Les Corbeaux
· Bonus: Trompe L'Oeil at the Louvre ·
If memory can be trusted – and I wouldn’t, necessarily – the background of this montage was based on a photograph taken two years ago at the Louvre. Something about that luscious chair appealed. The focus, however, was supposed to be the crow – a bird species I hold special feelings for. When my children were young I convinced them (probably one of the last times I convinced them of anything) that I could communicate with crows, and you could see me flapping about the backyard, wildly cawing, to the consternation of the bird population and probably the amusement of the rest of the neighborhood.
Crows are not just quite intelligent birds, they are culturally adaptive, superb tool makers and sport an incredible multitude of voices and expressions. For a short introduction there is the TED talk below, for longer perusal there is an interesting book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens, by John M. Marzluff.
https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows?language=en
If you are lucky enough to travel to Paris in the next months and if the Louvre is on your list of things to see, you will be surprised. The I.M. Pei pyramid in the courtyard, so controversial at its inception and so beloved now, is playing hide and seek. Muralist JR, commissioned by the museum, is casting a trompe l’oeil spell over the structure. The article below explains in more detail (and is surprisingly catty when discussing work of another graffiti artist, Banksy.) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/may/26/louvre-pyramid-trompe-l-oeil-jr-im-pei-paris-museum I, by the way, when first visiting, was startled by all these people in front of the pyramid holding up their arms until I inquired: if you photograph them from a specific angle, it looks as if they are touching the top of the pyramid. Another bit of useless knowledge crowding my brain……
Some years back, shortly after the show Portlandia had targeted the intersection between art and commercialism with the meme Put a Bird on it!, some cultural journalist in Salon wrote about her acute discomfort when purchasing bird-related art and/or craft. She had become self-conscious in the wake of the joke, wondering if she – as so many of us – was the butt of it. She described the feeling with a newly invented German term – der Vogelschäme – which cracked me up since it captured the emotional reaction perfectly, but was all wrong linguistically. (It would be die Vogelscham – the bird shame.)
In the small German village where I grew up villager solidarity increased proportionally to the amount of nightly noise produced by a band of roaming peacocks. A miniature version of this is happening in my current neighborhood where the neighborly greetings of each other start with the question, “did they keep you up all night as well?” A pair of very loud and very much in love owls is filling the air from sun down to sun rise.
After more than 5 years of sending a daily picture to an ever growing number of people via email I have now shifted to the blog format. There will be a daily photograph or montage, there will be a weekly theme that holds the images together and, of course, there will be the occasional text. The only change will be the way in which it can be accessed. You can go to the site anytime you wish at