Yart

My ex-husband coined the word "yart" when we were living in Columbus, Ohio, to describe the phenomena wherein Americans decorate their yards with Americana type art (yard art in other words). The tiny plots of land outside their front door, in addition to being landscaped with trees and rocks or flowers, get various man-man items scattered about as well. Sometimes these are things like old-fashioned wagons or other antiques (my parents have an antique fire pump outside their weekend place in the desert, for instance). Other times it is store bought items; one particularly popular one was a two-dimensional metal cut out of a cowboy leaning against a wall, a silhouette of a bygone person. Some people have gotten creative and mixed together various old items to form something new, like the bottle tree my mother-in-law has (a tree trunk with various colored glass bottles stuck where the branches used to be). 

Yart is not very common here in Iceland, mostly I guess because of the wind, although some people in the countryside keep old boats outdoors on the property, and this seems to me also an artistic statement. Otherwise, the outdoor art tends to be public art, commissioned pieces by known artists, placed in parks and traffic circles. I think this is sort of a shame; one could easily just gather up all the trash blowing around here and make a huge sculpture out of it. This kind of "found art", made from broken bits of this or that, is absolutely my favorite. The Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore has some truly amazing sculptures of this type, and it seems to me to be simultaneously a statement about caring for our resources, valuing the old, while at the same time a testament to man's creativity and genius. Here in Iceland people would tend to think the person was just crazy, for welding together broken bits of bicycles and home appliances. But maybe I can start a new trend?