The date of Tiepolo’s Würzburg work rocked me. Just seventeen years after he put down his brush, Captain James Cook sighted the coast of Australia. What would Tiepolo have painted to represent the fifth continent had he known of its existence?
Suddenly it didn’t seem so far-fetched for me to think, as I had, of the newly seen land of Australia as somehow being itself baroque, a misshapen pearl, a last treasure—a place where pre-Enlightenment forces, both Indigenous and European, could still be active. In short, I wanted to blow up all those old, passive depictions of Sydney Cove, and the baroque seemed the way to do it.
The fresco was a vindication of everything I’d been leaning towards, even if the logic of how it would work in my novel still lay just out of reach. In a state of possibly unstable joy, I pored over my Tiepolo book.
The fresco is marvellous in every regard. The depictions of the continents run frieze-like above each of the four walls and the viewer ‘travels’ to them, physically visiting each continent as she ascends the stairs and looks up, turning to ‘discover’ a new vista at each landing. Tilting her head back to take in the central part of the ceiling, the visitor sees the gods in the clouds, and right up their gowns. There, Tiepolo’s lightness of touch and genius for airiness reigns.
In the political dramas arrayed around the staircase, Tiepolo shows a pragmatic understanding of human behaviour and driving motivations. Complex compositional lines create the sense of many movements happening at once. Here and there the action threatens to spill out of the frame—then actually does, with people, animals and material goods toppling over a trompe l’oeil parapet, which functions as the fresco’s bottom edge. Some figures, having fallen out of the picture, are seen desperately trying to climb back in, scrambling to grab or defend what’s theirs before it’s carried off by someone else. But the illusion is taken a step further. In each corner of the stairwell there is a real cornice of decorative plasterwork where sculptures of naked youths perch on a ledge that looks the same as the painted parapet. Several of these statues convincingly appear to have one leg in the painting and one leg out, as if they had swivelled on their seat, straddling it to get a better look at all the commotion going on behind. In one corner the youths’ legs are grey, as if in the shadow of the dark cloud which looms in that quarter of heaven. In this way, even the weather comes out into the room.
The blurring of the edge between realms is complete and the painted world is so thoroughly activated it cannot be enclosed. Untidy, barbaric, joyous, it pours out into the thoroughfare of the staircase, a transit place of real people and real movement.
This is Art wanting to meet Life.
And to me, it was riveting.
•
But why?
Why did I find this idea of frame-breaking so arresting? My TV days were so long in the past I’d forgotten my former relationship with the frame, but now they came back to mind. I began to see that it was really my own, old history that caused the research to speak to me, because I also remembered something else.
Long before Tiepolo, well before the viewfinder, there was the window.
III.
The window was really a series of windows running along the whole front of the house. And the house was the old Woy Woy holiday cottage our family went to with friends when I was a kid.
The house had only two bedrooms, and the front room, which had the feel of a closed-in verandah, was the main one. Single beds were arranged end to end around the walls; against one of the short walls my parents had a double. My bed was under the window.
Every day I woke before anyone else and my first thought was for the window. Though the main elements of the view did not change, every day, sitting up, I was eager to see how it looked: weather, light, boats wrought endless variations to arrangements.
The house was perched on a bushy hill, so the view was layered. Trees in the lower foreground; in the middle distance the blue strip of estuary; on top of that the opposite shore with its fussy detail; beyond that, ocean, Lion Island, more hills—sky.
Morning light in morning air. Everything gold-edged, intense.
Through that first frame I looked—I studied—for a little while alone, but in the sleep-muffled company of people I loved.
Next to my bed was a traymobile where Uncle Clive would put the tea things when he woke, but a lower shelf of that vehicle was the keeping place of something very wonderful. A pair of binoculars. They were small and made of brass, very old, perhaps once used more often at the opera than on the seven seas. Perfect for a child. In my first novel, I gave my childhood experience of looking through them to the adult female protagonist. At her dad’s house, she idly picks up his binoculars and scans the bay, bumping over the water until she isolates a putt-putt motorboat. She moves with it, giving it a little bit of open water to cut into. What she’s got before her eyes is an old-fashioned motion picture, grainy and unsophisticated and containing one simple uncluttered truth. It’s just a picture of a boat moving through water, and, to her, it’s lovely.
That’s exactly what I saw, that’s exactly what I thought, as a kid. And I suppose it’s why I later loved my viewfinder.
The images of childhood are mythic, steering thought and lives in ways not always easy to discern. Here I was, only just beginning to understand how a humble window helped shape mine.
IV.
Frames began as protective edges around paintings and were ‘engaged’; that is, physically attached and inseparable from the artwork. Any ornamentation of the frame was thus a permanent part of the experience of viewing.
By the Middle Ages, some paintings used as altarpieces were literally ‘housed’ in frames designed to look like church architecture. These frames paid reverence to the sacred images they contained, and protected them as treasures. The paintings were valuable treasures, made of gold leaf and pigments ground from rare and expensive minerals.
During the Renaissance, illusory effects involving the frame first emerged. Painters began to incorporate elements of the frame into their pictures, softening the transition between the real and the painted. Effects were also tried where objects such as books or knives seemed to protrude out of the picture plane.
Canvas slowly replaced wooden panels as a painting surface, and the frame became an accessory and ‘disengaged’, or separate to the painting. As the individual skill of particular artists became more celebrated, craftsmen took over the job of framing. They, in turn, began to assert themselves, especially in Italy during the baroque period, with frames becoming more and more elaborate. Intricately carved and gilded, these frames proclaimed the trophy status of the paintings, and, by featuring crests and emblems, drew attention to their proud owners. In northern Europe, as one might expect, the fashion remained more restrained.
Gradually Paris took over as the centre of frame making, turning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into a golden age for the craft.
In the nineteenth century, advances in printing meant images were far more widely available. To use them as decor was finally within the reach of many. Prints required frames—so frame making became an industry, not much connected with artists. When artists did take back control, they reacted against extravagant designs. The impressionists and post-impressionists opted for plain frames painted in neutral colours to complement works, although few of those frames have survived. Collectors mostly replaced them, choosing frames which spoke to the status and value of the pictures, or which matched collection styles.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it’s obvious that artists have used frames when and however they pleased. Now when museums and private collectors need to reframe works, they select frames which best serve the intentions of the piece. But the ethos, reputation and architectural setting of a gallery or collection also ‘frames’ works in various ways. I can’t help but think here of the area where Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings are hung in the National Gallery of Australia. It’s a specially designed, separate room, which not o
nly announces and frames the Kelly series, but its oblong proportions, and the physical experience of being in it, replicates what it might be like to look through the slot of the bushranger’s iron mask. In the paintings, Nolan is playing all the time with the mask’s eye-slot and using it as a frame.
A weird fact about the frame is that empty frames demand pictures: so much so that an empty frame will convert whatever can be seen within into a picture—even a blank wall. In the often-empty Kelly eye-slot you can see something of what might be called the great loneliness of the frame: it’s always in search of something.
The Kelly/Nolan room at the NGA is an echo chamber of frames, of presentation and re-presentation.
Because that’s what frames do. They act to cordon off reality, pushing away distraction to signal an aesthetic work, and draw attention in. This subject, they say, is worthy of our further consideration. The academic Karsten Harries puts it nicely, in a way that reminds me of my viewfinder days: frames help us attend to ‘the silent speech of things’.
Something else Harries says interested me very much. During the late baroque, the frame began to collapse as a border, on occasion invading the picture to the point of becoming part of it, and vice versa. (We see this with Tiepolo at Würzburg.) But then there’s a further phase where the frame goes completely wild and neurotic. Some of the most extreme examples are seen in drawings and etchings where picture elements, such as trees, ‘grow’ outwards, morphing to become an intricate drawn frame within an actual frame. Furthermore, these secondary, drawn frames often fail to contain their central image, resulting in a kind of bizarre feedback loop. With all the picture elements battling for supremacy, the status of the central image is undermined. Harries suggests this indicates a repressed anxiety about the approach of modernism. The decay of the frame raises the question: What is Art?
•
In the basement library of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where I investigated the frame, I wrote up my notes. While I was typing out quotes from academic theory to do with the frame, the words in common use struck me: imprisoning/freedom, subordination, transgression, authority, containment, contamination, protective, restrictive.
They were words anyone might read in a book about a penal colony.
Then I thought of Aboriginal rock art and rock galleries and couldn’t recall ever seeing a line drawn around an image to isolate it or privilege it over another. In the Indigenous world, it would seem, art was never separate from life.
Among our other tyrannies, we whities brought the frame.
V.
Writing a novel, as you can see, sometimes takes its author off in unexpected directions. Yes, I hear you reply impatiently, but did all this baroque/frame research pay off?
It did not.
I spent four years. I had two good characters; some good, unexpected ideas went unexpectedly well together; I had chunks of good writing. But whatever I tried, I couldn’t get the novel to breathe by itself, to start making its own action.
In a last hope that undivided attention would make the difference, I ditched my only reliable income stream and quit my part-time job.
Still the novel refused to be. And there was no denying it: though the good bits were good, the worst were fake.
I wondered if the baroque was to blame after all. Was the baroque all gesture?
Critics of the period say for all the wealth and potency of its images, it leaves the viewer feeling empty. Its vibrancy is superficial, its noise merely noise. The harshest critic even said that, at its core, it’s frigid.
That bothered me.
I put the novel aside but continued to think about those negative assessments.
After returning again and again to my favourite baroque artworks, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t agree. There’s too much relish and appreciation for life in the baroque for the frigid and empty charges to stand. No, something else is the matter with the baroque. At the heart of the baroque is frustration. The baroque puts its arms out and complains—I give you so much, this power, this beauty, this force poured forth, and yet it’s not enough. It’s everything I have, but it’s not enough. Because there’s something pure at the heart of art that can’t be wholly communicated. We glimpse it, we manage to show it in parts, but it remains itself, unattainable and intact. The baroque weeps with frustration at this. It wants to pull that thing out by the roots and thrust it into your hands. But it can’t be done. This is really the message the baroque has for the rest of Art.
It can’t be done.
But, dear baroque, your temperament is to die trying.
VI.
The novel had failed. Perhaps not permanently, because there was still a maddening pulse at its centre, but certainly for the time being—maybe for a very long time. My material was exhausted, I was exhausted. I needed to take stock. I needed to repair.
I decided to go fallow.
The more I thought about it the more I warmed to the idea: I would go dormant but in a way that was still active. If I opened myself up and calmly listened, there might be all sorts of things to hear—things I didn’t immediately have to turn into something else, as writers often feel compelled to do. In fact, I would be anti-production. I would read and walk and look at art and people and nature, and I would let whatever came my way wash over me and through me, and then let it go. I felt tired and sad and strangely like I wanted to find some missing level of maturity, but I also had a half-formed notion that if I took that mood to the experience of fallowness and went carefully and slowly ahead, it might be possible for this period to become a kind of artwork in itself. Perhaps that sounds hippie-ish; but it could be more, a lot more, than a desolate dribbling away of time.
My chief pleasure during the fallow was to read visual artists talking about their work and ways of seeing. The difference but adjacency in their thinking freshened my own. David Hockney became my favourite. I like the way he lives a life of inquiry, arranging every aspect of daily living around his investigations. When intrigued by something he’s noticed, or when moved to interrogate an accepted orthodoxy, Hockney undertakes elaborate, semi-scientific experiments. The artworks that might result are not an end in themselves but part of his ongoing engagement with visual perception.
In a book by Martin Gayford called A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, Hockney has some interesting things to say about the frame. Because he’s so fascinated by the way the eye moves around a picture to read it, he’s also very interested in edges. He talks about Jacques Tati’s 1953 film Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, in which one scene is set at a large railway station with multiple platforms. The comedy relies on a static frame. A group of people find themselves on the wrong platform. As trains arrive and depart the people rush downstairs to pop up on another platform, also the wrong one. And so it goes on. The comic tension arises out of the confusion, but also because of the way Tati uses space. The trains come and go from the frame horizontally, while the people travel up and down vertically. In the unseen underground tunnel that connects the platforms, they also notionally travel below the frame.
Hockney says really good filmmakers and photographers like Tati understand the screen and know how to get the best out of it. He notes that big effects don’t necessarily create a more immersive experience.
When he found himself unimpressed with 3D cinema, he realised it was because the 3D camera, with its fixed position, was unable to interpret the world in the same way as the human eye, which constantly samples from here and there as it scans a scene. To see if he could do better, he ran an experiment, mounting nine high-definition cameras on a car, which was driven down an avenue of gloriously blossoming hawthorn. The results were projected onto a nine-way split screen. He was pleased with the way it opened up new modes of narration. Essentially, he and his assistants had made a very fluid lens. They’d succeeded in making a flat picture that allowed the eye to look the way it likes to look in real life—roving and taking in multiple things in a split s
econd.
When I watched the hawthorn video online, I found it unexpectedly involving. It was surprisingly beautiful, for starters, but I was drawn in to it—became almost latched on to it—because it really did command the physical engagement of my eye. I entered the picture, moving past the psychological fence of the frame.
Still ruminating on the frame, Hockney talks about a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he was invited to look at a Chinese scroll. About 30 metres of it was unwound on the floor and Hockney shuffled along on his knees looking at it for hours. The scroll dated from 1770 and depicted an emperor passing through a city which was represented in its entirety, along with its population of thousands of individualised figures going about their business.
That same day, museum staff asked if he’d like to see something else. Downstairs they had a panorama of Versailles, painted by John Vanderlyn in 1818–19. To view it, Hockney he had to stand on a platform in the centre of the circular panorama. He immediately understood the contrast the staff wanted to show him. ‘We’re stuck in a fixed point [where the city doesn’t change]. But in the Chinese scroll we’ve just been travelling through a great city.’
In Vanderlyn’s day not many people in the Western art world knew about such scrolls, because they’re impossible to reproduce in books, and to be correctly viewed they should be unwound in person.
You don’t entirely unravel a scroll; you turn it continually. So it doesn’t really have edges on the sides. The bottom edge is you, and the top edge is the sky … [We] found out that the Chinese had rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century because it meant that you—the viewer—weren’t there. You weren’t moving. If you’re not moving, in a way you’re dead.
In the next breath Tiepolo’s ceiling over the grand staircase in Würzburg is mentioned. This, Hockney says, is an example in Western art where, as the spectator moves, more of the painting is revealed.
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