Dodo Museum, 1980

Beck’s DODO MUSEUM—an ornately appointed gothic building partly covered with feathers—contains the artist’s version of a life-size skeleton of a dodo. The sculpture comes complete with its own attached pedestal and stands more than seven feet high. The viewer peers in through the open doors, craning this way and that in an attempt to see everything inside, and there’s a lot. The outside of the building is also full of details, from the feathers covering some of the walls, to the perched gargoyles, to the round mirrors inset on the side walls, to the monkey guarding the museum’s entrance, to the copper sheeting on the roof, to the golden dodo perched on the top of the building. And this is not the half of it.

Beck’s dodo skeleton rises from floor to ceiling, like a dinosaur display at the Museum of Natural History. It is all made up, of course, because no complete skeleton exists. Everything we know comes from inaccurate visual records and scant physical proof. On the museum’s interior walls—and barely discernible—are small paintings based on the “Unicorn Tapestries” on display at The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. The comparison of the dodo to the mythical unicorn reminds us that for a while people thought the dodo was a myth. Breathtakingly attentive to details, Beck has memorialized a creature that humans quickly and thoughtlessly made extinct. The dodo may look dumb and foolish to us, but our own foolishness turns out to be monstrous. Beck’s devotion to this impossible recreation is a funeral hymn full of whimsical visual notes, a gentle reminder of human waste and greed. – John Yau

mixed media, wood, feathers, copper and electric lightbulb
86 ½" × 34" × 36"