The video artist mentioned in my previous blog, spent 10 days filming the flamingos at the Karlsruhe zoo from every possible angle. She got to know the birds, and they her. She wore the same clothes every day (so did they!) She studied their routines and became familiar with their moves:
Now they paraded forward, now they all marched aft. Now they shot up their necks like periscopes and twisted their heads first left, then right. They flashed the black petticoats of their underfeathers in single- and double-winged salutes. They moonwalked on water, raised a spindled leg balletically, from dégagé position to arabesque. They honked like indignant Canada geese and rasped like didgeridoos.
She played games with the flamingos, and through trial and error devised gestures they would respond to in a predictable, even anticipatory manner. “It was really like a dance, or the writing of a poem,” she said. “We trained each other.”
Later, she edited several days’ worth of film to a spare six minutes and added a startling soundtrack, of a gun periodically being cocked and fired; the resulting video, “67 Bows,” was shown at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.
This is a work of art, not a documentary film, yet it is born aloft on the mad en masse majesty of flamingos, the dazzling speed with which they synchronize their watches and coordinate their fates.
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