Marjorie Moore: Remains

Arts Review
By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle

9 January 2009

A lifeless bird is a sorrow all its own. Many creatures in death may move us, but the particular tragedy of the bird is that its nature is to fly, to be in motion and of the air. And in death it is still, profoundly still, and forever fettered to the earth, like any other beast.
This singular sorrow flutters and falls upon your heart many times in viewing Marjorie Moore's current work at d berman gallery. Almost every piece is centered on the corpse of a bird or some part thereof, either a rendering by the artist's hand or, more commonly, the thing itself, collected from the wild by Moore and carefully preserved under glass. These bodies seem impossibly fragile, the hollowed legs and talons frailer than eggshell, the wings brittle as a glaze of ice. And the plumage: frayed and faded to a dull, lusterless crisp. If, as Emily Dickinson would have it, hope is the thing with feathers, then these are shells of despair.

And yet Moore has framed them with such care, in displays of such beauty and elegance, as to rescue them from their desiccated state and, if not restore their former splendor, at least pay tribute to it. Most of the tiny skeletons are laid on rich fabric and showered with and surrounded by dozens, even hundreds, of colored, pearllike beads no larger than a bird's eye. A couple are nestled inside the drawers of specially made and decorated standing chests, which you may pull open to see the dead birds lying in great beds of salt, like tree limbs in a snowdrift. Several others rest under Plexiglas boxes atop wooden tables just a couple of feet high. That these displays are so clearly handcrafted and put together with so much apparent feeling makes them seem personal, as if the fallen animal was known truly and well by the maker, as if these were birds with names.
If these exhibits were only memorials to anonymous birds discovered in yards and on the roadside, it would be enough to make this exhibit a little heartbreaking. But in the smaller tables is another element: Below each box and lifeless bird is a drawer with a pull like the perch of a birdhouse, which, when pulled out, reveals an excerpt from a story in The New York Times describing catastrophic deaths in Iraq. Explosions. Suicide bombers. Blood in the streets. Death.

It is the same in box after box, drawer after drawer, accounts of bloodshed and carnage and loss of life. Suddenly, it isn't only the birds that are fragile but ourselves; it isn't just these beautiful, innocent creatures of the air we are mourning but a host of other beautiful innocents whose lives have been ripped away and who lie still, profoundly still, forever fettered to the earth half a world away. We close the drawers, and a weight falls, a deep sorrow settles in, not as the result of some aggressive political statement, some loud condemnation of the current war, but because a connection has been made by Moore and felt by us: life threaded to life, each one so delicate, so vulnerable, so precious. Hers is but a gesture made in appreciation of flight, in memory of life, and it is exquisitely moving.

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