La interpretación optimista-narrativa de Charles Guignon

So there’s this bird.

It’s called the superb fairy-wren. (That’s its name, it’s no joke. Its cousin is the splendid fairy-wren, which is almost as good but not quite as.) It’s tending its eggs in a nest woven of spider webs and grasses. It’s singing a little song.

But here’s the thing: this little song it’s singing isn’t like the little song of any of the other superb fairy-wrens. Each family of superb fairy-wrens has got their own little song that they sing. So: this

particular superb fairy-wren is singing its own little song to its own superb fairy-wren eggs. The still half-formed babies are listening. They are growing bigger and bigger inside their own speckled eggshells. They are listening and learning the song as they grow. The parent wren learned this song from its own parents. It is passing it on to its wren babies. It’s like a surname, this fairy-wren song.

This is us, it flutes, we belong to this family.

When the babies hatch, they sing the little song back when they’re peeping, hungry. The superb parent fairy-wren leaves the nest to find food in the wild:

grasshoppers, weevils, larvae, bugs, ants.

It flies back to the nest, it lands on the edge. It sings the little song. The little birds answer back with their sweet higher-pitched version of the same little song.

This is us, the parent wren calls.

And then the baby wrens respond, yes.

They say, we belong to this family.

There’s a reason the superb fairy-wren has its own little song that it sings. The reason is this: it can’t count. So when the parent fairy-wren returns to the nest, it can’t say to itself,

when I left, I had four eggs.

It can’t murmur suspiciously on the edge of the nest,

and NOW there are FIVE.

It can’t say tremblingly, but five minus four is ONE.

It can’t realize in a brief searing moment:

THERE IS AN IMPOSTER IN OUR MIDST.

Some cuckoo species lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. They leave the other birds to raise their hungry babies who are much bigger than their surrogate

mothers. Who sometimes eat all the food and leave the other babies to starve.

Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of superb fairy-wrens.

Sometimes a fairy-wren will leave her nest of four eggs and return to five eggs, one slightly larger than the others. An imposter. And because they can’t count, the fairy-wrens sing their family song to the eggs instead.

We are us, it sings to the eggs.

And the little wrens inside their shells learn the song, quickly as they can: we are fairy-wrens, we belong.

It’s a password. It tells the parent birds which of the nestlings to feed.⁷⁰ Whose peeping mouths to drop pieces of caterpillar and grasshopper into: the small superb fairy-wrens’ and not the cuckoo’s. The ones in the know are the ones with full bellies.

At the end of the day.

In art school, our teachers sang to us, Rosalind Krauss. And we called back sweetly, OCTOBER. Minimalism, Fluxus, they sang, and we answered Donald Judd, Yoko Ono.⁷¹ They sang television

interventions, we responded, Stan Douglas, Monodramas. General Idea, they sang, and

70 Diane Colombelli-Négrel et al. “Embryonic Learning of Vocal Passwords in Superb Fairy-Wrens Reveals Intruder Cuckoo Nestlings,”

Current Biology 22 (2012): 2155-2160.

71 Peter Rand, Double Rainbow/ Donald Judd Mashup, 2010. https://vimeo.com/14081289

72 General Idea, Shut The Fuck Up, Video, 14 Min., 1985.

73 Triple Canopy has an excellent article about the development of this language which takes the

we said, SHUT. THE FUCK. UP., and they said Right! ⁷² It, too, was a sort of a

password, one they learned from their own teachers, who learned it from their teachers before them. One unique to us, different than the other disciplines: the learning of a canon as the learning of a code. Was it to make sure, that when the time came, it was our bellies that would be full instead of a hungry interloper who didn’t know better?

(It is unfair, though, to make a metaphoric leap between mother wrens and teachers and funding. It is both related and also far more complicated than that.)

We secure the boundary of our

knowledge through language, and those not in the know come away feeling empty.⁷³ It felt elitist and withholding, this cultural capital we drew in up close close close to our chests. Could we not stretch the boundaries of our discipline to include others, I wondered? Reach out from art to bring farmers and city

councilors and cashiers and therapists and parents and roofers and servers and

digital press release as a starting point to unpack the origins, use, and future of International Art English. Alix Rule and David Levine

“International Art English: ON the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release,” Triple Canopy (They Were Us, July 30, 2012).

https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/

international_art_english

salespeople into our discussions of soaring beauty and political poetics? It is perhaps the same impulse that drives interdisciplinary thinking: to draw equitably from many different tools and understandings, to think with complexity and in relation.

Maybe they’re not fed by the same things I am, though. Maybe I am the large egg in the nests of others, I am the unwanted incursion. The imposter, desiring sustenance from a different inside. I’m still not sure which song I sing at the end of the day.

I still can’t quite sing this is us.

It sticks in my throat, a little: I belong.

A nest (loosely woven grasses and spider webs): close to the earth. The outside rests nestled in thick vegetation. Inside: four matte eggs, safe. Figure and ground divided by the wobbling opening: a smooth aperture, a mouth opened. *pkwhoouh*⁷⁴

Vocal passwords and boundary-markings have many reasons. To make sure that the police don’t show up at your protest or rave. To be very specific, to have a more nuanced conversation among colleagues. To speak words of truth to each other in a language your oppressor

74 “how to write out an inhale”

can’t understand. To be on the same page. To feel kinship. To keep an imposter out of your nest. To speak to two audiences at once. To define class lines and boundaries. They develop both intentionally and organically. They’re read differently from shifting angles, from a spectrum of power positions. Both we and these borders are in motion.

They articulate difference: that is there, this is here.

That is you, this is us.

THE EXECUTIVE