Installation view “Box of Birds” at The Opening Gallery. (Courtesy: The Opening Gallery).

Interrogating the ways we pay attention is at the heart of the artistic practice of the performative action collective The Order of the Third Bird, which brought its work to The Opening Gallery in New York.

“…probably the best way to get started is simply by reading the story that gives the name to the Birds,” D. Graham Burnett opened up a public program on June 4th in conjunction with the exhibition “A Box of Birds” at The Opening Gallery. The exhibition, curated by ‘23 Princeton Ph.D graduate Federica Soletta, presents artifacts from the Order of the Third Bird, also known by its Latin name Avis Tertia—a decentralized collective of scholars and artists occupied with investigating attention and seeing through prescriptive actions. Previously shrouded in a certain degree of secrecy (or perhaps paid attention to by smaller circles), the group has since published a collection of essays, In Search of The Third Bird, Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021 (co-edited by Burnett). This exhibition, part of the gallery’s collaboration with Watermill Center, brings their work to wider audiences. 

Burnett’s story surrounds a mythic 2nd-century painting where a boy is depicted carrying grapes and birds peck at the grapes —in a 4th-century poem about the work, the painter says, “If I had been a better painter, the realism of my child would have scared away the birds.” In this version, he repaints the work, places it outside, and observes three birds engaging with the painting in different ways—one flies away, one disregards it, and the third looks fixedly at the image, lost in thought. As detailed in an extensive article in the New Yorker, the disparate group of observers, “Birds,” of which Burnett is a chief member, meet in front of artworks in order to, like the third bird, ‘look at them.’ Guided by a bell, they engage in exercises to develop ways of looking at and investigating their attentive experience of the work, themselves, and their surroundings. At the talk, attendees were invited to follow an abbreviated Bird watching–session or action.  

D. Graham Burnett, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Joanna Fiduccia at The Opening Gallery. (Courtesy: The Opening Gallery).

On June 8th, to close the exhibition, The Opening Gallery hosted a conversation between art historians Carrie Lambert-Beatty and Joanna Fiduccia on June 7th. Fiduccia, who teaches art history at Yale, is a long-term “Bird,” and although the talk didn’t center on their practices, it was deeply intertwined with their practices of attention and perception. An audience member inquired about Fiduccia’s current book project, Hollow Man: Alberto Giacometti and the Crisis of the Monument, which examines the artist’s return to figuration. In 1931, Giacometti joined André Breton’s surrealist group but was excluded in 1935 upon his return to figuration. However, surrealism continued to be present in his work. The conversation between Fiduccia and the audience member speculated that group dynamics and the political climate at play might have trumped the aesthetics and perception. 

Burnett, a historian of science in the History department at Princeton, misleadingly used the word “simple” in his first talk, but as the closing talk would convey, there is nothing simple about perception and its history. Burnett uses the anthropological terms emic (inside accounts of communities as if you were one of them) and etic (accounts from the outside, not as a participant but as an analyst) and by inviting the viewer to participate and observe the Order’s activities, allows them to inhibit both stances. In the exhibition, groupings of objects are presented in shrine-like installations; an early Apple computer caught my eye as a tool for archiving, presenting, playing, and communicating—holding our attention. A predecessor to the smartphone, which arguably steals attention instead. Burnett suggested a listener read Claire Bishop’s new book Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, available from June 11.

Installation views “Box of Birds” at The Opening Gallery. (Courtesy: The Opening Gallery).

Like the exhibition, the talk was winding and steered in various directions. Lambert-Beatty, who teaches at Harvard, brought the audience’s attention to the viewing experience: how do you move through exhibitions and galleries, or for that matter, the exhibition presented at the gallery? Her argument is presented in her book, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s, where she suggests  that “the crucial site of Rainer’s interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer.”

Overall, in its short history, The Opening Gallery, directed by Dr. Sozita Goudane, has become a haven for art embedded within or adjacent to scholarship (Warren Neidich launched his term Wet Conceptualism in an exhibition there, for instance). Offering audiences the opportunity to explore and meander through the multiple layers of The Order of the Third Bird further continues this exciting path for the gallery, an invitation for all to spread their wings.