As a response to our recent report on an Action of the Prosphorion held in Istanbul, and of its resurgence of late among the ranks of the Order of the Third Bird, another extraordinary document has emerged. It would be unseemly to encourage any kind of sleuthing, since the mystery surrounding its author appears salutary – but it is written from the perspective (in the voice, as it were) of the “object” of an Action in New York devoted to Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc,” and its email address of origin is the provocative “tiltedarcotb.” Its provenance clearly lies within the circumference of the Order and its distinctive modes of collective activity, but further details would be difficult (and we suspect, impossible) to determine.
Who is this “Ovenbird” (as we know, members of the Order take on “Bird names”), and why is “solidarity” such a central part of his or her nature? Could the text have been written by this “Ovenbird” in the lingering throes of Prosphorionic metempsychosis? Or by some other Bird, a galvanized link in the Action’s chain of Platonic enthusiasm? Why does the Tilted Arc seem already to know its devoted attendants so well? And why does its “me” give way so freely to “us”?
Perhaps we will never know, and perhaps we should not. But we reproduce the document here in full, along with the photograph that accompanied it.
