39th AAH (Association of Art Historians) Annual Conference and Bookfair, University of Reading, UK

11 – 13 April 2013

Call for Conference Papers for the Session:

TWITCHERS: Birds and Art

Convenors:

Dr Tracey Warr, Oxford Brookes University, t.warr@brookes.ac.uk

Dr Paul Kilsby, Oxford Brookes University

Clair Chinnery, Oxford Brookes University

A clutch of delicately freckled eggs, a sharp beak, the unknown language of bird song, extravagant mating plumage, a brush of wings, a soaring flight: we have a perennial fascination with the familiar and yet alien presence of birds in our midst. Artists have addressed the topic of birds to consider a range of issues. The recent Animal Gaze symposia demonstrated how the inter-species boundary is rich ground for artistic exploration. The ‘twitcher’ is an individual who takes bird watching to the extremes, in collecting ‘sightings’ as a form of experiential acquisition and artists have extended their examinations of birds to address notions of collecting, archiving and taxonomy, in for example, Marcel Broodthaer’s Department of Eagles. Bird envy manifests in works such as Pieter Brueghel’s Icarus, Max Ernst’s Loplop and Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Himself Into Space. Gaston Bachelard wrote of the nest-house, and how we inhabit space with our bodies just as a bird creates its nest with its breast, and his writings have in turn inspired artists’ nests examining the practice of space and home. Other birds in art projects have considered communication, ecology, colonialism, flight, the soul, migration. Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Cornell’s assemblages with birds, Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus, London Fieldworks’ Super Kingdom, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas’ Villa Lituania pigeon race and pigeon loft at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ Moon Goose Analogue and Lynne Hull’s Raptor Perches, are just a few of the myriad artworks focussed on birds. Considering the strutting peacock, the hovering predator, the Christmas robin, the homing pigeon, the clever cuckoo, the swoop of the black swift, the pecking hen and the memento mori of the hung game bird, this session will present papers on the topic of birds and nests in the art and theory of any period.

Details of the conference are at http://www.aah.org.uk