August 6-20, 2023
For the Birds 2
A Response to Lauren Sudbrink’s For the Birds
by Max Guy
Fluxus was not an “ism.” As in, there is no fluxist. There is no fluxism. There were and are ideologies underpinning Fluxus, but Fluxus is not an ideology in and of itself. Seemingly, no Fluxus artist is more or less of a Fluxus artist than any other affiliate. Just like no bird is more or less a bird than any other, some people might say George Maciunas was, as founder, the most Fluxus of them all, but this assumption is counterintuitive to the lateral structure of the collective.
The collective proposed collapsing of audience and artist, averting a work’s conclusion, making actions scalable, resourceful, almost parasitic employment of banal objects, and making labor and work indistinguishable. With its far-reaching possibilities, Fluxus throws a wrench into the spokes of art history and turns art historians into anthropologists. We’ll leave it to the art historians to establish a hierarchy (a pecking order) among the expansive and amorphous bunch. Birds throw a wrench into the spokes of artistic practice in that they show us its joyful redundancy with the world as it is. Without knowing Lauren Sudbrink’s investment or interest in Fluxus, her work For the Birds invokes its collective characteristics.
The happening itself was photogenic, composed, and constructed. Yes, people attended the closing reception of For the Birds, but I mostly captured the birds present on camera. What kind of birds were they? Sparrows, probably. Two or three Fledglings would perch on the White Mulberry tree just feet from the porch and intermittently land on the instruments suspended there. Fledglings are light, making minimal noise when landing and pecking on the feed, inevitably shaking the bells attached to them by a cable. Then, there were tambourines containing seeds hung from the porch ceiling.
Lauren wasn’t there, but if we consider all birds part of some large, global sound studio, she was somehow still in the picture. And if you listen to birds, they are like a collective sound studio, right? Even the movement of their wings makes a natural sound, which humans have inevitably needed to “invent.” Owls, for example, can fly stealthily through the night because of the nature of their wings and feathers. And besides, who’s to say she wasn’t there? I have no photos of people from that day. And besides, who’s to say it’s over? There are so many questions for a work that speaks more to the idea or the impossibility of listening to the world in summation.
The instruments are eaten, not played, or they’re perches. Imagine the slurp of your drink, more pleasing to the ear. The omission of “playing” from the engagement with instruments is perhaps one of the greatest innovations of some unnamed Fluxus affiliate. That’s the last time that word will be written in this text; from here on out, we’ll call it Birds. A squirrel will make sounds when nibbling on one of Lauren’s food instruments. Does that count? Are squirrels also Birds?
Birds are aesthetes par excellence. They work with colors the human eye can’t see; they operate without borders. Birds perform for an audience of one, two, or three notes that sing, “Here I am” or “Go Away.” They build elaborate sculptures that will either attract a mate or not. A Birds dance will remind humans that we’ve replaced love with money.
Where much art, in some form or fashion, tends to rely on an immense number of conditions to disambiguate itself from the ordinary, musical bird-feeds do not. Birds uniquely challenge those inducted into art to question the relationship between such existential issues–will, professionalism, etc.–and necessity. Only some people find something abject about bird songs, maybe exciting or weird, but the effect is always positive. Music composers have sought to emulate the eccentricity and nuance of bird sounds. Here’s a brief list of bird-specific onomatopoeias.
- Chirp
- Tweet
- Warble
- Sing
- Whistle
- Coo
- Trill
- Caw
- Squawk
- Hoot
- Screech
- Peep
- Cluck
- Gobble
- Quack
- Honk
- Chatter
- Purr (for pigeons)
- Ruffle (for chickens)
- Squeak (for some smaller birds)
Not to mention mimicry—again, making the ordinary redundant. I once lived with a parrot that would mimic the sound of water coming from the refrigerator fountain and the chirp of the security alarm at the front door. Television drove it crazy.
Of course, pecking is percussive. While many avant-garde musicians champion the indiscriminate appreciation of sound, even the non-human world would likely disagree with this expanded, non-hierarchical approach to aesthetics. Some sounds just suck, and if you can’t play a note, you just won’t survive.
Around the time of Sudbrink’s installation/happening, Chicago alone killed nearly 1000 Birds; its architecture, light pollution, and unaccommodating yet idealized skyline lured many migrant Birds to an untimely fate. We are losing Birds to a world where all environmental conditions are constructed and prescribed without consideration of life. Yet, Birds are better artists than people, eliminating that fabricated boundary between desire and aesthetic experience.
For the Birds is a humble offering to those things that are better than us human beings at what we call art. Are there things humans do that Birds find just as humbling? Would they want to play her strange and tasteful redundancies? Would they recognize their pecking and chewing as some form of delicate art—etiquette? There may be a time when Birds aren’t around to answer.