{"id":684,"date":"2019-04-11T21:59:55","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T21:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/?p=684"},"modified":"2019-04-11T22:01:54","modified_gmt":"2019-04-11T22:01:54","slug":"topographic-actions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/?p=684","title":{"rendered":"Topographic Actions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There has never been much evidence that orthodox associates of the Order of the Third Bird have engaged in any sustained way in \u201cBirdish\u201d practices of attention to natural landforms \u2014 or, indeed, to \u201cnatural\u201d objects more generally. While a number of \u201cdivergent\u201d tendencies (one thinks immediately of the twentieth-century Russian \u201cKorfians,\u201d about whom Justin E. H. Smith and others have written at some length; and on the \u201cOannes Scrap\u201d and the activities of M.I. Return Maycomb in the 1820s and 30s) have arisen that do indeed perform attentional rites on the night sky, the ocean surface, horizon-lines, and various other non-canonical objects, the basic widely accepted rubric for the Practice has long been that devotees attend on \u201cobjects made to be seen.\u201d\u00a0 This seems to have been interpreted widely, and admitted also of other sensory modalities.\u00a0 But the notion of \u201cintent\u201d has been paramount.\u00a0 In this context, doing a Bird Action on a natural object (a tree, say, or ordinary rock) can been understood to raise theological questions of some depth.<\/p>\n

Working the edge of this problem has been a preoccupation of several known vol\u00e9es<\/em> operating in North America and Western Europe since the 1960s, and we have secondhand reports (in the W-Cache and in oral traditions) of active debates around the suitability of a bonsai tree<\/em> as a \u201cWork\u201d in the sense acknowledged by the main line of the Avis Tertia<\/em> (the preponderance of collective opinion on this was affirmative).\u00a0 Another striking \u201cboundary case\u201d has been Robert Irwin\u2019s epochal \u201cString Drawing \u2013 Filtered Light\u201d of 1976 (a delimited patch of grass in the garden of the Venice Biennial, which heralded the young Irwin\u2019s move to the thresholds of direct sensory experience via bracketed bits of the world). There has long been a rumor that a Southern California vol\u00e9e <\/em>performs an annual Action upon a pastiche of this work installed anew every May near Twenty-Nine Palms in Wonder Valley.\u00a0 There seem to be a small number of dissenters who, in a ritualized (and apparently friendly) manner, \u201cprotest\u201d this Action every year.\u00a0 Both groups finish the day with a cookout, if these reports are to be believed.<\/p>\n

All of this makes the present photograph of interest.\u00a0 It came to light in 2015, in materials related to the estate of a Los Angeles researcher long associated with ESTAR(SER).\u00a0 It would appear to represent an Action of associates of the Order working in Ohio in the mid-1920s, using a \u201cProtocol for Topography\u201d that has not been preserved.\u00a0 Anyone in possession of information that might bear on this document is encouraged to follow up with the Editor of the Communiqu\u00e9s directly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has never been much evidence that orthodox associates of the Order of the Third Bird have engaged in any sustained way in \u201cBirdish\u201d practices of attention to natural landforms \u2014 or, indeed, to \u201cnatural\u201d objects more generally. While a number of \u201cdivergent\u201d tendencies (one thinks immediately of the twentieth-century Russian \u201cKorfians,\u201d about whom Justin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":687,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}