The controversy began on Friday, October 13, according to Stewart Turnquist, program director of the MAEP. After seeing the show, a museum visitor named Frank Erickson left a message at the MAEP office citing concerns about the treatment of the two chickens. Turnquist spoke with Erickson on Monday and asserted that he "gave him a rundown of all the safety and health considerations that we [the MAEP] and the artists had made ... I was filling him in, too, about the reasons of the artists for including the animals in the exhibition, thinking he would begin to understand that the artists and he had the same consciousness-raising ends in mind, but then he started raising his voice and shouted, 'These chickens will be sacrificial lambs!'

"When he said that," Turnquist continued. "I knew he wouldn't be hearing what I had to say ... Afterwards, we started getting e-mails [of protest] from around the country. And they're astounding. I think they really define the moment."

Between October 15 and October 20, more than 70 e-mail and phone messages poured into the museum from all around the country. Though a spokesperson for the MIA denied that the museum was caught off guard, other staffers seeking anonymity reported that an emergency meeting was held on Monday morning, October 16, to discuss the issue and start a damage-control campaign. "It [the protest] was not a surprise," said museum spokesperson Kaylen Whitmore. "There was some talk previous to this show of instituting a no-livestock policy. It is something that has to be looked at ... We're always looking at how we function in the community and how people view our collections." MIA director Evan Maurer refused to comment for this story.

But Erickson hadn't waited until his conversation with Turnquist to act. Since his protests on October 13 did not bring an immediate response, he called a friend named Karen Davis, who runs the United Poultry Concern (UPC) in Norfolk, Virginia, on Saturday, October 14. In its methods and outlook, the UPC resembles animal activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), except that it is solely dedicated to the welfare of poultry.

"I told Karen that they had birds tacked to a wall in a chickenwire cage," Erickson said. "And that they were trying to pass the birds off as art. She was appalled, and so she immediately put out an action alert on the [UPC] Web site..." It worked. "I'm not a computer person," Erickson continued, "so I was amazed at how fast the word got out there. I think she has something like 10,000 people on her list, so it was like 'boom.' They just nailed the MIA."

The original action alert hit the UPC Web site on October 14. Titled "Minneapolis Institute of Arts Confines Chickens," it is addressed to Evan Maurer, the Institute's director and president, and to Beverly Grossman, the chair of the board of directors. The item at best can be described as selective in its choice of details regarding the show, claiming the birds "have nothing to do," and that they have no opportunity to "forage, sunbathe, dust bathe and socialize naturally. ... Denial of these natural activities," reads the alert, "constitutes inhumane treatment."

Privately, Mark Knierim, the artist and owner of the birds, expressed bafflement at what he perceived as the guerrilla tactics of a small group of militant animal rights protesters who had never seen the show or the state of the birds. According to Knierim, the e-mails and faxes repeatedly cited false information about the show — that the cages were small when they were not, or that the birds were unhappy and stressed when the birds often reacted socially to gallery visitors. Some protesters compared the cage in the show to cages that hold chickens on factory farms, even though Knierim's cage was 25 times larger than a typical factory cage, and included a perch, a heat lamp and a hard plywood floor with bedding for chickens to move around on and scratch for their food. Furthermore, two independent animal experts examined the birds in situ and pronounced them fine.

Ironically, in the post-Seattle age of political organizing, our rapid-fire capacity to spread the word can backfire: Along with the opportunity for increased communication comes the opportunity for misunderstanding and misrepresentation, rumor and innuendo. In fact, many of the letters and message that came to the MIA — often removed three or four times from their source — offered increasingly erroneous impressions of the exhibition. E-mail messages from as far away as New York, California and Massachusetts, cited "cruelty," the "terror" the chickens must be feeling, and compared the show to the "forced molting" and "beak removal" practices of factory farms.

For three days, the controversy brewed internally at the MIA. (The Institute did not release information about the protests to the local press until the following week.) It was Knierim, finally, who made the decision to remove the birds after one phone call from a woman who said she was not going to be able to stop some of the younger activists from "messing with the exhibition." Afraid for the safety of his pets, Knierim removed the birds from the exhibition on October 19. According to a press release circulated by the MAEP staff and the two artists on October 27, the birds were removed from their cage in the show after "the widespread public misinformation and escalating controversy surrounding the birds' inclusion in the exhibition potentially jeopardized the safety of the birds and the museum."

According to Mary Britton Clause, a Minneapolis artist and former president of the Animal Rights Coalition who became involved in the protest early on, the particulars of this case are not the issue: "These birds are a symbol for a lot of people. Just because they were treating them better than a poultry plant does not mean what they were doing wasn't wrong. I protested to the very fact that live creatures would be used in this way. They are exploiting someone [sic] that doesn't have the ability to say 'no.' Art is about ideas," she continued. "It's not a matter of these individual animals' welfare, but what they were saying with even having them there." (As a result of this exhibition, Clause has joined with three other artists to form a new organization devoted to the issue of the use of live animals in art works, the Justice for Animals Arts Guild.)

Although Clause and Erickson are artists as well as animal activists, they seem to be speaking another language than Knierim and his First Amendment supporters. "The people I've talked to say it's really awful," said Knierim. "Artists support free expression ... They don't see the problem with it [the chicken piece]. Visually and aesthetically, it is a very successful piece." Erickson, not surprisingly, sees it differently. "What [Knierem and] Turnquist's trying to do is make it an artists versus activists thing - to say that it's all about censorship in this case. That's baloney, because I am an artist. I just happen to also advocate for animals ... I knew this was something I had to do. It goes beyond art."

"I've changed politically because of this," said Knierim. "I am really opposed to the way these [animal] activists used violence and destruction as blackmail to get their point across. I disagree with birds being used for testing, but also believe we need to encourage changes through dialogue."

Clause echoes the need for discourse. "I disagree with any threats [to those who disagree with us]," Clause said. "To me, the discussion is where it's at. That's where we grow. We need to open up a dialogue."

Amen for dialogue.

— Michael Fallon is an arts writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a regular contributor to City Pages, a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis, and he writes regularly for several national publications, including Art Papers, Fiberarts, Modernism and Public Art Review.