Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet

3. Culture

From the large-format photographs of colorful chickens decorating the restaurant on Tenth Avenue where my family celebrated Father’s Day to the smashing close-ups of exotic breeds in a calendar I leafed through at the Barnes and Noble on Sixteenth Street, New York City seemed full of chicken culture in 2007.1 What do I mean by that term? Until very recently I would have meant something agricultural. As Raymond Williams has observed, “culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals” (Williams 1983, 87). Yet, whereas chicken raising is becoming a greater presence in the five boroughs every day, chicken culture stretches beyond its original meaning—the cultivation or tending of chickens—to refer to an increasingly widespread current phenomenon: the production and exhibition of artistic works that incorporate chickens to generate a wide range of aesthetic, social, and scientific meanings.2 The notion of chicken culture draws together two seemingly disparate worlds: the metropolitan art market, where values are established by critics and galleries, and the agricultural market, where values are set by the craft and science of animal breeding. Common to both worlds is one specific kind of visual image: the chicken portrait. This type of image—initially an engraving or painting and now frequently a photograph—was originally produced to help the practical poultry manager identify specific chicken breeds and to provide the poultry fancier with a “standard of perfection” to which he might aspire as he bred exhibition birds. From its heyday in Victorian England and America to its reinvention in the works of contemporary photographers, sculptors, and conceptual artists, the chicken portrait has served as a powerful instrument for producing both chickens and the human beings who tend or attend to them. 53 Culture “Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something , basically crops or animals.” —Raymond Williams, Keywords bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 3 Poultry Shows and Hen Fever Chicken images first proliferated noticeably in the United States in the midnineteenth century. A craze for poultry breeding had been fueled by a new social phenomenon, the competitive poultry exhibition, where poultry breeders could win increasingly lavish purses for their prize birds. The first major poultry show in the United States was held at the Public Garden, Boston, November 15–16, 1849. Beginning in 1890, when the Madison Square Garden poultry show became an annual event, poultry shows were permanent features at state agricultural fairs throughout the United States, and poultry exhibition buildings rose up as part of the grand exhibitions of the era: the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1902, the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, and the 1915 PanamaPaci fic Exposition in San Francisco (Robinson 1921b, 7, 14). As interest in exotic chickens increased, so too did another source of potential profit: the publication of illustrated poultry books to feed the appetite of poultry breeders and exhibitors. John H. Robinson’s 1921 volume, Standard Poultry for Exhibition, is a classic example, with its extensive and exhaustive table of contents covering judging fundamentals, the ethics of readying birds for exhibition, care of the exhibition stock, selection and fitting of birds for exhibition, care of birds in transit and at shows, and the method and philosophy of poultry judging. Robinson’s volume pictures the basic practices of chicken exhibiting: teaching the birds to pose, washing them, drying their feathers, and even bleaching or bending their feathers to the proper angle. Standard Poultry for Exhibition is notable for the marvelous compendium of photographic portraits it includes, both individual and group. We see standard and inferior chickens organized by breed and sex, and we see serious dark-suited poultry exhibitors, poultry show organizers, and poultry judges, nearly all uniformly white and male. Dedicated to illustrating the proper and improper physical type of each major chicken breed, the book develops in a reader the habit of making morphological distinctions, or approaching the human portraits with a eugenic gaze. Thus, looking at the portraits of “Prominent Black Minorca Breeders and Exhibitors” and “Prominent Breeders and Exhibitors of Asiatics,” one is tempted to begin judging the genetic information conveyed by the features of the men pictured—to note the pince-nez, the glasses, the prominent ears, the drooping moustaches and beards, the receding hairlines, and the firm or receding jaws among those orderly images of white men. When we...