An exhibition by two Scandanavian artists, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, is causing a bit of a stir at London’s Tate Modern gallery this month. In an otherwise empty new gallery space 25 metres by 7 metres, a sparrow is trapped between the panes of a double-glazed window, apparently dying. The sparrow is, however, animatronic. It cost £12,000 and was made by Crawley Creatures, the company best known for the creatures in the BBC’s/ABC’s Walking with Dinosaurs series. The artists make a connection with the general demise of sparrows and that of London’s working class, though other interpretations have been made.
A selection of reviews
30 second video of the animatronic sparrow
Pictures 1, 2
The picture here is a woodcut from an early (1820 or so) chapbook, An Elegy on the Death and Burial of Cock Robin (York: J. Kendrew), reproduced in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, by Iona and Peter Opie, (ISBN: 0 19 869112 2).
Who killed Cock robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
With my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Maybe he can’t afford to be so jaunty any more.
