John Newsom: Silverstein gallery. (Reviews - New York).

In the first chapter of his 1977 text Noise: The Political Economy of Music, French economic theorist (and Mitterrand adviser) Jacques Attali approaches music--the human organization of sound-through nature, or more specifically birds. While we might innocently mistake the sounds they make for songs, Attali strips us of our romantic notion, pointing out that their racket is really a "tool for marking territorial boundaries." What we read as pastoral cheeps of enjoyment or idle chatter is actually noise "inscribed from the start within the panoply of power."

You get the sense from looking at John Newsom's paintings of warblers and woodpeckers that he never mistook the sounds coming from the trees for song. Newsom paints birds with a matter-of-factness that acknowledges, as Hitchcock's film did, the turf-war sensibility of these creatures. The paintings follow a general pattern. Oversize, carefully rendered birds fill the foreground, often perching on the edges of built structures (feeders, birdbaths). Their beady eyes are alert and comprehending but not friendly. Their poses and bearing are stiff, they were drawn from a field guide. Contrasting with the birds' deadpan naturalism are the brightly colored patterns in the background--checks, stripes, hearts, stars--which serve as absurd counterpoints, examples of human whimsy offsetting the rigid determinism of nature. The titles of the works veer from the ominous to the tongue-in-cheek. Springtime Oasis, 2000, presents a motley group of jays and sparrows perched on a birdbath, surrounded by bright, pastel spring flowers; a ye llow gingham pattern fills the background. Backyard Bliss, 2001, combines autumn leaves with a bluejay and a blue-and-white plaid sky. Labor of Love, 2001, is a dense crowd of owls and other birds of prey with dead mice or rabbits in their beaks; lurking behind is a bloodred background peppered with hearts. Call to Arms, 1998, features a bevy of woodpeckers against a bright polka-dot ground; the largest bird carries a mace in its beak.

Shuttling among the mundane, the sensual, and the confrontational, Newsom's project recalls the work of artists like Mark Dion who reflect on the ways in which animals have become a sort of mirror for humans, a "kingdom" to be organized or classified in our image. But while Dion's interest in animals reflects, ultimately, on humans, Newsom's birds resist this sort of intervention. They cavort in baths and feeders, places made by us to lure them, against wholly unnatural backgrounds, with bits of manufactured detritus in their beaks. But they are neither conveniently labeled nor cute and cuddly, nor are they anthropomorphized in any way. Divorced from their natural habitats and living in a world of gingham and polka dots, they seem indifferent to our desire to watch and understand the patterns of their lives--to interpret their noise as "song." Instead, they stand defiant, going about their business, adapting to their altered landscape, coopted by painting's urge to organize the physical and visual world, but as distant from us as martians, as self from other, or predator from prey.