Reading Frank’s Corpus

For sev­eral years, I’ve fol­lowed Elis­a­beth Nicula’s doc­u­men­ta­tion of the scrub jays who alight on her back porch. The images are reli­ably inter­esting — birds caught in strange motion, or super close-up, or both — but it’s Elis­a­beth her­self who brings the project to life, with her win­ning cap­tions (narrating the pol­i­tics of the porch: there are crows, a cat, and the sad sack squirrel known as Cindy the Barfer) and her simple persistence.

Now, for SFMOMA’s Open Space web­site, Elis­a­beth has written a com­pre­hen­sive essay about the project, and it knocked my socks off.

Framing the scale of the imagery, she writes:

We know that I started Frank’s corpus on March 21, 2017. We know that I have taken 82,438 pho­tographs since then, including today’s 115, whereas in all the dig­ital years before that, I took 6,085 pho­tographs. We know without ques­tion that since March 21, 2017, I have mostly taken photos of scrub jays. Therefore, according to Peter, “the average pic can be assumed to be a birdpic.”

Let me be honest: when I saw the link, I pre­pared myself to read this essay with, shall we say, “dutiful interest”. That’s totally fine; I’ll bet many of you browse these newslet­ters the same way, and I THANK YOU FOR IT!

But dutiful interest was, it turns out, not required, because the essay swept me away. I found it magnetic, provocative, totally absorbing. That’s espe­cially note­worthy for a piece of writing that, as you’ll see, treads some gnarly terrain; it tan­gles with the analog and the dig­ital, the eco­log­ical and the archival. In my estimation, the things at the heart of this essay are basi­cally unsayable — which is one of the rea­sons art exists, right? — but/and Elis­a­beth somehow makes them clear.

In the end, I’m not sure if this is an essay about the artwork, or if this essay is the artwork … but/and that blurred boundary oper­ates as a fea­ture rather than a bug.

Anyway, it’s great, and not in like, “one of the eight estab­lished ways an essay can be great”. Elis­a­beth’s moves are gen­uinely risky (and successful!); this is not an addi­tion to the high-end dis­cur­sive memoir genre (yawn) but a new genre of one.

It’s an uncom­monly inter­esting piece of writing, from an uncom­monly inter­esting artist, about an uncom­monly inter­esting bird.

Or maybe that last one should be “commonly”, and maybe that’s the point.

Please read Frank’s Corpus.

March 2021, Oak­land