AVAILABLE NOW: IN SEARCH OF THE THIRD BIRD

Hi There,
We're thrilled to announce the publication of a monumental and beguiling new volume... 

In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021.

Edited by D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen and Justin E.H. Smith

ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

You can gain further insight into this curious new work via a recent feature in TANK Magazine:

The Order of the Third Bird - TANK Magazine

And through this insightful essay by volume co-editor Justin Smith:

The Corona of Care: Attention, Aura, History

In Search of the Third Bird
Edited by D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen and Justin E.H. Smith
155mm x 235mm
HB/PB, 768pp
45 b/w Illustrations
16pp colour plates
ISBN: 9781913689360
 

Paperback: £25
Hardback: £35
(limited to 200 copies, exclusive to SAP)

Please note that HB copies may take a few weeks to be shipped as we are awaiting stock.

A very strange book
Hal Foster

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.