'Parrot Parrot'

The image on the invitation card, and the clue to the most resonant motifs in the body of work, is a watercolour painting of an African Grey parrot. This picture, which is reminiscent of 18th and 19th century ornothological studies drawn and painted by imperial explorers, is the centrepiece of a triptych titled Parrot (African Grey) I. The parrot is a pretender on two levels: first, it is pictorial semblance of a real creature, an illusion. Second, a real parrot is in imitator in its own right – it learns and repeats speech without necessarily knowing what it says. It uses language without having ‘acquired’ it in the same way that a human subject comes to understand and be able to use language. Whether or not the parrot’s speech constitutes valid language, it is proliferated as if it were: a human listening in on a parrot speaking in a human language would be able to make sense of what is being said. This suggests that words have meaning and a legacy even when their connection to a conscious source is severed by time or translation, as is the case when words are read as text, for instance.

The text that appears in two paper constructions, Ivory Tower and Marginal Book, has been gleaned from apartheid-era law books, and reappears in these works fragmented, shuffled and interrupted, but repeated nonetheless. One gets an inkling, when reading this haphazard poetry, of the legacy of apartheid legislation and social theory – another spectre haunting this exhibition. The presence of these text fragments is particularly unnerving because, as Ivory Tower and Marginal Book evidence, it is possible for words used as the foundation for a deadly political system to undergo a semantic resurrection. They breathe again, differently and less dangerously, but with the dust of their previous life still in their lungs.

This slow meditation on different forms of life and agency is complicated by two digitally rendered, life-sized images of bookshelves hung in the window area of the gallery. Lives of Animals is a row of scanned spines of books on philosophies of animal rights, animal consciousness and human-animal encounters. This casts doubt on the initial impression in the show that the parrot is merely a mindless fraud. What if the parrot does in fact think and could use language in a way that approximates or even matches our own use of it? Which creature, human or animal, is in a position to decide what constitutes legitimate consciousness and agency in the first place?

On the facing wall, the second shelf, Library of Lies, packed with titles on cloning, conspiracies and art, suggests that even our traditional guarantors of authenticity and reality – living creatures that we can see and touch, the artistic genius and signature – are imitable. And if, as this work and the adjacent two drawings He Is Barehead and He Is Barehead II suggest, ‘reality’ is imitable, then distinguishing between the truth and a lie might not be of any consequence. Whether or not the parrot utters the word ‘parrot’ honestly, with intent, it still conjures up a mental image of the bird that goes by that name.