Dodos en Suite

David Beck, Dodos en Suite, 2010, bronze, each: approx. 15 × 5 ¹⁄₂ × 5 ¹⁄₂ in. (38.1 × 14.0 × 14.0 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist in honor of Elizabeth Broun, 2016.53A-G

Artwork Details

Title: Dodos en Suite
Artist: David Beck
Date: 2010
Location: Smithsonian American Art Museum
/
Luce Foundation Center
/
4th Floor
/
48B
Dimensions: each: approx. 15 × 5 ¹⁄₂ × 5 ¹⁄₂ in. (38.1 × 14.0 × 14.0 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of the artist in honor of Elizabeth Broun
Mediums Description: bronze
Classifications: Sculpture
Subjects: Animal — bird — dodo
Object Number: 2016.53A-G
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2016.53A-G

Artwork Description

For more than forty years David Beck (born 1953) has crafted sculptures and elaborate cabinets that cleverly combine mundane found objects with precious materials, complex marquetry, and lacquer techniques. His works are opulent microcosms that evoke admiration and wonder for the natural world and a quirky, wry humor that exposes the absurdities of human behavior. Beck's sophisticated constructions often have hidden compartments and mechanical components that call to mind his varied sources of inspiration, which included medieval miniatures, German wunderkammers, Catholic reliquaries, eighteenth-century automatons, nineteenth-century mechanical toys, and the boxes of modern artist Joseph Cornell.

Beck's Dodos en Suite consists of seven bronze casts of the famously extinct bird. Each one is handsomely chased, richly patinated, and uniquely posed atop a round bronze socle, which is then mounted on a carved block of wood. The elaborate presentation recalls eighteenth-century French portrait sculpture, humorously suggesting that Beck's dodos are on an equal footing with Voltaire, Rousseau, and other venerable men of the Enlightenment era, many of whom collected natural specimens.

Beck became enchanted with dodos around 1976 after seeing a display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The presentation was an imaginative composite, since dodos suffered extinction in 1681 and no complete specimens survive. The artist was inspired to create his own romantic version of this mysterious creature and drew, painted, and sculpted numerous versions of the flightless, "disastrously trusting bird" that has become a symbol of extinction.

Dodos en Suite presents the species as admirable and beautiful, countering its reputation for being dim-witted and ill-proportioned. Beck's titles of each sculpture suggest human behavior, from the palpable tenderness of Mother with Child, to the vanity of Preening a Wing, or the paranoia of Looking over His Shoulder. Some hazardously perch on one foot or tip so far down that they seem about to tumble off their pedestals, yet each one carries on with its activity, blissfully unaware of its precarious position in nature.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2017

Works by this artist (13 items)

View all artworks

Bowl

Artist

Karen Karnes

Date1953

glazed stoneware

Casserole with Lid

Artist

Karen Karnes

Date1953

glazed stoneware

Bowl

Artist

Karen Karnes

Date1953

glazed stoneware

Tureen

Artist

Karen Karnes

Date1998

stoneware and glaze

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David Beck speaks about his work in the exhibition The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition examines mankind's relationship to birds and the natural world through the eyes of twelve major contemporary American artists, including David Beck, Rachel Berwick, Lorna Bieber, Barbara Bosworth, Joann Brennan, Petah Coyne, Walton Ford, Paula McCartney, James Prosek, Laurel Roth Hope, Fred Tomaselli, and Tom Uttech.

DAVID BECK: Probably the first time that I actually saw a dodo, outside of illustrations or something like that, was at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. That was probably in 1976, and they had a display there, they had a stuffed dodo, a taxidermized dodo, feathers and that, and then they also had a small skeleton, and I was just fascinated that finally I get to see one of these things, it’s just incredible. and then I started doing some research and I had old copies of the almanacs that had funny little, they had this whole story about that in fact the dodos you see in the museums are not real, they’ve been manufactured, that there are no dodos, calls into question if there were ever any dodos before. And the skeletons that are put together are actually composites of some dodo bones, maybe not all, but different things like that. So that I became very, very fascinated in this sort of thing was made up and manufactured in a bizarre sort of way, and I started doing research on where the dodo came from and how it came to become extinct and things like that, because it is known and is like the poster child for extinction and it has different names, “dead as a dodo,” “gone the way of the dodo,” but it was in fact discovered on an island called Mauritius, which is in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar, by the Dutch in 1598.

Supposedly, the Portuguese had found it several decades before that, and maybe Arab travel – or Arab explorers or traders had found it even hundreds of years before that, but the Dutch were the first people to actually write about it, and they colonized the island, so completely uninhabited except for giant tortoises, dodos, different parrots, there’s a whole group of animals and in fact – so that’s where the first pictures of it came from, sailors doing drawings and things like that, and they’re very different than what we see now, but there was an artist named Roelant Savery, who did a lot of paintings, and he was doing these things in probably 1620, something like that.

Sort of these paintings of Eden with every animal, and there’s a tiny little dodo in the corner, and that’s sort of the basis for anybody who does dodo imagery, the kind of go-to that guy’s stuff. Also, there was, I think that there was a complete dodo, some made it to Europe, and I think that there was one in particular that made it to the Ashmolean Museum in England, and then the Oxford Museum got it, but all that was left was basically a head and a foot. And there’s this big story about how it had been stuffed, and they had a complete specimen, except it was so poorly done in the 1700s that it all fell apart, so they threw it in the bonfire, but like a maintenance man had found the head and went ahead and saved it. Turns out that’s all in the literature you read about the dodo, but it’s supposedly not true at all, it never happened, but there is a head that’s in a box that’s in Oxford.

I think I made a sculpture in about ’76 or ’77, and the sides open up, and inside is like a little paradise of dodos, and they’re all kind of looking around. Some are looking straight up and some I think are falling from the sky. That was one of the first. And then I continued, and I decided to make the “Dodo Museum,” and I think I finished that maybe two or three years later.

It’s a little building that’s sort of Victorian in nature in a sense, but it’s covered in feathers, and the inside of it has an atrium, and when you open the façade of the building itself, you see there’s a skeleton of a dodo inside, so it takes up two floors, so you have this sort of funny little scale thing happening, and then on the walls of the little museum inside are paintings that are taken from the Unicorn Tapestries that they have at the cloisters, and I replaced the unicorn with the dodo, and I told the story of the dodo being discovered by Europeans, and that sort of being, well, being taken, you know? Being killed by dogs and that sort of thing. But also, in there, there is a tiny head, and a tiny foot, that are on little pedestals, and there’s a skylight, so that looks nice, so the light filters down. And outside, on the podiums outside, the steps going up, there’s a monkey and a pig, sort of ominous, and on the sides at the top, there’s a gold dodo that’s on top of the dome, and then there’s a dodo on the side, on like the third floor. And then on the other side, it’s his bottom, so it kind of goes all the way through.

And there’s two skulls, come to think of it. On the window in the back, and they look like little tiny skulls, but in fact, they’re seed pods from snapdragons, but they look exactly like tiny bird skulls. It has a very dark kind of look to it in a funny sort of way. I mean, dodos have this sort of humor to them, but there’s a little bit of an edge to it, because they are, you know. And there’s all those sayings about dodos: “dead as a dodo,” “gone the way of a dodo,” and then there’s “dumb as a dodo,” things like that.

The bronze piece is “Dodo En Suite.” There’s seven sculptures and their poses. A lot of the poses are actually quite precarious, and that’s sort of done on purpose in that the dodo itself didn’t… of all of that sort of ideas are precarious. So there’s a dodo that’s preening, he’s leaned over, he’s on one leg and has his foot up in the air. There’s one looking straight up and almost tilting back, and that reminds… that’s actually kind of somewhat of a helpful pose, but also reminds of all these tourists, in any kind of metro. For some reason as they do that, their mouth opens at the same time, it’s almost as if their jaw is connected to their belt or something like that.

The “Dodo” drawing was, I started… I generally work pretty small, but this is actually one of the largest pieces, largest drawings I’ve ever done, and the way that this came about was that I found myself just drawing dodos again. I had stopped, I had sort of figured that I had gone through that and I didn’t really need to make any more, and I found myself constantly drawing pictures of dodos again, and then there was this cold snap in California, and you know, our houses aren’t heated that well, so I couldn’t really work in my studio, and I had a heater that’s mounted on the wall, so I took this really big piece of paper and nailed it above the heater, and I stood in front of my heater for, you know, basically just to stay alive, or just to stay warm, and I just started drawing this giant dodo. And so that’s how that, actually, you know, little natural disaster. But that’s how I started doing that drawing.

And there’s a stump in front of it, and that’s right outside my door, so I could turn around and look out the window and draw a stump and I put that in there, and I put the stump in, and it’s kind of a symbol. In a graveyard you kind of see a lot of stumps, or one, you know, it’s kind of clamped down on life. In the background is actually from somebody’s house that I know lives down south of here, but yeah. So, it’s kind of funny to sit here and doing a piece of art because you’re trying to stay warm.

I prefer to work in a very intimate scale. I feel better, it just comes more natural to me, and it’s also a way of communicating one-on-one with a person, an audience or something like that, and it’s also a way of sharing, for them, which I like to think about, like I show you something tiny, and then you show your friend something tiny, but only one or two people can look at it at the same time. Like, even the larger pieces, the openings. Like say for instance, the “Dodo Museum,” it’s gonna be tough for more than one or two people to actually look inside, you know. Because the openings are small, and they’re intentionally small, so that one person will have a kind of direct, a real direct, an uninterrupted sort of experience.