The Pigeon

Musing on pigeons

I was drawn to writing about pigeons today for two reasons.

Firstly, weirdly, a small pigeon feather carried by the wind circled me as I was sitting and reading during my lunch break, and floated into my bag, almost as if it was meant purely for me.

Secondly, I later saw a pigeon bunch itself up and do a massive shit, inches away from the head of a passer by. It made a satisfying splat, and you could tell that this pigeon was pleased with itself; it’s whole body relaxed and it had a certain kind of look in it’s eye.

These small events got me thinking. Pigeons are great.

And pigeons can be viewed as rebels, usurpers.

A friend told me once that pigeons, derided for the very fact that they are pigeons, are actually a kind of dove, which alone gives them an unassuming grandeur.

They were originally drawn to urban sprawl because they confused it with their original, rocky habitat. It’s almost as though they are pissed off by being deceived, so much so that they take pleasure on shitting on the man made madness that has become their habitat.

Pigeons are quite elegant, and are perhaps the only obvious wildlife in the urban environment (perhaps the best evidence I have for this was masses of people’s fascination with an adventurous mouse on the tube the other week… pigeons just don’t get that kind of attention). On occasion they encourage passers by to chase them and can delight children, breaking the urban monotony. And yet, at the same time they are so familiar in the environment that they have become part of the fabric of towns and cities.

The pigeons have a status beyond themselves; they read initially as scum, “rats with wings,” and yet they are doves, with biblical proportions. But they remain indifferent to their status and us (unless for some gain); they are modest and totally zen.

They are a kind of disruptive anomaly amongst the order, and yet they usurp the order whilst being a part of it. Surely the best means of rebellion/subversion; become a part of the system you aim to disrupt. Anthony Huberman writes in Naïve Set Theory that awareness of the

“double bind between refusal and complicity – inextricably linked, the former is unable to prevent the latter – many contemporary artists have chosen a more balanced relationship between disruption and compliance…’power flows not from masking but from an unmasking which masks more than masking does.’ Art hasn’t lost it’s subversive edge, but saying yes has revealed itself to be an effective means of saying no.”

The pigeons, apparently, have already perfected the balance.

The kind of modest rebellion pigeons represent for me really gets to that hopeful, romantic bit of me, that got me into making art in the first place.

They undermine the order that they are part of, they are free, in so many ways we are not. They are constrained by the city, and yet, at their choosing they can just fly away. I believe we can learn a lot from their example.

We should never calmly accept our circumstances, but always feel free to speak up, in whatever modest way, in the way that I have always believed art can. Use pigeons as your examples.

Fiona Tan: Cloud Island

My first experience of Fiona Tan was back in the 53^rd Venice Biennale with her show Disorient in the Dutch pavilion. I recall that the work was simultaneously stunning, very beautiful and intensely warm and heartfelt.

The work I first encountered, and which sticks so clearly in my memory, were from the piece Provenance (2008) displayed at the show. Concerned with people and portraiture, the images had an alluring luminosity that I could not understand, until of course these still images shuffled slightly, moved. These were not images at all, but high definition films; the audience encounter with them thus changed drastically. You were experiencing another person, through film, in a very intimate way; it breathed life into portraiture in a way that I have not experienced in some time.

So, naturally, I held high expectations of the film Cloud Island at the Frith Street Gallery in London. And my expectations were met.

The intimacy is still there in Cloud Island; Tan visited a remote Japanese island for the film, with an aged population and with her film she gets into the fabric of their reality. Any dialogue is rendered unimportant; this is very much about the incommunicable experience of the place, the people and their peaceful existence, just as Provenance was equally about that unspeakable quality between people.

It becomes almost as if the audience were another member of the island society, helped along with the occasional ‘conversation’ the audience has with a woman showing photographs. But of course the conversations are in Japanese, so the audience is offered some distance, and the lack of narrative throughout the film imitates the indifference of life.

Don’t think however that Tan is cold in her approach; quite the contrary, she lets us indulge lazily with the islanders, as if wandering on a Sunday afternoon, taking in the sounds, the scenery and the people. Though Tan is in control of the audience, you don’t feel forced into this kind of serenity; that simply would not work. The audience is lulled into the islander’s pace, an especially great feat when you consider that Frith Gallery’s closeness to the bustle of Piccadilly and Soho – the audience immersion is complete.

One particularly poignant moment is when the audience catches a man asleep in his garden. We just watch him, breathing heavily, as insects float by. We watch for a while, gentle voyeurs, and drink in the scene, with its calmness, and perfect, but not distracting, composition.

Thus Tan does not disappoint; she transports us to the island wholly and completely, the audience powerless to resist, totally immersed in the lives of these people, feeling a kinship without words, experiencing a true portrait.

Beuys Has the best words.

“Money and capital cannot be an economic value, capital is human dignity and creativity.”

“I say only that I have done certain experiments and explorations that have stimulated discussion… I certainly do not claim that any lasting value attaches to these experiments that I have conducted… my concern can only be…whether one can bring people to and into this kind of movement, in the culture that holds and has held sway, and has numbed them into inaction; whether things can be freed up and released, so that people can accomplish this together.”

I’m currently reading a Beuys book called What is Art? edited by Volker Harlan and translated into English, where these quotes come from… Beuys speaks a lot of sense. In my opinion, essential reading.

Have a read…

“The Infinite Library is an ongoing project by Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda.

It is primarily an expanding archive of books, each created out of pages of one or more found books and bound anew. The online catalogue serves as an index.”

I was drawn to this by the close relationship to the Borges story, The Library of Babel, an infinite library made up of hexagonal rooms, in which there exists every combination imaginable of letters and words. Different combinations convey differing meanings.

“In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö.

These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library.

I cannot combine some characters

dhcmrlchtdj

which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning.”

– Borges

For me this incarnation, the visual form of the infinite library, champions creativity; it looks gorgeous and the re-use and recontextualisation of the images are like a source of endless inspiration – you could have the same book with one image misplaced, and it could convey a wholly different meaning. There’s a weightiness, and an astounding simplicity too.

Awesome. For the infinite library click here, for Borges’ fiction, click here.