t loud or dramatic. No one cried, no one clapped, no one wrote a headline. These upcoming blogposts focus on one iteration of this experiment. They describe what I did, where I did it, and how people responded (or didn’t). They also explore what these reactions might say about perception, intention, authorship, and public space.

Can context alone make something art?
Does intention matter if no one knows it?
Does silence count as feedback?
Can something become art by being thrown away?
This is the thread I’m following. And I invite you to follow along.
So here we go: celery, confusion, and the quiet comedy of public experimentation.
I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I did. Have fun reading

If someone points at a mundane object and calls it art, does it become art? This question strikes at the heart of how we define art. For some, seeing art in everyday objects is a mark of creativity. For others, it’s an absurd notion that undermines the value of traditional art forms.

Can People Who See Art in Everything Be Considered Crazy, Happy or Sad?

Imagine someone who finds meaning in every aspect of life—from the way sunlight filters through a window to the symmetry of a building’s shadow. Are they unusually attuned to the world around them, or are they projecting their own emotions onto their surroundings?

Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche have suggested that seeing meaning everywhere can be both a burden and a gift. It may reflect a heightened sensitivity to life, but it can also reveal an emotional need to create order or purpose where none exists.

Does Perception Alone Make Something Art?

The idea that perception itself can turn something into art is central to modern and conceptual art movements. Artists like Duchamp challenged traditional definitions by asserting that the act of selection and presentation is enough to elevate an object into the realm of art.

When interviewing people about installations, one can notice how their perceptions shape their experience. Some might see profound statements in simple arrangements, while others dismiss them entirely. This subjectivity suggests that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it needs a perceiver to complete the process of meaning-making.

the Act of Giving Meaning = the Core of Art

At its core, art is about giving meaning. Whether it’s the artist declaring, “This object has meaning because I say it does,” or the audience finding their own emotional connection, the creation of meaning is what transforms the mundane into the extraordinary.

But this act of meaning-making can also be divisive. For some, it’s liberating to think that anything can be art. For others, this openness feels like it erodes the skill, effort, and tradition that many associate with “real art.”

The beauty of this debate is that there’s no single answer. Art lives in the balance between perception, intention, and meaning. Whether it’s a masterpiece hanging in a gallery or a forgotten object rediscovered and reframed, the process of seeing, assigning meaning, and discussing it makes art a vital part of human experience.

Thank you for joining me on this research journey. I had a lot of fun and am looking forward to our second semester.

Have a nice semester break and see you soon. xoxo Fiona

Who decides what qualifies as art? Is it the artist, the audience, or the broader society? This question gains even more significance when we look at modern installations that challenge traditional notions of what art is supposed to be.

Example: Duchamp submitted a urinal to an art exhibition, labeling it as art simply by giving it a title and signing it. His bold act set the stage for the debates we’re still having today: does the artist’s intent alone make something art or does the audience’s reaction play an equally important role?

The Artist’s Intent vs. The Viewer’s Perception

An artist’s intent often serves as the foundation for a work of art. They imbue an object, a scene, or an installation with meaning, hoping to communicate something to their audience. But once the artwork is released into the world, it takes on a life of its own. The audience’s interpretation can diverge dramatically from what the artist originally envisioned.

Consider a hypothetical installation of scattered objects in a public square. One observer might see it as a critique of consumerism, while another might view it as an homage to chaos. These interpretations may have little to do with what the artist intended, yet they add layers of meaning to the work.

Does Misinterpretation Enrich or Detract From Art?

When audiences misinterpret an artwork, does it diminish its value? Or does the diversity of interpretations make it richer? Many argue that art is at its best when it invites multiple perspectives. In interviews with people responding to modern installations, many expressed personal and emotional connections to the work—connections that might have been far removed from the artist’s original message. Yet, these responses weren’t invalid. Instead, they demonstrate the collaborative nature of meaning-making in art.

Ultimately, no one has the final say in defining art. The tension between the artist’s intent and the viewer’s perception is what keeps art alive. Art is not a fixed entity; it’s a dynamic conversation between creation and interpretation, constantly evolving as it moves through time and culture.