In conversation with a spewing parrot. (Part 2)

Before I start this interview It should be added that the In Conversation with a Spewing Parrot series is derived from a process of stream of consciousness and the auto interview. What results from this process is then edited to make more sense but what I’m trying to achieve initially is something as close to a verbal language version of my painting practice. While what results may be read my initial intention is for the recipient to listen to the texts using the Microsoft Sam reader at a speed of minus one.

Why?

As I’ve outlined, that within the current styles of painting categorised as abstract, there is a separate area of inquiry which looks similar to that which we call abstract painting but is not abstract because it is not abstracting from any recognisable external source.

 What is it doing then?

 It is using the language of paint and the physical properties of the medium to make a representation of something ambiguous.

That would be ambiguous abstraction then?

Not necessarily; what results from the process is a kind of ambiguous image, yes, but it operates perhaps more like a mirror.

How do I mean? I mean it reflects the visual psychology of the painter?

Yes but also that of the viewer, the audience.

So why use the voice of Microsoft Sam to listen instead of reading?

Well I’ve been thinking about what sets this kind of work out as separate and that would seem to be that it is difficult to locate a description of the work using language. They are paintings, or perhaps more accurately they are made with paint, with things which are acceptably categorised as residing within the cannon of painting but they could become figurative, an image, a picture, an object or some marks on a surface, represent a space and so on. An analogy for this could be a word or a phrase in one language which has no parallel in another making it almost impossible to say what that word is or means outside of its native usage.

So why Microsoft Sam?

It seems to me that this is the polar opposite of what I’m trying to achieve with the paintings and thus very close to what I’m trying to achieve with the paintings.

Pardon?

Well one is a conscious attempt to avoid the intervention of the conscious; to move as far away as possible from straight descriptive terms to a place where the best I can hope for is simile, analogy.

Very much like music, jazz music then?

Perhaps. Because Sams voice is digital and very mechanical sounding, the rhythm of his speech very non human, it seems to me that the text takes on some extra meaning in the same way as we attach extra meaning to the blobs of coloured mud we see in paintings of the kind I’m talking about but also in painting in general.

I’m not sure I see the connection.

That is because there isn’t one. But there is one and that is because I have taken something very literal, some text which would normally be read and a voice which you would expect to be human has some similarity to something made with paint which you would normally recognise as a painting and painting usually having an initial intention of communicating something specific on the part of the painter. By listening to a non human voice trying to illustrate with words something not ultimately illustratable in words the mind is allowed to wander and make its own associations, draw its own conclusions. I’m trying to be less leading.

Not to paint a picture with words or the sound of a voice like an audio book?

I think it may give the subconscious part of the mind a way to interject by allowing the conscious to relax a little.

Why am I so intent in working in this way?

I think the message has gotten in the way of the medium. People want to be told what the work is about and this prevents them from completing the work.

So I’m not telling them anything?

Who am I to do that?

I’m not saying how it is?

No I’m saying I’m thinking about this or that in this or that way. How anyone else thinks about what I’m doing is up to them but what I hope for is that it goes beyond a binary response.

Yes or no?

Agree or disagree. The ability to think is our greatest tool and it seems that certain types of work seem to reflect our current cultural malaise.

I mean we’re being told not to think? 

More that we are encouraged to think that we are thinking when really we are not. With current painting I think this is still the fallout from the formalism wars of the last century.

Would you care to elaborate?

Not today.

So what is the point of listening to this text in this way?

I hope you can describe what it is. A passage of text about the way some passages of text could be engaged with while still being allowed to interact with that text in other acceptable ways.  It takes on its own rhythms, texture, in a way I can not control; is not consciously injected into the work and thus is not, or at least less, contrived. You could describe what the voice sounding out the text sounds like, even what you think the text is about i.e. painting but in the same way as the paintings are about painting no one can really say with any great surety what this type of painting is about.

How would I suggest someone should engage with this text?

Initially? It doesn't matter but ultimately I would like to think they would listen to these interviews in the suggested manner.

With Microsoft Sam?

Yes, set to minus one.

It occurs to me that those for whom English is not the native tongue could use software to translate these text and have them sounded out in a native equivalent to Microsoft Sam.

They could then write about their impression of the experience of listening to it?

Yes and this could be something akin to making a painting about an experience of a painting.

A transcription then?

No something much less defined than that. Perhaps you could begin to build a picture of a cross cultural structural unconscious, a wider global visual analogy library.

But wouldn’t that mean the work was being front loaded? I thought I wanted to avoid that?

Not really. As I’ve said I think to some extent I’m making paintings about my experience of making a painting. That experience is particular to each painting. So this would be someone else attempting to make a painting about their experience of making a painting about an encounter with a particular painting. So at the most you could say ‘this is a painting about a painting’ but that would tell its own story perhaps. Perhaps I need to mull that one over some more. Can I leave it at that for now?

Yes but it sounds like the kind of project which could be achievable?

Perhaps but that raises the question of whether it is necessary to experience this kind of painting in the first person which I very much believe it is.

I agree.