
Klemens Gasser
There Will Be...Without You
Gasser is himself a creature of transcendence: art dealer to artist. But aren’t we all transcendent? Isn’t our notion of sameness, of permanence, a construct that’s dubious, and increasingly dated? The fleeting sentience of birds is extraordinary to us; amazing and majestic and frenzied and silly. But that same sentience, of course, is our own sentience, and our self-importance, absurd and self-fulfilling, is our only pretense otherwise.
We live in cities, with wild birds only a few yards away; the naturalism of Gasser’s ornithology is that of a subway goer, and for the most part takes place within the confines of the city. The internet community of bird watchers, not the solitary wilderness, served as Gasser’s muse; the hawk has been spotted in Central Park, etc. The quietude of bird watching is itself a deception; it is high tech and twitter friendly. Tripods and long lenses and fancy computers and forums and forums. And here we are, we too, waiting to take flight.
--John Reed