Comme un Oiseau [Like a Bird]

"A bird, a beetle, a butterfly invite the same fervent contemplation that we reserve for a Tintoretto or a Rembrandt: but our eye has lost its freshness, we no lon­ger know how to observe." -Claude Lévi Strauss

The exhibition Comme un Oiseau carries on from earlier thematic exhibiticns organized by the Fondation Cartier, such as Vitesse, A visage decouvert, Azur, By Night and will be accompanied by a catalogue published in conjunction with Gallimard Editor.

For any number of artists, ornithologists and wri­ters, whether from Europe, Africa, the South Sea Islands or Alaska, the bird is a symbol of the other world, of beauty and the supernatural. Birds have continued to fascinate mankind through every age and culture and continent. The exhibition presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, from June 19th to October 13th, explores the universe of birds as depicted in some of man's ear­liest art all the way through to the more recent experiments of contemporary art.

Centered around the theme of the bird-man, the exhibition brings together a selection of works that reveal just how original the response of a civiliza­tion, culture or artist can be to the world of birds­from feathered clothes from Peru, Indian masks from the north-west coas'C of North America and drawings by Jean-Jacques Audubon, to 20th-cen­tury art ranging from Max Ernst and Alexander Calder to Merce Cunningham and Jean-Pierre Raynaud. 
Movement and flight, the expressive qualities of colour and form, music and bird-song are evoked in a series of works carefully selected from little­known private collections and major international museums. The bulk of the exhibition is made up of modern and contemporary works which conjur up flying machines and the conquest of the skies since Leonardo (the Futurists, Panamarenko), the image of the bird in painting (Paul Klee, Joan Miro) and photography (Edward Weston, Alvarez Bravo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres.Gabriel Orozco, Jean-Luc Mylayne), sound installations and videos (Carsten Holler, Erik Samahk), mobiles and sculptures (David Hammons, Jean Tinguely, Rebecca Horn), and an aviary imagi­ned by Jean-Pierre Raynaud. 

The exhibition also brings together works by pain­ters and ardent bird-spotters, with drawings and paintings from 17th to 20th century European artists, including Jan Brueghel, Johann Walther, Jacques Barraband, Martin Johnson Heade and William Turner... 
There are also works borrowed from ancient civiliza­tions and traditional societies: from the South Sea Islands (dazzling, feather-covered heads and rare sculptures from New Ireland); Africa (Benin bronzes, masks from the Ivory Coast and Ethiopia, and reli­quary figures from Gabon); and North and South America (masks from Alaska, Inuit sculpture, fea­thered objects from the Chancay culture of Peru, jewelry and figurines from Amazonia and plumage art from Mexico). 

The catalogue brings together contributions from personalities in the arts and the ethnographic sciences, along with philosophers, poets and orni­thologists, and includes previously unpublished texts by Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel Onfray. It also puts forward a polysemic reading of the theme, thanks to a glossary which holds all kinds of sur­prises in store and a hybrid approach which accords as much space to ornithology as to art history and music.