Louise Lawler | Bird Calls

from Micah Lexier's Instagram page yesterday:


"Poster of an early presentation (August 16, 1983) of Louise Lawler’s seminal “Birdcalls”, which I was lucky enough to attend when I was a student at @nscaduniversity. After the performance I took this letterpress-printed poster off the wall (you can still see the pin holes in each corner) and managed to hang on to it for 37 years.

Stacey Allan, writing about “Birdcalls” in Afterall: Issue 20 (Spring 2009) wrote: The towering list of names is impressive…Stacked one on top of the other, the appearance of these artists' names might typically signal the inclusion of their works in a group exhibition, but here they serve as part of an audio-and-text installation by an artist who literally buries her name under the more recognisable names of her contemporaries. At the very bottom of the heap, a modest line identifies the work: 'Birdcalls by Louise Lawler'. Perhaps only after reading this acknowledgement is one able to connect the ambient audio track and its incongruous cries with the names on the wall. The sounds are made by Lawler, who strains her voice to sing the names of twenty-eight celebrated male artists as though they were the songs of twenty-eight unique species of bird. She calls the first, last or full name of each artist as indicated by the part of the name that is printed in red or green, each name given its own specifically nuanced call… Like the artists themselves, each name as performed by Lawler has its own imitable style.

Wendy Vogel wrote the following text - “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. Yet the work, in its explicit irony and eschewal of the visual, represents not only a turning point in 1970s feminist art production.

Yet the work, in its explicit irony and eschewal of the visual, represents not only a turning point in 1970s feminist art production, but a critical model that resonates with contemporary production and curatorial practice that don’t adhere to the notion of a fixed site.""