Bird Diary
Hong Kong Airport Gate 60 8.15am a few days ago
Two unidentified birds land briefly on the supprts of the enclosed walkway between gate and plane. Caught them as smudges on camera as they flew off.
Some timely visits to retrospectives of John Baldessari (Tate Modern) and Ed Ruscha (Hayward) both West coast Americans of a similar era, both hovering on the boundaries of conceptual art and minimalism, with reference to Dada. The wit in the work is infectious.
Ed Ruscha ‘words as landscape’.
On TV last night ‘Horizon: The secret life of dogs’ and their underrated intelligence by us humans (not unusual). Also Natural World on New Guinea’s incredible birds of paradise.
Which reminded me of Michel de Montaigne (1500s) quoted in Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Animal that therefore I am’ (1997):
‘How does he [the human being] know, by the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings of animals? By what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity that he attributes to them?’
Montaigne ‘attributes much to the animal, beginning with a type of language…and [he] recognises in the animal … a capacity to respond’ (Derrida):
‘it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals; for what is it but speech, this faculty we see in them of complaining, rejoicing, calling to each other for help, inviting each other to love, as they do by the use of their voice? How could they not speak to one another? They certainly speak to us, and we to them. In how many ways do we not speak to our dogs? And they answer us. We talk to them in another language, with other names, than to birds, hogs, oxen, horses; and we change the idiom according to the species’ (Michel de Montaigne ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’)
“How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless be speech, and a kind of undefined promise to communicate, guaranteed by the incessant coming and going of solitary words”
Maurice Blanchot Everyday Speech 1962
“What happens when nothing happens?”
Stephen Johnstone Intro to Recent Art and the Everyday in The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art 2008
“The banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? (…) How are we to speak of these common things, how to track them down, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they are mired, how to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what it is, who we are”.
George Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974
