In Search Of The Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The PRoceedings of ESTAR (SER), 2001-2021
D.G. Burnett, C.L. Hansen and J.E.H. Smith
768pp / 133mm x 203mm
45 black & white illustrations
16 pages of colour plates
Limited hardback edition of 200 copies
Paperback
£10.00
A very strange book.
- Hal Foster
It’s…. strange! The prose style suggests that at the time of writing the authors were possessed by ghosts from circa 1900. It totally reads like an act of inverse ventriloquism. Strangely compelling… I can hear it as a very odd performance score and everyone off their tits on laudanum.
- Emma Bolland
A great deal of uncertainty—and even some genuine confusion—surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or Order of the Third Bird. Sensational accounts of this “attentional cult” emphasise histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes—both to its ranks, and to its scholarship.
In recent years, however, the revisionist work of the research collective ESTAR(SER) has done much to clear the air, bringing archival precision to the history of this covey of attention-artists who call themselves The Birds. Gathering the best articles of the last twenty years of The Proceedings of ESTAR (SER), this volume represents a landmark in the history of aesthetic practices, and will be a point of departure for future work wading the muddy marshes at the limits of historicism.
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About the editors
D. Graham Burnett serves on the board of trustees of the Milcom Memorial Reading Room and Attention Library; he holds a faculty appointment at Princeton University and edits “Conjectures” for the Public Domain Review.
Catherine L. Hansen teaches at the University of Tokyo, and is a contributor to The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism.
Justin E. H. Smith is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. From 2019 to 2020, Smith was John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library.
In Search of the Third Bird: peer reviews
In the spirit of transparency, we’d like to share some of the peer reviews we received for our title, In Search of the Third Bird.
While the reviewers were somewhat conflicted in their appraisals – and not exactly encouraging – we still felt that the collection was intriguing, and potentially important enough, to publish anyway. We hope you’ll agree.
Download the full PDF of peer reviews here
“So what, exactly, ARE these nearly 800 heavily footnoted pages? That is very much the question. I’ll have a go at answering it here below…
Is this a game?
It may be. Make of it what you will.
The authors are welcome to clarify their position on this thorny matter. But my job, here, is to write a peer review of a work of historical scholarship. And whatever IN SEARCH OF THE THIRD BIRD may be, it is not that, by the current constitution of the enterprise — despite the rather substantial amount of history that is in it.
Is it, then, a work of fiction? That is a different question, and one you have not asked me to answer. It certainly has some fictions in it! I will leave it at that.
Let me briefly summarize my assessment here: while I had hoped to be able to give this work an easy and positive review (I know several of the authors/editors, and had every reason to expect a scholarly work of high standard) I must very definitely recommend AGAINST publication of the present work, which is, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, NOT a work of historical scholarship in any conventional sense…”
Darrin M. McMahon
Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History
Dartmouth College
