big bird

So there were like 50 artists in "A Bird Tapestry" by Davis S. Rubin and I actually found maybe a half a dozen of them interesting or topical. This is more than I thought I would find. Although I like birds and their manner of transportation, I think that for the most part the subject of these artists doesn't really matter so much so as the importance that they use birds as a metaphor to talk about issues of animals and the environment that might be intangible in a normal, rational way of thinking. The plight of endangered birds is something that should be brought to our attention. Using art might bring a better understanding of an animal that might live thousands of miles away from our backyards. But I think at it's best, the art rearranges how I might naturally observe or interpret a situation or living thing.

John Salvest's piece FLY, rearranges how we might interpret birds on a wire and does it in a rather obvious way, as if birds understood the English language or as if they knew the codes and translation for how to relate this message to humans via telephone wire.  I think the piece is great for its play between coincidence and act of nature.  Does it matter whether the birds possess the knowledge to achieve this act?  The point is that they're communicating with us and we should be listening.

I found Peter Edlund's work that uses Ansel Adam's photographs of sites around Japanese internment camps in WWII interesting in how it reconsiders and re contextualizes landscape in that particular site for that particular artist.  The photographs, like the article said, were made by "artists who idolized the American wilderness with little political regard to what was actually happening around them," (Rubin 30).

Lynching in the free state of California, 1999-2000, Peter Edlund

I'm finding it hard to immediately relate these paintings to race.  Edlund took the liberty to paint in where slaves were being lynched or other narratives about the history of slavery in the land where the Hudson River school paintings were often situated. Other than that fact (which he more than obviously points out in captions beneath his paintings) these paintings to me, really talk more about authorship.   The fact that he is now taking authorship, metaphorically, of land that was interpreted by white men in the 19th century, is important. It really didn't matter if he painted in the lynching or slaves.   Later, after these first series of paintings, he created another series where he introduced birds in the landscape in the tradition of Audubon, idealized and in a way hyper-real.

State Birds of the Slave States, 2001, Peter Edlund

Edlund incorporates birds in a way that idealized them like Audubon and Audubon was of mixed race. Beyond this interesting relationship, I'm having trouble finding the paintings themselves or the way they were crafted interesting. So I won't dwell on them any longer.

Roni Horn's work is really fascinating in how it explores identity (or mistaken identity). It reminds me of that song on Sesame Street, "one of these things is not like the other..." It sort of becomes a game to examine and figure out if the birds are different or if they're of the same species. The work plays with how humans assume or mistakenly assume a lot about what they're looking at. Horn's work doesn't really give us an answer and that's fine, it's better that way and it probably shouldn't. Birds don't give us answers either, the point is that we discover how we come to these assumptions and that we understand the differences between what looks to be two identical animals.

Untitled#2, 1999, Roni Horn

The diptychs are probably my favorite pieces in the article that I've found. My favorite piece that I haven't found online yet but swear I've seen in person is Michal Rovner's installation Of Mutual Interest where projections of flocks of birds fly from screen to screen on three walls in a square room. The piece is similar in Horn's in how the viewer examines and goes back and forth from point to point, examining relationships and what they know to what they're actually seeing.

Videos of nature and how we humans examine it and come to know it are probably my favoritest videos ever (Thank you Andy Goldsworthy!). So much so that I made a video piece of my own some four years ago in undergrad about my own relationship with landscape. In particular- the landscape surrounding the Missouri River and how by exploring it, I simultaneously coexist with it and interrupt it. This doesn't need to be critiqued but if it is whatever...

I've posted still shots from Untitled #6 (Missouri River) because the compressed movie is still way to big for blogger to handle. I might show the movie in class sometime if we have time...