In a stroke of modest genius, Anna Rubin put a GoPro on a homing pigeon and showed the results on a flat-screen at Maxwell Graham Gallery. The Gram documents the bird’s twenty-six-minute odyssey from Midtown Manhattan to its roost about nine miles away, at the artist’s studio in the Bronx. In juddering, lossy footage soundtracked by abrasive wingbeats and wind, the yellow cabs of East Thirty-Third Street give way to the sunstruck waters of the East River, to the swimming pools and softball diamonds of Roosevelt Island, and finally to the Fedders-style homes of the boogie-down borough. Toward the end, the homer alights on a roof and sees itself in a rain gutter’s puddle, a moment redolent of Andy Warhol’s brief reflection in the window in Empire (1964), which, paired with The Gram, would make for an excellent eight-and-a-half-hour double feature.
Oddly enough, The Gram is not the latest example of peristeronic ostranenie in New York’s art world—that would be the sixteen-foot-tall aluminum-cast common pigeon that is currently menacing Tenth Avenue from its perch on the High Line, and for which I harbor a wary affection. In a stroke of cheesiness, Iván Argote named his sculpture Dinosaur, a reminder that the species descends from the same clade as velociraptors and T. rexes. The Gram descends from ’60s and ’70s structural film, whose proponents sought to demystify the material conditions of cinema through the kind of reflexive formalism that had already had its way with painting and sculpture. That Rubin could return to this forsaken post-Greenbergian cul-de-sac and produce something this wondrous and contemporary-feeling either reflects very well on the artist or very poorly on today’s avant-garde, or perhaps both. In addition to being a profound and hypnotic memory piece, it’s also a pretty good joke, filtering video’s capacity for immediate transmission and feedback through the ancient, mysterious, and fickler communication method of messenger pigeon. We are afforded less an omniscient God’s-eye view than a moving image of what the city would look like were it tossed into a drying machine set to max. Time seems to slow up or speed down. Viewers may contract jet lag in less than half an hour. The pigeon cannot hear the pigeoneer, and things (spoiler alert) fall apart.