SCHNAAAAABEL

October 27, 2023 3:14 AM

"Bird Calls (1972, recorded in 1981) by Louise Lawler is a six-minute roll call in which the artist squawks, chirps, and warbles the names of twenty-eight of the leading artists of the time—not coincidentally, all men. Each name is subject to distortion and derision as it is transformed into an individual call. This powerful (and powerfully funny) piece, the artist’s only audio work, may seem anomalous in relation to the subtly acerbic photographs and ephemeral multiples for which she is now known...

…
In 1972, Lawler and fellow artist Martha Kite installed an exhibition at New York’s Hudson Pier in which all the artists, as well as the show’s curator, Willoughby Sharp, were male. To ward off unwelcome attention on their walks home at night, Lawler and Kite began vocalizing the names of male artists in the form of loud bird calls, starting with Sharp’s. When artists Jenny Holzer and Stefan Eins asked Lawler to contribute an edition to their Fashion Moda booth at the international contemporary art exhibition Documenta VII in 1982, Lawler decided to record and distribute Bird Calls as an LP."

The article linked above is by Wendy Vogel (“Vogel” means “Bird” in Dutch and German but thats neither here nor there) an artist and curator based in Brooklyn.

The original sound piece can be heard in its entirety at UbuWeb

Here, performed as a sound installation in a garden:
Meise Botanical gardens in Belgium in 2022


The list of “bird calls”, in order are:

VITO ACCONCI
CARL ANDRE
RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER
JOHN BALDESSARI
ROBERT BARRY
JOSEPH BEUYS
DANIEL BUREN
SANDRO CHIA
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
ENZO CUCCHI
GILBERT and GEORGE
DAN GRAHAM
HANS HAACKE
NEIL JENNEY
DONALD JUDD
ANSELM KIEFER
JOSEPH KOSUTH
SOL LEWITT
RICHARD LONG
GORDON MATTA-CLARK
MARIO MERZ
SIGMAR POLKE
GERHARD RICHTER
ED RUSCHA
JULIAN SCHNABEL
CY TWOMBLY
ANDY WARHOL
LAWRENCE WEINER


(ps: thanks to Claudia )

posted by vacapinta (4 comments total)

Mockingbird.
posted by fairmettle at 4:27 AM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Pretty funny stuff, especially the echo/stereo effect with headphones. Also funny: the hyper-academic discourse in the first link, which includes a little meta-ironic linguistic slippage:

Queer theory takes poststructural linguistics to political ends, asserting the power of linguistics lippage (purposefully playful or otherwise) to create constantly shifting and fluid meaning, resulting in new subjectivities.17
posted by kozad at 5:39 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

(The correct pronunciation of Cucchi (= cookkie) would have made for a better call. Still: fun!)
posted by progosk at 10:56 AM on October 27, 2023

I assume the mispronunciation was intentional and probably the greater dig
posted by zenon at 12:43 PM on October 27, 2023