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 th…