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ESSAYS
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Essays
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Parrotsong by Sarah Armstrong
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Up in the valley you are carried into the day on a wave of birdsong. You can never sleep in, the noise is vast and swelling, a cacophony of voices. And through it always, the thread of parrotsong. Strident, chatty, throaty. The forest surrounds you here. Nature holds sway, with rain, floods, spiders, snakes, weeds, mould and falling trees. As if she wants to take back her land. Animals are her forward scouts, parrots the cheerful advance party, rejoicing in this reversal of the urban order of things. Three Crimson Rosellas circle Noel’s house in a swooping, curling line of flight, skimming tree tops, inspecting the lie of the land. Their plumage is shocking vermillion, ultramarine blue. Six wings flashing, blurring, iridescent, and then they are gone into the forest, disappeared into shadows and close growing trees. Water drips from leaves, last night’s rain slowly making its way to the ground.
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King Parrot
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The banana palm beside the verandah leans with the weight of its swollen purple flower –– a heavy package of petals opens to reveal small unformed bananas. King Parrots come to check on the fruit – in threes and fours they glide in and land, flapping wings akimbo. What colours! The males green and crimson, the females smooth polished green. One male moves awkwardly, purposefully down the flower stem, and his button eye watches you.
He hangs upside down to reach the nectar glistening at the tip of the pointed flower, indifferent to his own extravagant, lurid suit of feathers. You want to inch closer until you can touch him, take hold of that firm smooth body, quivering with flight. What is this human desire to touch wild animals, to have them look us in the eye, notice us? Is it forgiveness we seek or some kind of reconciliation?
A feather lies on the verandah boards, abandoned in the parrots’ flurried departure. It is no bigger than the tip of your thumb, fan shaped, downy grey touched with green, its filaments stirring in the morning breeze. You imagine it slipping from the bird’s body as his muscles pulled him into flight, unaware of the beauty he leaves behind.
Mid-morning you hear her calling, and the harsh cries lead you to the top orchard. She is high, higher than you’ve seen a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo before, no more than a ragged-winged shape against the sun and the thin blue sky. It’s a dry day after weeks of rain, and a blanket of humidity rises around you. She makes wide lazy spirals over the orchard then heads east towards the ocean, coasting on unseen currents. A white speck in the blue – her cry still reaches you after she has disappeared behind the tallest trees.
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Galah
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Needles of sunlight filter the green, moist air of the forest. This is the parrots’ domain – they navigate the trees like fighter jets, turning and corkscrewing between tight-packed trunks and looping vines. Groups of Rosellas, three, four, now six – fast-moving shadows in the dim light – call across to each other. Urgent, alert screeches, heralding the rain that sits ready in the air. It comes, beating its way through the canopy high overhead, striking the broad leaves, lifting the scent of humus from the forest floor - and you fancy the parrots avoid the raindrops, so cleanly do they slice the air.
In town, a family of Galahs hangs upside down from a phone line. A heavy summer shower has swept in from the north, filling puddles and masking the landscape. The pink-grey Galahs hang in a row, upside down, sodden and delirious with the rain, their knobbly feet holding them fast. When the rain abates, they right themselves and smooth their damp tufted feathers, beaks sliding long strokes along satiny wing feathers. Fluffing, stretching, chiacking, they take half an hour to arrange their glossy coats until the sun breaks through and they lift en masse into the sky and wheel away across the rooftops.
On the phone pole is a faded black and white poster of a Lost Cockatiel. He looks at the camera with one dark eye - thin claws tight on a child’s finger, inquisitive nervous head tipped to one side. Somehow scared into sudden panicked flight, he must have hunched on a branch - waiting, small heart beating fast - even as other parrots flew past, busy, purposeful. The poster is written in a child’s careful hand and dated three weeks earlier.
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Rainbow Lorikeets
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At dusk a flock of Rainbow Lorikeets streams through the hazy slanting light and converges, chattering, on the palm trees that line the main street. This is the soundtrack of sub-tropical towns on nightfall - this impatient, cheery twilight chorus, forest-dwellers making do in town. As the air cools and light softens, more birds arrive - they jostle and screech and preen, preparing to settle for the night. On the street below it’s too loud to talk, too loud to think.People pass each other with a smile - tolerant, forgiving, enraptured. Always enraptured. They seduce us - the parrots. They are nature’s wild unruly seamless perfection. Noisy and unapologetic in their brilliance, they come to us and speak of the loud fragile beauty of this planet.
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Alchemies for the Eye:
Noel Hart’s Psittaculture By Paul Carter |
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To see something in the wrong way is to extinguish its spirit. To perceive it in the right way is to revive it. Noel Hart’s work embodies both these propositions. To begin with: what does it mean to embody the chromatic hues of parrot plumage in glass? What is embodied? Is it the ‘spirit’ of the Conure or Lory that swirls through the vitreous medium? Or is embodiment the wrong term? Is it the spiritualisation of parrot that is practised? Some chromatic essence has been abstracted from a fluttering creature in the subtropical rainforest of northern New South Wales and transmuted. In these preliminary questions a profound issue for art is raised: Noel Hart’s literally flamboyant designs suggest a Promethean program. Art, with its gift of fire stolen from nature, emancipates humanity. Its creative flame makes us godlike.
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Blue Winged Parrot 2006
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The proof of this is the power art exercises over nature. Inside his mysterious semi-translucent envelopes essence of parrot is transmuted into flame; first extinguished, then alchemically revived, rendered precious. You would say that in Hart’s vision, the Ur-parrot, the one burning original parrot, from which all the world’s parrots – some 350 species plus at the present time - are descended, is the Phoenix, a symbol of art’s capacity to conjure out of extinction a renaissance.
But here is the rub. How does the environment fare in this alchemical transformation? Art may burn itself to death and come out alive, but what of nature, whose plants and soils supplied the pigments, and whose evolutionary masterworks provided the original inspiration? What of the parrots who, although notoriously talkative, had no say in their material immortalising? Isn’t there something frighteningly spectral about Hart’s extraordinary glass sculptures? In his artistic vitrines parrots are not displayed as they are in scientific cabinets. There is none of the taxidermist’s melancholy mortification. In Hart’s glass coffins no literal parrots are buried: it is figures of parrots that seem to hover at sprays of flowering gums or to mimic themselves in distorting mirrors.
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Scarlet Crowned Semaphore
2006
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His parrot emanations not only display their full chromatic spectrum but render their avian avatars curiously ghostlike (spectral). His glass-fused dream birds have come back from the dead: in the alchemical crucible their dumb matter has been rarified – hold these stained-glass portraits to the light and you experience a kind of visual ecstasy, or optical elevation, as if the Host were being elevated (and you with it). It is as if Hart has realised in glass what Gustav Flaubert imagined in his short story Un simple Coeur when he had the simple Félicité come to believe at the end of her life that her parrot (by then long dead and stuffed) was none other than the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost.
In other words, Hart’s work recognises that representation is always an ethical question. Taking the chromatic genius of a parrot, and inscribing it in the fritillary gestalt of a wing pattern is both to display and to conceal. With a dancer’s gesture, the glassblower twirls these patterns into a movement form that has the depth of a reflection, the poise of captured flight. Out of the destruction of the image a new parrot likeness is manufactured. Against a scientific tradition which consistently represents parrots as museum objects in advance – as if the passage from presentation to representation does not involve the violence associated with shooting, poaching, embalming and classification - Hart’s glasswork freeze-frames a moment of fatal impact. His parrot auras are conjured up, not in the hour of thoughtless triumph, but from a confrontation with death. These parrots bleed to death – except that, like the scattered limbs of Orpheus, wherever their gobbets of burning feather alight, they set alight tongues of coloured fire that speak eloquently, and not without a nostalgic excess, of that pre-representational Paradise.
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The ambiguity of representation is represented. This not only belongs to the troubled history of parrots in our culture, but to the glass manufacturing process. The fusing of matter at high temperature that renders it transparent is already an alchemical refinement. In glass, the material of the craft is already ambiguously withdrawing: to look at glass is always to look through it. Glass objectifies the scientific gaze – that disembodied stare that sees the world as an object to display. In this case, the smoky exhalations that are suspended in Hart’s bowls ask us to look at glass; their darkness is where glass becomes a house not a window. But the act of reincarnation staged here, the confrontation of eye with matter, extends to the forms themselves.
Shall we call them ‘bowls’, ‘vases’ or sculptures? Do they belong in houses or in museums, on tables or in glass cabinets? What kind of ornament is produced? But it is the same question that might be asked of parrots: in whose world do they belong? In our world they are confined in cages where they can be seen. In their natural environments, though, they are habitually invisible, secreted within a jungle of competing colours. Are Hart’s pots cages for parrot souls or analogues of places where the visual sense is not yet privileged over the other senses, and where the flash of colour as the birds streak by, is a glimpse that cannot be reproduced?
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In this case abstraction is not a withdrawal from the complex world of the senses. It is not a heroic reduction of multiplicity to a simple geometrical schema or system of correlations. It is instead the trace of fleeting encounter. This may be what is held up to the eye in Hart’s glass fossils. The rainbows suspended in their weighty, hyaline flanks are cast offs of creation that could not be satisfactorily caught in an image. They are the traces of the transparent, the always fleeting, that had to be looked at differently to be recorded: indeed, to see parrots in the wild is always, first of all, to be listening to what is about to pass by. And when they explode out of the trees, like instincts flushed out of the unconscious, they usually come in noisy, querulous flocks.
So with Hart’s new work: it is to be looked at together as well as apart. And it should alarm as well as beguile. You will never have the tourbillions of spiralling parrot virtue in full view: like parrots in nature, his creations only show one eye at a time.
Drawn to them, you must also be drawn away (abstracted), if you are to understand the environment that grounds their vision. The message is: images of them, like caged parrots, lose sight of the mind that made them. The psittaculture that Hart invokes is not an ornamental addition to our aesthetic vocabulary. It refers to a contract with the natural world in which it is agreed that representations come at a cost. It describes an imaginal economy in which the cost of reproduction is counted. This is why, when we look into these marvellous creations, we are very properly troubled by imaginings of violence to the environment and the evaporation of the conscience of the eye.
Paul Carter is author of Parrot (Reaktion Books, 2006)
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