THE BLIND MAN

"Why this image?" asks an interested viewer. (V)

"Seek a reply by looking backwards and forwards through the series,"
replies the artist. (A)

(V) But why such an image in this particular work?

(A) Think of the relationships of surfaces and materials and aspects of the cultural climate in which the work was made and exists. But this is 'jumping the gun'. Let's start again.

(A) The frame for/of what? The frame through which one can see a surface.

(V) What sort of surface?

(A) Ask yourself.

(V) Maybe some kind of wall?

(A) Close!

(V) Oh, just a minute! That figure, it looks like it's painted on a wall, like a fresco figure, a temple fresco maybe.

(A) Ok, let's take stock. We have a window frame, a pictured window through which we can view a surface that, because it has a figure painted on it, may be a temple wall. But surely, you're deducing rather quickly that this is a figure from a temple fresco?

(V) Yes, but this is Thailand. Such images are very familiar here.

(A) But this limits the work, making it less than autonomous. Shelve the figure for a moment and look further at the formal conditions.

(V) Formal conditions?

(A) Yes, you've noticed the frame, the pictured frame which, because of the nature of such a motif, causes one to view the surface - clearly a surface because of its very noticeable composition of sand and glue - as though behind it.…

(V) But just a minute! I'm having trouble with that because the surface comes forward. The sand and glue is literally in front of the frame.

(A) Ah, yes, now these are what I might call the formal conditions. You're observing a formal tension or contradiction in the work.

(V) Okay, but why didn't you just paint the surface to look like a surface but behind the window frame, as though seen through it? Easier to understand that way.

(A) Let's take stock again. We have a pictured frame, a window frame, behind which or through which we can see a surface. But that surface protrudes in front of the frame because it's thick and tactile, and a real as opposed to a painted surface. The window frame is only pictured or depicted but the surface is real. Therefore we have a tension according to our perceptual and cognitive understanding of what we're viewing.

(V) Ah, hang on! The figure, that figure you've painted to look like a fresco figure, kind of returns the surface to a pictured or depicted one, like the window frame is pictured or depicted. I suppose you could've achieved the same with some other motif but it's kind of neat, a figure that looks like a temple fresco figure being used to make a real surface look like a painted one.

(A) Good! Now you're starting to understand that there's an inseparable relationship between the formal dynamics of the work and the iconography. The window, the fresco wall - if that's how we can now refer to the surface - and the figure are the work's iconography.

(V) I don't know why you're doing it though. Why bother to create that tension or contradiction between surface, the wall coming forwards, and space, the wall going back behind the frame?" And why use a figure to further endorse this apparent tension?

(A) You want to go deeper?

(V) Well, it's necessary now. It's part of finding out more. Also, the same preoccupation appears in other work in the series. You seem to give constant emphasis to the same issues.

(A) I can answer you to an extent by referring to the sense I have of a painter's preoccupations with painting. To my mind the contemporary painter, that is the painter who is the product of the understanding of painting as it has evolved through the 20^th Century, has an obligation to acknowledge the surface on which he or she works as being surface. You can have space, of course, but the relationship between apparent space and apparent surface, the dialogue and correspondence that can be set up between the two, is unique to painting. Some painters strive to eradicate any sense of surface. I can think of one painter who works on mirror-smooth chalk & oil grounds, and polishes her paintings to eliminate all sense of brushwork, but try as she may to increase the spatial illusion her iconography and working procedures sets up, her efforts endorse the surface all the more….

(V) Are you saying that you can't get away from it, this sense of surface?

(A) No, but I may be suggesting that for many painters the sense of surface, or the struggle between that and the creation of space, is part of a kind of psychological drama. But this is preempting a later elaboration of the argument. I merely wanted to satisfy you sufficiently to listen a little longer. Just to continue trying to explain to you why I use surface and the figure; making a painting is rather like telling a story. It doesn't matter whether your work is so-called figurative or abstract, the procedures you follow have to feel right, necessary, kind of logical. For abstract painters the story may be between say, red and green and yellow admixtures. Or how this medium-sized brush-stroke relates to the previous larger one. Or whether to allow that little aperture of blue to appear like the sky when one is not keen on such associative qualities. This makes it sound over-simple, but you get what I mean. For me, I like to use the figural motif, which can create an immediate, obvious and compelling rapport with the viewer. But I also like to make the figure emblematic, to drain the blood out of it, if you like, to make it appear there like an object on a shelf, devoid of human status. If you look at depictions of the human figure before the advent of realism in painting, say medieval or Italian primitive, depictions of the figure in folk art, or depictions of the figure on Thai temple frescoes, you see this emblematic quality. The intention may always have been to make the figures lifelike, but the limitation of means gives what I am inclined to see as an emblematic less than lifelike figural quality….

(V) Drain your figures of blood?

(A) Ah, you've picked up on something I've said in the manner of an analytical therapist! While you may otherwise have been convinced by the art historical justification for the presence of rather emblematic-looking figures in my work, the more figurative speech I have used to describe their quality, i.e., as though ‘drained of blood’, has suggested a difficulty. How can I answer you? The formal story sometimes discloses the personal one and sometimes conceals it. I am somewhat undecided on this. I want to be allegorical, in a sense, and I want it to be possible for the viewer to tease the truth - the personal truth - out of the work. Let me ask you? What personal sense do you get from the work?

(V) Do you mean personal sense of you from the work or personal understanding of my own?

(A) I suppose I mean personal understanding of me, but you can answer any way you want.

(V) Well, I feel this tension/contradiction between space and surface suggests a kind of uncertainty, a lack of your being able to make up your mind. But then the formal criteria that makes such a personal reading possible is also, confoundedly, the work's strength. As to the figures, they're kind of cute. Not so much in this picture, maybe, but in some of the others they have a cheekiness to them like the lads from 'Boys Own' stories of action and adventure for children from years ago. But you'll have to tell me more as to their origin.

(A) Okay, take yourself to Lumpini Park in Bangkok some time. Observe the young men who hang around there. They have a kind of languor. Perhaps the result of a mixture of heat and boredom makes them feel tired, so they sit around, alone or in pairs or small groups, and appear to be waiting for something to happen. There's a sense that they're waiting for you, as though you’re a catalyst who can wake them up. If you substitute inertia for languor, then these figures are waiting for some form of charge that will bring them to life.

(V) So you're saying that the figures in your paintings are figures from Lumpini Park, languid, inert, drained of blood?

(A) In a way perhaps, but before that there's the channel, the Thai art historical channel, the groups of similar-looking figures that inhabit many Thai temple frescoes. 'Commoners', so-called, who, by virtue of their status, are allowed to do what they want in scenes that otherwise depict the life and teachings of the Buddha. Iconographically, there's not so very much difference between these fresco figures languishing in what we can assume was the Thai heat, in park-like settings, and characters from the present-day who hang around in Lumpini Park with nothing better to do.

(V) But isn't it rather arrogant of you to assume that you can be a charge that will bring them to life?

(A) Maybe, yes, but can you see that this idea can be inverted? These guys can be the charge that will bring me to life. It may be that I’m looking at questions of my own through them. And then there’s the nature of these questions.

(V) Desire is a word that comes to mind. But if these ‘questions’, as you put it, are to do with desire, do you need to deal with this in your work? Cannot you be more direct in your life?

(A) Perhaps, but there's ones own predetermined limits, limits defined by the voices from one’s past. Maybe artists will always be more conservative than some other people, by virtue of the fact that their work provides them with a means of courting their fantasies and achieving their aim without risk of oblivion.

(V) The voices from one’s past? Oblivion? We should get back to the painting for a moment! The window looks out onto a scene of a young man languishing inert, lifeless, waiting to be woken up. Or perhaps pulled forward. Ah yes, maybe that's it! The surface or wall protruding forwards from the frame is a metaphor for the potential for this figure to be awoken. Can I go on for a moment myself?

(A) Sure. I like what I'm hearing!

(V) You as the painter are the catalyst for awaking the figure, and I like the idea of the viewer also having this power in relation to the painting. To awaken the depicted figure from his inert state through the act of looking and evaluating. The figure is a mirror, in a way, reflecting back the conditions of looking at and evaluating the work. The more one achieves understanding though evaluation of the picture's formal dynamics, the more alive the figure becomes, in accordance with the realization of the life force of the picture within oneself. And by what you suggest, you too see the figure as a mirror, but in a more personal sense.

(A) I’m thinking about my relationship to the figures in the park. These young men are the sense in me of a force that I feel I can engage with through painting. Although painting, while incorporating the personal, also kind of depersonalizes the personal. Does that make sense? Painting makes of the personal a gesture outside of oneself. I feel rather like the blind man who walks with his hand held out in front of him, appearing to need to touch - this is maybe an archetypal gesture of the need to make contact. The blind man whose path through the sensed but unseen terrain depends as much, perhaps more successfully, on not having to touch.

(V) This is perhaps the essential relationship of you to your work, a relationship through which you appear to want to touch reality but which enables you to chart a path that makes the often banality or brutal directness of touching unnecessary.

(A) Okay, the roles have somewhat reversed, haven't they. I began by instructing you as to the nature of this painting. Now you, the viewer of the work, are informing me. I feel my relationship to the painting has fallen away a little, and in your last remarks you have provided me, through the channel of the painting, with an apparently succinct conclusion as to the nature of that relationship, to which I can only intimate in myself. But in reality there can be no such conclusion, except what is sometimes necessary to end a conversation or a paper. Better perhaps to refer to your conclusion as a kind of artifice, therefore, that belies what have become our attempts to understand my painting, with the proviso that as artifice it is not all that bad!

Michael Croft
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