It is the unfortunate disease of the Londoner to dub anything outside the confines of the M25 ‘provincial.’ Paris and Rome are pale imitations of our great metropolis. Leeds and Manchester are veritable backwaters. Cambridge is dismissed as a mere hamlet, scarcely on the radar of the London cosmopolite. But Cambridge, it turns out, can more than hold its own against London’s cultural leviathan, at least as far as baffling contemporary art exhibitions go. Three Days of The Condor, currently nesting in Kettle’s Yard, surpasses anything the capital has to offer in terms of sheer oddity.
The Swedish artist Henrik Hakansson, a dedicated bird-watcher and environmentalist, has turned Kettle’s Yard into a temporary hide from which to observe some of the world’s most endangered bird species. There are MDF ramps to navigate, electric cables stretched across the floor, and bird song tweeting intermittently though gramophone speakers. Google printouts are blu-taced haphazardly to a wall, while in one room, a stuffed bird rests in a glass coffin. It is on loan from the Natural History Museum but looks suspiciously like the parrot wielded by Clouseau in Revenge of The Pink Panther. Some of these birds are flying perilously close to the fate of the Dodo. In the poignantly titled exhibit Lonely Hearts Club, Hakansson has prepared a dossier on each of the mate-less birds in the manner of a professional match-maker.
The lonely bachelor Sphix Macaw is beyond the help of any dating agency. Hakansson captures the macaw calling vainly for a mate in a film reel which plays on a shaky loop. Touching though these scenes are: the macaw singing to the moon, a Condor flying fruitlessly through the empty skies, they can’t compete in a post-Attenborough age. If this were an Attenborough documentary, the macaw would perform a Macaranan mating dance, plumage splayed in a heroic display of pomp and machismo. Hakansson’s macaw perches forlornly on a branch, and that, for several hours is about it.
The internet printouts are disappointingly symptomatic of the latest affliction to hit the contemporary art scene. The Tate Britain recently came into possession of some Xeroxed papers by the artist Bethan Huws; an artwork that quite literally wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and these lazy photocopies have spawned a slew of imitators. Hakansson’s Google search results on endangered bird species are unenlightening and devalue the environmental message.
Heart wrenching though the plight of these birds is, Hakansson is no Attenborough, he’s not even a Bill Oddie and in an age when we are spoilt by Life on Earth beaming images of polar bears on melting ice caps and snow leopards hunting on the Siberian tundra direct to our TV screens, a mournful macaw tweeting in a lachrymose sort of way is desperately uninspiring.
Call me a philistine, call me an environmental fascist, but as I listened to the soporific tweeting I found myself guiltily re-hashing the infamous Monty Python sketch: This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot.
The Swedish artist Henrik Hakansson, a dedicated bird-watcher and environmentalist, has turned Kettle’s Yard into a temporary hide from which to observe some of the world’s most endangered bird species. There are MDF ramps to navigate, electric cables stretched across the floor, and bird song tweeting intermittently though gramophone speakers. Google printouts are blu-taced haphazardly to a wall, while in one room, a stuffed bird rests in a glass coffin. It is on loan from the Natural History Museum but looks suspiciously like the parrot wielded by Clouseau in Revenge of The Pink Panther. Some of these birds are flying perilously close to the fate of the Dodo. In the poignantly titled exhibit Lonely Hearts Club, Hakansson has prepared a dossier on each of the mate-less birds in the manner of a professional match-maker.
The lonely bachelor Sphix Macaw is beyond the help of any dating agency. Hakansson captures the macaw calling vainly for a mate in a film reel which plays on a shaky loop. Touching though these scenes are: the macaw singing to the moon, a Condor flying fruitlessly through the empty skies, they can’t compete in a post-Attenborough age. If this were an Attenborough documentary, the macaw would perform a Macaranan mating dance, plumage splayed in a heroic display of pomp and machismo. Hakansson’s macaw perches forlornly on a branch, and that, for several hours is about it.
The internet printouts are disappointingly symptomatic of the latest affliction to hit the contemporary art scene. The Tate Britain recently came into possession of some Xeroxed papers by the artist Bethan Huws; an artwork that quite literally wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and these lazy photocopies have spawned a slew of imitators. Hakansson’s Google search results on endangered bird species are unenlightening and devalue the environmental message.
Heart wrenching though the plight of these birds is, Hakansson is no Attenborough, he’s not even a Bill Oddie and in an age when we are spoilt by Life on Earth beaming images of polar bears on melting ice caps and snow leopards hunting on the Siberian tundra direct to our TV screens, a mournful macaw tweeting in a lachrymose sort of way is desperately uninspiring.
Call me a philistine, call me an environmental fascist, but as I listened to the soporific tweeting I found myself guiltily re-hashing the infamous Monty Python sketch: This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot.
