Louise Lawler and the Missing Frank Stella Manbird

Frank Stella would, ideally, always be invoked in a funny parrot voice: a short Frank followed by a long Steeeeeh-la. Or at least that’s how it plays in my head since I heard a sound piece where a woman shouts out the names of (now) old (or dead) male artists with mostly funny-sounding names like Ruscha or Polke or Twombly like a mocking bird. Try as I might, I hadn’t been able to recall the name of the artist who did the recording or where I had heard it. Maybe I imagined it, I used to think. Maybe I dreamt it — I do have elaborate dreams about non-existent artworks once in a while, thank goodness.

I recently mentioned this lapse of memory to a friend who is an artist and she reassured me that such a work of art existed, but neither of us could even make a wild guess at who the author was. Bruce Nauman! — said her husband spouting names at random like the lost artwork itself, except that he has a lovely singing voice. Earlier, before this discussion, he had brought up Frank Stella for seemingly no reason as well, to which I replied FRANK STEEEEEH-LA in a parrot voice and, in so doing, triggered the quest for a NAME and a TITLE and a PLACE and a WHY.

A few days later I had a flashback: I was standing at the Barbican in London, with headphones on, trying to decipher the crazy shouts of unintelligible birdcalls. I had bought the catalogue of that exhibition, a finely bound volume with bright green covers with embossed golden characters. The exhibition was called Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art. This piece and one other one, a man who had a collection of ties that had belonged to heads of state and displayed them in frames, were the two only art pieces I suddenly recalled from this exhibition. Leafing through the catalogue I realised my brain didn’t much care for filing Duchamp’s Urinal or Manzoni’s Merde de Artiste. And then I found it:

Louise Lawler

Born in Bronxville, New York, 1947; lives in Brooklyn

– Birdcalls 1972/81

Typography and sound, 7:59min. Recorded and mixed by Terry Wilson

Collection of Sol LeWitt

And, with that, it struck me that odd coincidences and incongruities had just happened:

• My artist friend, who couldn’t remember the name of the artist for the life of her, had worked for Sol LeWitt — who owns this particular piece. I welcome coincidences in my life and cherish them, Murakami-style. Or like any conversation with Vila-Matas, I gather.
• Sol LeWitt himself is “called” in the recording — does he own it because: he enjoys hearing his name being parroted mockingly; because he is a feminist; he appreciates Louise Lawler and is a good sport; or no good reason.
• Frank Stella, which prompted all this search, is not one of the names on the list of bird calls to which I say LOUISE WHAT THE HELL, IT IS PERFECT. Also, I blame Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams for my false memory.

Through a wonderful blog (Dissolving Sounds), I found the original list of “birdcalls” in the image above and that the piece is available on Ubuweb. An essay by the appositely named Wendy Vogel further enlightened the WHY.

It is telling, then, that Bird Calls originated not as a hermetic artistic gesture, but rather as a site-specific antagonistic response. In 1972, Lawler and fellow artist Martha Kite installed an exhibition at New York’s Hudson Pier in which all the artists, as well as the show’s curator, Willoughby Sharp, were male. To ward off unwelcome attention on their walks home at night, Lawler and Kite began vocalizing the names of male artists in the form of loud birdcalls, starting with Sharp’s. When artists Jenny Holzer and Stefan Eins asked Lawler to contribute an edition to their Fashion Moda booth at the international contemporary art exhibition Documenta VII in 1982, Lawler decided to record and distribute Bird Calls as an LP.7

The tone of satirical portraiture that characterizes Bird Calls (in which, let us remember, Lawler adopts the ultimate voice of mimicry — a parrot’s — instead of her own) extended to the packaging. Bird Calls’ record sleeve was designed as a type of veiled self-portrait of Lawler herself. She is “depicted” as a parrot looking over its shoulder against a vibrant red background — the quintessential color of punk-inspired rage — (punk being a contemporary vehicle for feminist production in the early 1980s). Stacey Allan writes in a recent article about the work:

“Maybe it is useful to think of Birdcalls as a type of vocal bondage assumed by Lawler, posing as the proverbial caged bird and vocalizing her own oppression. Her position is really not so unlike that of the self-aware punk in collar and chains, a rowdy and playful use of self-parody to position herself against patriarchal systems that require women to shackle themselves to male artists, to repeat their names, their styles, their careers.”

Published on https://wherecanwelivebutdays.wordpress.com