Category: Culture

The long running window programme returns with a bolder cast. The blue tit, absent since March, reappears in the second episode with a changed manner and a fresh scar. The pigeon cabal, led by a figure known only as Gerald, continues its slow programme of takeover at the feeder. I was glued to the glass, nose and all, for two hours without a single commercial break.

It is not without flaws. The squirrel subplot is a retread, and the new crow, introduced in the fourth episode, is an obvious attempt to court a younger audience. Even so the writing, which is to say the weather, remains superb. A rating of four paws. Do not tap on the glass during the finale. They notice.

The tenth Biennale, installed in the long gallery of the Tabbycroft Institute, presents some two hundred objects, each of them pushed from a high surface by a paw. The pieces include a pen (Gallery 1), an unfinished mug of tea (Gallery 4) and a glass of water, whose fall is rendered in a continuous loop for thirty one minutes. It is rigorous work.

Curator Wilhelmina Argyle has declined to explain the curation. “Gravity is the explanation,” she told me, before nudging my notebook toward the edge. I admired the nerve. The catalogue, at $38, is itself a hardback that has been dropped, repeatedly, and the dent is part of the price. Standouts: the cactus, the remote, and a single vitamin. Not to be missed, unlike the vitamin.

It begins, as the finest operas do, with an unexplained grievance. At 3:07 a.m. the soprano, a grey tabby of rare lung capacity, takes her position at the foot of the stairs and delivers an aria in a language she appears to have invented for the occasion. There is no libretto. There is only the corridor, the dark, and the mounting sense that someone is meant to be doing something.

Act two, a gallop, was somewhat overlong. The ensemble knocked over a lamp, which I thought a bold directorial choice, though the lamp did not. I rise to applaud, in spirit, from under the duvet. Four paws, and a note for the management: the human in the bed was not consulted, and did not enjoy it, and that is the point.

The red dot has been called the defining visual motif of our age, usually by those who have been chasing it. I find it a deeply unoriginal work. It goes left. It goes right. It stops, which is the closest the piece comes to a thesis, and then it goes left again. There is no character arc and no catharsis, since the dot cannot be caught, and I note that this is also true of most careers.

Still, I watched it for forty minutes in the hallway of a Mr. Desmond Pratchley, and I chased it for thirty nine of them. Criticism requires distance, I told myself, tumbling over an ottoman. Two paws. Four, if you add the ottoman.

Forget the municipal galleries, with their velvet ropes and their children. The finest permanent exhibition in this city is the sill of the east facing window at 14 Pilchard Close, where a rotating programme of pigeons, one bus and a man named Gerald appears daily from 7 a.m. The curation is flawless. Nothing is explained. Everything is behind glass.

I spent four hours there on Saturday and witnessed a sparrow commit what I can only call a gesture. It landed. It looked at me. It left. I have not been so moved since the 2023 retrospective of the dropped sock. Admission is free, though I did pay in dignity, having chattered at the glass like a common amateur.