Cover a past experience or are you expecting to many a brand new 11 of the most extraordinary things about painting and it's unlike any of the other arts which is that you can take in an extraordinary amount almost instantly It's amazing how much you can take in in the tiniest fraction of time all the other arts involve time you have to really read a book to watch a play a film music everything else occurs across a period of time and you need to hold that together but you can actually glance to the page I mean frankly no prizes in art could ever be given if this wasn't true when the Royal Academy. Commissions look at paintings for the summer show they are passed in front of them and decisions are made in seconds and it's it's there and it's gone and it has to have some sort of resonance quickly or they can't you couldn't make a decision so there is both that instant and then there's the question of what it is to really look at something and they're quite different things OK So on that idea of what the brain's ability in the eyes ability to absorb all this instant information think about the science of perception as well today so Danielle what's happening in our brains when we remember a picture say well it's great to have a Royal Academicians to to make the most important point about perception which is that we have absolutely no idea how it really works and introspection is a very unreliable tool so of course the impression that we have is that we take in a picture immediately but in fact our visual systems to Cayle Retton other detector at the back of our I can only really see detail at the very center and so while you do get a snapshot image of a picture to see it at all you have to move your eyes around it and we can talk more about what the patterns of that are like little that we Seems we give the impression to ourselves of having taken it all in at once actually the only way we can see is by as it were undertaking an inquiry around the picture. By moving our eyes to bits of interest and so how does that affect when we see something sort of the 2nd time Mike was talking about this idea that you know we get this flood of information but can the 1st flood of information ever be like the subsequent ones are they in the water is muddied in a way by the memory of the initial experience absolutely and so all of your perceptions are principally driven by your prior knowledge and your expectations and this can be demonstrated very readily in lots of different ways there's a very nice order treat demo which I think we've got lined up which can prove that very convincingly we're going to listen to some sounds but the process of perception is the same across all modalities of the should take this point to be being made about vision as well since it's radio I thought it be nice to bring some sounds along these are down to map Davis from Cambridge University and what you're going to hear is 3 sounds the 1st sound and the 3rd sound are identical listeners will just have to take our word for that it's the same sound sequence and in the middle you're going to hear a 2nd sound which will help you to the 1st perhaps that's enough introduction you can hear 1st 2nd and 3rd the 1st in the 3rd all the same. It was a sunny day and the children were going to the park. There is no cause or have to tell you no because most of you will have heard that the the 3rd sound which is identical to the 1st sounds completely different in particular you can pick out the words on the 2nd hearing of the 1st sound because you now know what they are and what this demonstrates I think very nicely and sound is that although you have the impression that perception is about taking things in from the world actually it's your knowledge your expectations and your prejudices that are being projected out into the world and compared with the input from your eyes or your ears this is very interesting in relation to my own work because I draw ordinary things I draw a thing I never make a drawing of something that you can't recognize that everybody should be able to recognize my work is based entirely on memory the ideas I give you very little information I give a line drawing it's a few lines it's almost nothing I don't tell you what size it is what it's made out of what its color is what it's for I don't give any of that information but by just triggering that bit of information the polls in the memory the memory fills in everything I haven't really noticed in the sense of fishing into the minds of the people who will be looking at your work that's exactly what I'm trying to do let's bring more in now I'm because I think your works are resonates with this with the combination of the listening and the visual I'm trying to see 1st how do you think remembering stands in the way of looking or hearing again quite the contrary I think there's a sense in which the common perhaps I don't know if any of experiencing a film that really mocked he when you were young and then you see it again and you kind of you know you reinvent that film in your mind based on all the experiences that have happened in in the meantime So I think it's in ridged if anything and this idea that you know you can't come to any perceptual experience as a blank slate you're always coming with. Preconceptions or certain level of bias and the point I wanted to bring in around listening is that in some ways much like the slow looking. Composer who passed away 2 years ago Pauline only Barrow's who came up with this philosophy of deep listening which I think is really interesting and resonates with this idea of slow looking in some ways in that she suggests that where very much engaged with this idea of vocal listening so listening to the message that's been communicated the one that we're expecting in the one that is being communicated us to us in a very kind of pre-determined way based on common codes and semantics whereas what she called Global listening is a different kind of attention a different mode of attention where your open and receptive to everything that maybe isn't necessarily the message and I think that idea of understanding the painting or the outward or the. Sonic stimuli in a very kind of pre-conceived way is is quite quick it's quite impatient sometimes and yeah I suppose there's a kind of generosity in shifting one state of attention and tending towards but also allowing the noise rather than just the signal in. The same unveil quote which I love to foster French some advance saying you know attention is the purest and sincere is want generosity I like that idea of this slow slow looking being a for a sort of a moral proposition as well groovy out the weird and wonderful example that Daniel brought in why did want to produce a drop the exact cut and paste verse not that I can attest that and caught your honor in that case the message was fairly clear Do we understand the sentence or we don't but I think that with a visual image perhaps such as a painting is it more of a complicated question I think it's all about the priority of experience and so when whatever works we see are going to be informed by whatever works we've seen before them and we don't experience the history of art linearly from 1st works made through the medieval relay Salzberg cocoa and then but we it's a hot pursuit so there are going to be people who experience bond or who 1st experience of art maybe Banksy and that's going to flavor very differently their perception we grind the lens of what we see from the experience of that medium So art is forever shaping how we see other art so you to get the the viola and the Michelangelo are coming up the sun Skelly and the Turner shows you those juxtaposition and whether or not you're seeing one is an allusion to the other or or what is a pretty Luzhin to the next is very interesting and the vile eggs mission that you mention is opening there are academies so it will be able to go and look at that did you have a point but I just it feels to me. That Michael's work is a very nice bridge into this because it is legible as he said it has real world objects I 1st experience to work in a restaurant might say well you know when there were items of cutlery on the walls of it large scale but I do think that for those of us and I count myself among them who don't really understand art of the not familiar with the history of art where none the less able in a good show in a good hang in a in a good presentation of work to get a sense of how the pieces fit into the chronology of the individual artist her own work and how it's developed over time and into the history of art and clearly the viola piece juxtaposing his own modern video based work with Michelangelo sketches clearly situates it that way and so I suppose there's a kind of richness to looking that comes when an individual work can be seen as part of a sequence whether it's the sequence within the development of the artist or through the history of this is the desire often expressed by people I want to see something new. I've seen everything I need a new experience I want to see something original but. Most artists individually will have the experience that if you are familiar for doing something and then you do something else people's 1st reaction to it is NOT say Oh that's wonderful it's so much better than what you used to do they will say I don't like it it's the 2nd time you show it against better and by the 3rd time people people can respond to it and it's partly the more unfamiliar the territory you enter the loop where there is not the memory associated with you and with what you do and what your language and what your interests are the harder it is for people to actually approach I might on used to say my great aunt used to say of an elderly friend she's not being herself recently and it's been a great improvement. Oh my God you have you had any situations in your own work where you've exhibited something and seen that small town is desire and horror of the new audience Yes My best known work is the oak tree. Claim to have changed the glass of water into an oak tree well. It's become a familiar thing to a lot of people. But when I 1st show there were 8 people at the openly. Many promote people came to the gallery that there was nothing there at all it was absolute dismissed at the time that I did it it took time for it to become. To have a certain kind of familiarity and as as it gains in familiarity it it does actually open up itself to more and more people and also to more more more levels of understanding for those who for whom it is completely new and can you give an answer very quick visual description of this piece is a glass of water on a graph show off. Out of reach high so you can actually touch the grass and there's a text in the text as interview in which one side of the interview is the believer and the artist and the other is perhaps the viewer and the skeptic and I'm making a claim to have changed it without changing its appearance that in fact it's not class were at all anymore it's actually an oak tree despite the fact that all the evidence of your eyes tells you this is not true so this is one of the curses and blessings of the on God perhaps that anything of God requires if not slow looking then sort of repeated looking and so so that its meaning can be unfolded fairly OK I think judging by your new book a new way of seeing that you must be a fan of slow looking I mean how else would you have unearthed the minute details which in the book you call I hook in an image or you see a painting that you believe unlock the picture an example of an I hoped might be Van Gough sort of weird swirling sky in starry night so what's your relationship to slow looking you might think that slow looking is absolutely in accord with the pulling out of the single overlooked detail that unlocks the meaning of the work and I could see how you would YOU TO soon that but in fact I think for the works that comprise the book I undertake different speeds of looking and I think that many of the I have to take one for example in American Gothic the very small blue or that is atop a weather vane that is very tiny and on. Takes us out of the painting altogether and it's something that I noticed very very quickly and always niggled in my mind and it required then revisitation and I kind of investigation into what that might be and why it might be there and how it unlocks a kind of astrophysics of the painting to find out it was Samuel Johnson say to improve opinion into knowledge you know you you take that 1st opinion of something that you found strange and sort of wears away at your mind a bit and figure out why it's there so I wouldn't want to say that slow looking is somehow the only way one should experience art I think it shouldn't be the enemy of blink and fast looking and thin slicing in that way that very quick way of appreciating art I think that they work in tandem and and that's what yields probably the greatest enrichment and enjoyment of a work because there's different speeds of looking reading and working as a mind to the wrong idea of the term you know in a photograph it's not one to tell it to somehow as. His attention catches on and you are a diver about the fact that the idea of the eye hook may make a painting of a prescriptivism human you should zoom in on this so you know that you're guarding . The viewer into a sort of mine you shine 1st of all it is relish that you said my writing reminded you of Roland Barthes but. I'm just saving them from A Yeah absolutely it sounds as though I'm creating some kind of law for the way in a given work can be appreciated what I'm really hoping to do is to spark a debate about these works and whether or not any given detail if removed would diminish the work and where greatness rests where that kind of. Donna showing I can the city of work stems from and can it be pinned down to a flick of the wrist or as an artist I'd love your opinion on that how does that what Kelli saying resonate with your own practice and your own ideas about sort of greatness in art perhaps I teach in art schools so I'm kind of looking at the other end of the spectrum which is where is potential Where are the ideas potentially going to go if they ever well fulfill some kind of expectation or are they going to totally surprise me and maybe I don't have the paradigm of what greatness is or isn't but I suppose I'm really interested in small details and sometimes it's the thing that was overlooked the 1st time I saw it either in my own work or you know so I come with an intention I plan to make a piece and then as I'm making it through this happens 2 years on Michael I get distracted or I find myself going on a tangent or in fact a very small detail becomes the thing I press about for a very very long time and sometimes it might even just be I don't know the way a word is pronounced or a little bit of shimmer in the corner so I made a piece in collaboration with filmmaker Liz Rhodes and essentially our conversation is what drove the film the film is the soundtrack filmed through the optical sound camera through the tiny window through which you monitor this and so because of the way it was shot sometimes the words produced really interesting images you know sound waves and other times certain sounds that weren't speech like swallowing or taking a shot in breath produced a tiny flick air but weren't really part of the message and sometimes I kept those in because it tiny in breath or just even the sound of a mouse opening you know where you just hear the tongue for a 2nd you know and it was whether to keep those in or not and what those were actually doing where they instantiating a moment of pause where they during awareness to the fact that although there's no figurative image it's. Actually a body speaking that has flash. So yeah it's those things that you don't you know I just thought of it as a text that would be visualized But actually there's all these other much more material artifacts that you don't necessarily intend but they appear and they are rich they have depth and they take you somewhere else perhaps there's no counterpart in biology to the frame and that's why I think a frame is almost you know essentially what it means for something to be a work of art is that it's framed in some way or other and it's quite striking in the banal show. That there's a room where 3 of the works which are actually owned by take a guess that's how they got to do this and had their friends taken off which seem like a terrifying idea to me but that's because I don't know anything about paintings I've seen more terrifying if you do not think about things but I suppose this there was something quite symbolic for me about the curator of the show stripping the frame off almost re appropriating taking control of the work which the you know which the artist had sort of sent out into the world clothed in a frame revealing something about it and I just thought that interplay between friend and not framed the artist intention they all just letting go of the work or not was really interesting in the way that the works with only very few artists actually choose to frame their work that my most work never leaves the studio frame some summaries very deliberately make work in relation to frame me I mean you have to see say and you know Howard Hodgkin he even paints the frame into the picture this is very unusual but there in my own work I don't use no frames I never frame a painting I always like to use the edge and the frame I is that it's to do with the the painting as an object because the thing for me because the thing that when things interest me is the relationship of the the image object the object I have pictured and the object I have made I don't make chairs I make pictures of chairs and there's a difference between my object and the thing that I picture and it's the tension between the 2 and so the emphasize the object miss. Of the picture I leave it as an unframed object because that's the frame would be another object and would and would turn it more into an image and less like an object so the lack of frame Thesiger preserves the hybrid quality and the sense the sense that you know that you are actually looking at something which is this object which is put on the wall and you can pick it up and take it away and and it it's not a it's not a table it's not a chair it's not a shoe it's a picture of such and the miracle of this this thing that we are able to do of being able to to see things. As pictures I mean in my in my own work wondering why I try to make that instant thing as potent as possible is to remove speculation if you know what if this if you know in the 1st 2nd what it is you're looking at it you can stop thinking about that and it's the slow looking that occurs after that where you whatever slow whatever you're doing it cannot be absorbed in thinking what am I looking at because you already know does your use of color fit into this desire for instance a vivid recognition that yes that is to make the experience as vivid an immediate experience not a historical experience but a by Stark I mean it's not I'm not made pain I'm not I don't make still lives still life is something which exists somewhere else the artist looks at it makes a recording of the thing and then the other people look at this repeat of the experience they're not having in my things I would like to think of them as being as immediate for the viewer as they are for me so fierce and when you've painted turquoise corkscrew for instance sort of that's presenting that sort of instant recognition but also an estrangement from real and estrangement in order to make it more make the the present moment more vivid I mean one of the things that in. Just me in my own where and in my research and I think I try to kind of emulate or provoke some