Pete Stidman

MISSION HILL GAZETTE

As long as tourists with little white socks and khaki shorts aren’t obscuring the view, it’s what people notice first. The dead bird.

It lays prostrate in a white, centrally-located, glass-enclosed, air-tight pedestal, and it forms the centerpiece of Henrik Hakansson’s “Cyanopsitta spixii Case Study #001,” an art installation at the Isabella Gardner Museum through Sept. 17. Hakansson is the museum’s most recent artist-in-residence.

The bird is exceptionally dead. The feathers are almost imperceptibly blue, its natural brilliant hue faded after decades of storage at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The application form Hakansson filled out to get the bird is just as carefully framed nearby.

The Museum of Comparative Zoology, just like any museum of nature, is a surreal experience. A variety of dead species are mounted on sticks, the floor or fake dirt or just hung by invisible string in endless aisles of glass display cases. Generally, however, their poses imitate life.

The bird at the Gardner, lying on its back on a white pedestal, is at least honest about its condition.

And that is precisely what Hakansson is getting at. Collecting animals, just as we collect art, may not be in the best interest of the animals. Of course, for the bird, the artist is coming a little late with the revelation. And, as his display goes on to show, it’s not an original thought.

The dead bird is a parrot. More precisely, an ultra-rare Spix’s macaw. Spix’s macaw is the most endangered known bird species in the world, driven to the brink of extinction by those who have collected it since its discovery in 1918 by Johan Baptist von Spix, a French ornithologist. Spix breathlessly collected over 9,000 birds during his career; 4,500 of them were unique species.

Actually, it was his assistant who first noticed that Spix had “discovered” Spix’s macaw, but Spix was footing the bill for the expedition.

The association of fine artwork and dead bird is enhanced by scads of printed pages hung on four large bulletin boards in the room. The printouts, possibly found with the use of Google, document the history of the bird and those who have tried to save it from extinction.

One inconspicuous sheet of paper reports that conservationists and bird collectors were about to bare-knuckle brawl at a meeting of the Permanent Committee for the Recovery of the Spix’s macaw in Brazil, February 2001.

The world’s most avid collector of the bird, a billionaire sheik from Qatar, was reportedly accused of shuttling four of his nearly 30 Spix’s macaws (out of an estimated 60 alive in the world at the time) to his estate in Qatar without consulting conservationists. Another, more conservation-minded bird owner, reportedly wanted a piece of the sheik’s representative. The story is from no less than the Financial Times of London.

Luckily, a smaller flock is in the hands of a zoo’s special breeding center in Brazil, says another sheet, and there have been some small successes in the breeding of the birds in recent years. Even some of the collectors’ birds have participated.

The importance of the installation is not in its presentation. The display is very limited and spare. If it were a news story, a seasoned reporter might sneeringly refer to it as a “Google plus one.” Google plus one is a term that describes researching an entire news story online, and then conducting a quick phone interview for that one original quote. “Plus one” in Hakansson’s case was calling up Harvard University for the dead bird-loan.

To be fair, there is a soundtrack as well. But it’s merely a recording of a Spix’s macaw doing its screechy-screech thing on a very large and handsome reel-to-reel machine.

Hakansson redeems himself by smuggling his idea into a museum as prestigious as the Gardner, one of the few contexts where his comparison of art and nature could truly have resonance.

Spix’s macaw is a grand analogy for a major dilemma of our time. Individuals can still own birds, land and even whales or elephants. More pertinent to Mission Hill, individuals can own trees, even if they are integral to an entire neighborhood’s ecology, aesthetic beauty and financial wellbeing.

But owning something that is alive is invariably an objectification. And being treated as an object, as we know from human history, is never good for the health.