First things first – this (despite what every other blog post on the subject would have you believe) is almost certainly nothing to do with Monty Python.
I’m talking about the sculpture in the grounds of Devonport House, on King William Walk in Greenwich, that has become known as the ‘monument to the dead parrot’, because it does appear to be a psittaciforme that has joined the choir invisible.
It’s a yellow-crested (or a sulphur-crested) cockatoo (although the actually species is irrelevant, as we shall see) that is lying on a low concrete plinth, its eyes open, but with its legs pointing skywards. On its chest is the word “china” (and I’ll come back to my theory for that).
The sculpture is by an artist called John Reardon, formerly artist in residence at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths’ college in nearby New Cross, and he gave the work the title “Unwanted Gift”. Again, more on this later.
Reardon’s biography (taken from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine as his website is now defunct) states that “his work explores how art is made public, and how a public is constituted through art. It is site specific through its engagement with questions of structure and infrastructure that frame, organise, regulate and contain things, and where things start and stop.“
And of “Unwanted Gift” it says that it was “a sculpture in search of a site. The project was designed to provoke a series of conversations about the concept of public in ‘public art’ with Arts Officers in Borough Councils across South London“. (From the Wayback Machine again.)
So the cockatoo and the plinth are simply the MacGuffin, the real artwork was the process of engaging the local authorities to see what they would do when offered the sculpture.
And my theory for why the bird has ‘china’ stamped on its chest? I don’t think Reardon was concerned with carefully crafting a likeness of a cockatoo, this is simply a scaled-up version of a cheap plastic toy that would have stood upright (hence the open eyes).
The artwork is not the object itself, but the conversations about the siting of the object, and then about the public’s perceptions of that object. And as such, this blog post is now also part of the work.
nice one, my interpretation is that it is not just any parrot it is a cockatoo which is associated with imitation and copying (repeating sounds it hears). The bird appears to be playing dead looks dead but isnit, it is faking death. similar to chinese products that look like real but are actually fake copies. Now that makes for a nice public commentary, like you said your article is part of the mission and so is this comment 🙂