Eric Wesley, North American Buff Tit

Eric Wesley: My name is Eric Wesley. I am an artist from Los Angeles. I’ve always had an interest in kinetic sculpture.

Narrator: The drinking bird debuted as a toy in the mid-1940s. It works by heat transfer to create the motion that mimics a bird drinking water.

Eric Wesley: What it is the “dippy bird” or “lucky bird,” or it’s got various names, is a dressed up heat engine.

It’s said that Albert Einstein studied the dippy bird for four months on his desk, and couldn’t figure it out and refused to take it apart.

The movement is predicated on, basically two factors, heat, light, and humidity. The Whitney Museum space which I think is 70–72 degrees Fahrenheit, and 50–55% relative humidity. And so she feels the same as you feel.

It’s very Sisyphean. It’s very Pop in its design. I would even go so far as to say Disney or, more accurately, with what I’m trying to do, Pop art, or a kind of Koonsian dynamic, or Paul McCarthy or so. In terms of human condition, we are all always working simply by breathing, let’s say. When you sleep your heart doesn’t stop. You’re working. And so I think that there’s something about that in there, and this kind of cyclical nature of life in general, I suppose.

And I stopped at the human-size for a reason, you know if it’s just a little taller than you and looking at you as if you’re prey, if it’s twenty feet tall, it becomes about something else.