Explore the strange and compelling mysteries of the Order of the
Third Bird—a mysterious "attentional cult"—with
one of our largest and most ambitious books to date, now avilable for only
£10.00.
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
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
PB / HB
768pp
45 B&W illustrations
16 pages of color plates.
£10.00
The real history of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves
“The Birds.”
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” emphasize 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.
