Monique Luchetti’s Lately, It’s Late: Safety in Numbers
Monique Luchetti
Lately, It’s Late, 2023
780 birds cast in hydrocal plaster with 8-minute video projection
c. 10 ft. in diameter
Ornithologists tell us that birds murmurate, or swarm, with geometric precision, gathering to ward off predators. The word also refers to the hum of the swarm communicating as they follow a mysterious choreography. They fly with precision; they do not collide. Luchetti’s birds form constellations not in the sky, but on a dark, round circle placed on the ground. Ten bird species are represented, all cast in a matte white plaster reminiscent of bleached bones or driftwood. Their whiteness transcends differences, lending them a homogeneity. They have none of the hushed, decomposed quality of objects scattered along the shore; their bodies have been arranged with care, suggesting petals and, at times, crescent shapes or arcs. The composition is decorative, resembling a mandala or gothic rose window. The contours of their bodies are accentuated by the darker paper circle they perch on. Planes are reversed: this carefully synchronized flock or, in a more elegiac mode, a boneyard, rests on an earthly plane.
Such associations cast Luchetti’s installation as a kind of memorial. Intimations of communion and community offer a more hopeful reading of Luchetti’s avian circle. This flock is not belly-up; instead, they repose on rounded, curved breasts, urging us towards more redemptive associations. As above, so below: as they do when they murmurate, Luchetti’s birds congregate, forming simple patterns. The geometric shape draws together avian behavior and Luchetti’s own deliberate design. While otherworldly associations linger, a video projection reanimates the flock: grainy footage of birds in flight dapple the pale bodies, scattering and uniting to form the characteristic geometries of starling murmuration. Variations emerge; in one sequence, the larger shape of a predator – a hawk or falcon—separates itself from the swarm.
Flight of the Starlings. National Geographic, Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY
After the raptor’s initial pass, the starlings again close ranks, forming a protective cloud against a potential threat. The murmuration sometimes climbs, sometimes drops closer to earth as the birds roost, deepening the shadows cast on the white plaster bodies. The pixelated projection, which Luchetti captured from the internet, plays over the casts’ irregular surfaces, suggesting movement and ceaseless change: The grainy projections evoke the swell of ocean tides, a shifting grey cloud mass, or particles in a dust storm. The white flock heaves and rolls restlessly, as if dreaming of flight.
Monique Luchetti, Extinct: Passenger Pigeon 1900-1914, 2015.
Pencil, gouache, watercolor on Nepalese lokta paper, 19 x 27 inches
Lately, It’s Late marks a decisive shift in a body of work dedicated to the metaphorical resonance of birds. While decorative tendencies persist in the installation’s floral patterns, Lately, It’s Late is devoid of color, signaling a shift from the more sensuous character of earlier sculptures and drawings towards a more conceptual approach. In renouncing the vivid color palette and specific, portrait-like renderings of birds, Luchetti seeks to forge an indelible link between the specimen and broader systemic connections: How might starling murmuration provoke questions about collective behaviors—and serve as a sympathetic chord to human experience? Luchetti began her study of birds by sculpting parrots and songbirds rescued from pet stores as they flew around her studio. Sculpted forms soon yielded to large drawings of study-skins Luchetti pored over in diverse museums of natural history. Birds captured from natural habitats by affluent collectors filled drawers and cases, often with multiple examples of a single species, their delicate plumage and empty sockets stuffed with cotton. In these early studies, Luchetti rendered each specimen in tender detail. The texture of sheets of Nepalese lokta paper, pencil, and water-based paints reflect the delicacy of her subjects; the large scale, and explosions of brilliant color blossoming from the birds’ breasts, assign them a monumentality and visibility. For Luchetti, these descriptive passages restored the specificity of a particular bird’s history and narrative. Their stories had been wrested from them, replaced by strict organizational principles – location, species, color. To restore their granular histories, Luchetti describes each carefully and incorporated the tag, attached to the bird’s leg, noting the date and time of the bird’s death. And yet she reached for resonances beyond discrete bodies.
Birds as conduits for spirituality emerge as a consistent theme in her work. Luchetti observes that “birds are easy for humans. They are otherworldly. We have always loved them for their metaphoric qualities.” We associate their flight with release, freedom, and transcendence. The flowers bursting from their chests in her drawings atone for their capture, death, and ultimate disembodiment. She muses that birds in a single case, killed at near-identical moments, their tags attest, might have flown together and known one another—partners, perhaps, or companions. While the skins rest in a drawer, in these earlier drawings each bird poses upright, as if ascending and, in so doing, regaining an animate, spiritual plane.
These earlier series match birds with their particular histories, giving them a voice. Luchetti identifies other conceptual dimensions in Lately, It’s Late. She speaks of wanting to “understand the essence of it, just paring it down to the basic, to the gesture of the murmuration.” Simultaneously, Luchetti seeks to explore the intersection of particular identity and notions of community grounded in interdependence and communication. Some birds are shown singly, while other drawings show multiple birds, suggesting a relationship among them. Their poses vary: some turn one direction, some another; claws cross, curl, or separate. Lately, It’s Late approaches the notion of kinship differently. Distinctions among birds are more subtle, and differences diminish as the flock forms one unified shape. The circle, too, becomes a metaphor for shared experience. Luchetti is fascinated by how different stories proliferate even as we share our common humanity. This sense of shared purpose is echoed in a neighboring piece in Luchetti’s installation at the FEEDart Gallery in Erie. Luchetti has repurposed a birdbath, honing the edges to a shallow crater. A sleek jet skims across its basin, its silent passage echoing the ceaseless circling of the flock. The pairing might suggest the intrusion of technologies or natural habitats, but Luchetti identifies an altogether different purpose which brings human and bird into alignment: Both entities – the murmuration and plane-- encapsulate myriad stories. Luchetti muses, “ “when I think of all the people on the earth and each has a story…birds are the same thing…each has their own life. That’s the spirituality.”
Luchetti’s conceptual approach in Lately, It’s Late, evident in what she terms the “desaturation” of her installation, is also reflected in several other decisions, all of which draw her closer to recent exhibitions with a particular focus on birds and on artists who are also linking their absorption in ornithology to broader concerns. Her inclusion of ten species of birds in her murmuration, as well as her emphasis on essential shapes, explore parallels to as well as crucial departures from avian behavior. According to ornithological scholarship, it is generally starlings that swarm. Luchetti, while well aware of this fact (the murmuration captured on the internet, for example, is comprised of starlings), chooses to draw together ten different bird species. Contradicting established patterns of behavior calls attention to the conversion of science into art and permits Luchetti to investigate the larger implications of issues of communication and community essential to murmuration – indeed, to any collaborative enterprise. Per King and Sumpter, “murmuration behaviour is of considerable interest not only to biologists, but also to physicists, engineers and mathematicians. To date, attention has tended to focus on the mechanisms of murmurations to determine the rules governing individual ‘agent’ behaviour and understanding how these rules lead to collective behaviour.“ In the ornithological literature, biologists describe the complex communication and coordination in large swarms of more than a thousand birds essential to avoid collision and to achieve the shifting, synchronized patterns that give murmuration its undulating shapes. Here, individual histories must yield to collective action to successfully enact a strategy that protects the flock from predatory attack.
Luchetti gathers her birds in a circle. This geometry certainly reflects murmuration patterns, which have been described as circles, ovals, or rhomboids, patterns that fascinate physicists looking to nature for scientific parallels. The circle also presents a decisive challenge to the square, a geometry that defines artists working in two dimensions. The square is the paper, rectilinear canvas, or frame; the circle, by contrast, is something more organic. “The square,” Luchetti points out, “is the painter; birds are in the sky so a square doesn’t make sense.” The different birds are drawn together by their whiteness; desultory flight is replaced by calculated geometries. In identifying and giving form to common denominators, Luchetti connects her acute observation of bird behaviors to larger systems in nature and in art.
Murmuration emerges as an act of survival made all the more meaningful against the backdrop of climate change and human intrusion on natural habitats. It is a close cousin to flocks migrating to northern or southern climes; these routes, too, are predictable, but threatened by weather, seasonal changes and compromises to customary stopovers along the migratory pathways. While the stakes are different, the ominous presence of the hawk or falcon makes the threat palpable, the murmuration all the more essential for the flock’s survival. Spirituality, a constant theme in Luchetti’s work, changes shape in this installation: the video projection on the plaster bodies suggests re-animation. In this current iteration, Luchetti engages the movement and temporal dimensions of film to restore the birds to life. Intimations of flight form and re-form on breastbone and wing; associations shift from boneyard to the stirrings of multiple souls, taking wing once more. The footage, however, is appropriated, and does not reflect Luchetti’s personal encounter with murmuration as an immediate, miraculous phenomenon. Instead, it is once removed, alluding to the way in which so many of us simulate immersion via the computer screen. The projection is enlarged and, hence, degraded. Closer scrutiny reduces the swarming birds to pixelated marks as reductive as the distilled renderings of an Impressionist painter. The restless movement of the murmuration’s shifting patterns playing over the circle of birds, generated by a technological conduit is, paradoxically, also what lends the piece its organic qualities.