When a painting is described in terms of visual noise this is a dimension of its objecthood and, in its reading as an artwork. A riddle champions the agency of the thing to speak for itself. It can tell us its material properties, the process of its manufacture, it's setting and the time in which it exists, its use and its effects. Speaking in the first-person voice of the thing, it is the verbal identity of an object speaking on the occasion of its manufacture and revealing important details about its social and imaginative identities. This being the case, what, if any, assistance can be offered to an artwork, for instance a painting, for it to be listened to?

In a performance developed for Hollybush Gardens' series of events entitled 'Studio' exploring the translation of art from studio to gallery, I proposed myself as a device serving a painting, a painting painted by Sanja Todorović. Adopting an approach of ecstatic vocal inscription I presupposed that that painting may be read/heard and sought to define a threshold of attention. As a noisy thing jettisoning requirements of quiet contemplation, it seeks to ask who is reading and what is listening?

Hollybush Gardens is a commercial gallery, representing artists with internationally recognised profiles. The performance was subsequently repeated and re-titled 'A Three-Legged Man and Other Inquisitive Fruits' with adaptation to entrance and exit routes for the painting for TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre for Humanities) symposium 'Unruly Emotions' in the Faculty of Music. The performance was a subject in the subsequent panel discussion on the day.
Hollybush Gardens, London performance 29th July 2015
TORCH, Oxford symposium 23rd June 2016