Alchemies for the Eye:
Noel Hart’s Psittaculture By Paul Carter
www.comfortlevels.com
download a PDF of this essay
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.
|
|
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. |
 Scarlet Crowned Semaphore 2006 |
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.
 Musk Lorikeet 2006 |
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? |
 Semaphore 1, 2006 |
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)