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.
