LA Art Review: "For the Birds" at The Box

Here's the set up: in a small gallery in Los Angeles' Chinatown, two artists have installed an elaborate cluster of birdhouses and populated them with pigeons. Other than a camera and a television monitor projected upward toward the birds, the storefront gallery has been stripped of all furnishings. Its broad plate-glass windows have been marked so that the birds don't mistakenly fly into them. This is, perhaps, a "bird's space." Well, not entirely. For, our artists have also taken up residence in the gallery, albeit downstairs in a basement "situation room" filled with computers and editing equipment. There they will remain (dressed in fluffy, zippered, "bird-friendly" vests) for twenty one days - - one day, we are told, for each of the twenty one birds implicated in this business.



"What's the point?," we may be tempted to ask. "How is this art?" Or, less charitably, "What the *#%!?" As someone who likes him some performance art and is keenly interested in contemporary art more broadly, Old Ken wants to offer a few ideas on exactly how we might begin to make sense of work like this and, more to the point, what kinds of criteria we can use to evaluate it.



First off, let's go with the obvious. Despite the fact that these may be perfectly serviceable birdhouses, their craftsmanship is not relevant to the artistic enterprise at work here. (Parenthetically, I would add that an art exhibition on the history of well-crafted bird houses would be a delightful caprice, but that's for later!)



So, if this is not craft-driven art, how should we apprehend it? Clearly, this is art of a conceptual variety, where a situation is created in which an idea can be explored. But what of this precious idea? According to the press release from "For the Birds", we are told : "Attempting to orient themselves towards an 'other', to de-center themselves, the artists will bend their minds toward the birds instead of requesting the opposite."



Now, this is a fun concetto as it takes a venerable theme of Western art and turns it on its ear. According to tradition, St. Francis of Assisi was supposed to have preached to the birds. As we see in this panel from the 1330s now in the Getty, St. Francis kneels in visionary rapture to receive the stigmata while surrounded by small creatures of the air. So, as opposed to this indoctrination of avian life made familiar by Christian art, our artists in Chinatown are aiming to turn the tables. At least in part, their project is enriched by this reference to pre-modern art and the religious ends it served.

It would hardly be satisfying, though, to claim that the iconography of a thirteenth century Italian mendicant is much more than a passing reference in work like this. So, to get down to those points of reference that do give the work greater motivation, we could surely analyze the rhetoric that the artists use to discuss their project. Both choreographers themselves, so their press release tell us, the artists "consider choreography to be the dynamic juxtaposition of human an avian habitats, the fixed and changing organization of the space, daily and poetic activity (like the feeding of the birds), interaction with volunteers, and the transformation of thought over an extended period of time." Understanding statements like these would presumably lead us back to French philosophy of the 1970s - - to the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau and others - - and need not detain us here.



For, there are at least two different strands of reference to post-war art that seem much more immediately influential to piece like this. First, by dint of geographical proximity is the performance art of Chris Burden (whose installation of Victorian streetlights is, incidentally, now on display in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). What's crucial in Burden's work is the tradition of the artist literally inhabiting the gallery. In his 1975 performance "White Light/White Heat" at the the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, for example, Burden lived on an elevated platform in the gallery completely out of sight for the duration of the show. Of his new home as seen above, Burden claimed: "For twenty-two days, ... I lay on the platform. During the entire piece, I did not eat, talk, or come down. I did not see anyone, and no one saw me."

Here, we might be tempted to get nice by strongly comparing the birds' houses to the elevated "artist's nest" created by Burden, or to contrast the subterranean tele-visibility of our artists with the incommunicado Burden. More compelling, I think, is the powerful play with presence enabled by these works: the no-doubt creepy awareness that viewers must have had of Burden in his 1975 perch and the intense smell, sound and subtle heat of birds perceptible in this show. Both works, we could say, make us aware of properties of living bodies to which we otherwise have no access (and, likely, gladly so).



An even strong reference to twentieth century art made by "For the Birds," though, is to the work of Joseph Beuys. In works like "I love America and America Loves Me," the German Beuys lived in a gallery with a coyote for five days.



If, again, we wanted to think of the reversal of the pedagogical direction staked out with St Francis and the artists' statement above, we might also think of Beuys' famous 1965 performance "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare," which we see reenacted by Marina Abramović above. In this work, as the title suggests, Beuys lectured to a dead rabbit on artworks in the gallery space. No doubt other references from the history of performance art might be dredged up; but, the point is that a piece like "For the Birds" can be plotted onto a grid of similar practices to which it seems to make reference and subtle manipulation.



Of course, not all of the references made by a work like this need be to the alexandrine realm of the artworld. Indeed, we might think of the immediate context in which the work is being staged - - Chinatown - - and what "living with birds" might mean to local residents. After all, China is home to nearly ten percent of worldwide fatalities from avian bird flu since 2003 and has just recently witnessed the first outbreak of the disease in nearly a year. Although installation artists are often notoriously indifferent to locals' attitudes toward their installations, such attention might be linked to the vague ecological agenda to which the artists make reference.



Here, we could tally up all the references the work suggests: to religious iconography, various strands of post-conceptual performance art, global environmental issues, and even a references to the history of art spaces as like laboratories, which I am sparing you. But, what does it all mean? An uncharitable reading might say something like this: art such as this loosely conjoins a number of references in a vague but evocative way. The pleasure to be gained from such work is nothing other than the stroking of the ego of the insider who is able to make sense of these arcane gestures.

Yet, a more positive version of this story might go something like this: ours is a culture of info-glut, one desirous of various kinds of synthetic processing of information overload. What makes contemporary works of art interesting is when they postulate relations (vague though they may be) between different domains of information and create mechanisms for understanding those domains systemically, analytically or otherwise. Whether or not "For the Birds" moves toward these latter objectives (and I am almost certain it does not), at least it provides food for thinking about what might make other works of contemporary art more successful.