by David Malouf
Twice now I have evoked the idea of attention, and this business of attending might be as good a place as any to begin.
What any work of art demands of us if we are fully to take it in is the gathering of all our powers of looking and listening, of recording, understanding, feeling. But in this intense concentration on the object we also experience, paradoxically it might seem, a heightened awareness of our own energy and presence. One of the secondary meanings of ‘attending’ is, in fact, just that – to be present, as when we speak of ‘attending’ a performance. To give our whole being to an event or object outside us is to be ourselves most fully present, most fully there.
The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche spoke of attention as the natural prayer of the soul, and St Ignatius Loyola, in his spiritual exercises, recommended just such a form of absolute concentration, such a focusing of the mind on a single aspect of the Christian mystery, as a way to spiritual enlightenment, in much the same way that some forms of yoga use the repetition of a mantra.
Any activity that demands our complete attention – absorption in a task, looking hard at a painting or piece of sculpture, losing ourselves in the reading of a story or in a play or film; doing anything, as we say, that ‘takes us out of ourselves’ – is restorative, and in a particular way. We are there, fully there, in the most complete exercise of our consciousness and being; but, since we are also outside ourselves in the object of attention, we are relieved for a time of the heavy consciousness of being; and, in that strange suspension of time we experience on such occasions, we are free as well of the even heavier consciousness of Time. This is doubly healing, and we recognise the fact when we speak of such forms of activity as recreation, as re-creation. Freed for a moment from the self and its preoccupations, lost in the object of our attention, we are paradoxically both fully present and at the same time dissolved in what is outside us.
On the whole, modern living is not very conducive to this sort of activity: to the concentrated long-looking a painting demands, if we are fully to take it in, or the kind of intense listening we need to give to music.
The sheer size of gallery collections and exhibitions makes browsing almost inevitable. We move on through, pausing only when something catches our eye. Radio and CDs encourage us to eavesdrop on music while we go about other business rather than give our whole attention to it, as we do when we attend a performance. Paintings can too easily become wallpaper; music aspires to the condition of muzak.
If we take seriously that secondary meaning of ‘attend’, we are allowing our attention to become thin and spasmodic. When we give up ‘attending’, it is not the painting or musical work that grows dim and disappears, it is us.
Every encounter of the kind I have been describing, with a painting or piece of sculpture, a poem, play or novel, a music or dance performance, involves a human agency, and on both sides. It is the fact that it is a human body like our own that is taking Nijinsky’s leaps, a voice fuelled with ordinary breath that we hear soaring so breathtakingly (as we say) in the Allegri Miserere, that so deeply moves us. What we experience is an immediate and very physical sense of the body’s power and energy, both the performer’s and our own, but the revelation is of the body’s capacity to break free. Our spirit soars. We are enlightened, made lighter. The old distinction between body and spirit is resolved in us, and at the same time, in losing ourselves so completely in what is outside us, we feel the resolving of a second distinction – between subject and object, I and the world.
In musical performance and dance the presence of a human agency is clear, the performer is there in the flesh. What we engage with in the majority of the arts is not a present performer but one who was there and is now invisible, or so it might seem. But if we are properly alert we will be aware of his traces – on the canvas, on the page – and might even think of ourselves as occupying, as we engage with the work, the spaces in which he once moved.
With poetry, for example (and the same is true, if to a lesser degree, of prose) we experience this in the extent to which we fall under the spell of the writer’s ‘voice’, and through the relationship that exists between the rhythms of the work – its pace, the length of its phrases – and breath, both the writer’s and our own.
In painting we are most keenly aware of the painter as performer, most directly in contact with his ‘hand’, through the brushstrokes that are the essential and very individual mark of his presence, and no less now than at the moment when he made them; but more subtly when, in shifting our position with regard to the canvas – in approaching, stepping away again, testing this view and that – we track the shadow of his presence by seeking out a place where he might have stood, either in fact or in imagination, when he conceived the work: the viewpoint from which, in his mind and eye, the painting took shape and became what it is.
This extended play with the painting, in which we dramatise the space between ourselves and the canvas – ourselves always in motion while the painting sits still; this physical activity on our part as we investigate relationships, read rhythms, get in close to concentrate on abstract passages of paint that we delight in for their own sake, independently of what they ‘represent’; all this movement of the limbs, exercise of the mind and eye, keeps our own body clearly in view but is also a way of inhabiting the body of the once present and active, now invisible, creator. In occupying the spaces he once moved in, we give body once again to the shadow of his presence as performer. We begin to identify, if only in a ghostly way, the miracle of the creative act itself, the miraculous transfer of energy and vision from an actual individual to an object through which we can make it, however briefly, our own.
Delight, a lightening of the spirit, enlightenment: lightness, in the double sense of a lifting of the shades and a release from the body – this is the essence of the thing. When this happens we are all spirit, though if we are to call the experience ‘spiritual’ we may need to take the word in its widest sense: spirit as ‘mettle’, as spunk, intrinsic being, the individual spark of Promethean fire, or in the French sense as witty. This wider connotation of the work, from an enlarging sense of our own and the world’s energy to a sprightly play of mind, would explain why we feel something like the same elation, the same lightening release from self, on occasions that are on the surface so unlike what we might think of as their levels of seriousness.
Easy enough, for example, to regard what we feel when we listen to the ‘Agnus Dei’ from the B minor Mass or Mozart’s ‘Ave verum corpus’ as a ‘spiritual’ experience. There is, in the music itself, a clear religious content – though we might need to explain why people who have no religious feeling, or are hostile to religion, experience the same lifting of their spirit as those who do. But don’t we take a similar delight, find the same sense of joyful lightness and release, in the great ensembles in Act I of Figaro, which are in no way religious – are in fact comic, frivolous, ‘immoral’ even? Or, to go a step further, in the inspired nonsense of the quartet at the end of Act I of Rossini’s Italian Girl, whose bubbling lightness makes the spirit dance in a way that the same composer’s Stabat Mater does not? Or to go further again, when Fred Astaire floats his breath, fragile, all too human, lighter than air, in a number like ‘Cheek to Cheek’?
Music is non-representational. Even when it does have a verbal content, our response to it, as the examples above suggest, is independent of any idea or phenomenon the words might point to. But what of the visual arts, which, until very recently, always set out to re-create, or ‘imitate’ as Aristotle put it, a visible, tangible world of real objects and events? The question is why we feel driven to do this, why we need – and have done, it seems, since the earliest times – to reproduce in another form, in scratches or dabs of paint on a wall, in modelled clay, a world we already know, and can see and feel in its real form. Why is it that this version of the world that we make, that we re-create, seems so much more moving to us – so much more vividly present, in
all its energy and uniqueness – than the one that comes to us in nature? Is this only because it has been isolated in such a way as to command our attention? Composed and presented so as to strike more acutely on our senses? Set in a light and context that allows us to grasp, in an immediate way, its inner life and spirit? All these, no doubt. But isn’t there something more? Some sense we have, even at this late date, that in embarking on the business of ‘imitation’ we are dealing with a powerful and perhaps dangerous magic? That in translating things – not just living creatures but even what we might think of as inanimate objects – out of the realm of time and nature, the soft and fluid world of change, into a secondary world of our own creation, we are encroaching on what is sacred and maybe even, as some religions have seen it, forbidden? That we are appropriating both the knowledge and the role of the gods? Is this why there hovers about even the humblest objects in a painting – a bundle of asparagus on a dish, a row of nondescript bottles – some essence of the ineffable? Powerfully, even poignantly themselves as these objects may be – utterly present as phenomena of a known world – they seem endowed at the same time with the status of emissaries from another and more ‘real’ one, which we recognise but could not name. It is in this sense that they might be said to approach the sublime. But to put it in those terms we must intend by ‘sublime’ what lies mysteriously beyond the limits, beyond the threshold of what we can grasp, of where we have actually been – though not where, in moments of delight and enlightenment, the awakened spirit may take us.
Essay for Sublime: 25 Years of the Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art, 2002
SECOND NATURE
WHEN PATRICK WHITE WAS awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 he was honoured by the Swedish Academy for having, like a navigator or explorer, added a fifth and previously unknown continent to the map of literature; for having opened up to view the contours, the colours, the natural and social history of a New World that had till then been hidden and which had at last come into a being so actual and immediate that readers in the world at large could now enter and move in it as if they had known it all their lives.
The Academy was speaking metaphorically of course, but the metaphor was a strong one. The body of White’s work, that fifth continent of fictional event and character, of evocative and sometimes exotic landscapes, was a product of mind and imagination but had a real counterpart of which White’s version was a living reflection.
The notion of a new continent of the imagination, to be discovered and opened up to the scrutiny but also to the delectation of observers, is a useful one for all the arts, but especially perhaps for the visual arts, since there is always, in that case, an original that can be used as a gauge both of the accuracy of the artist’s eye and the power of his transforming vision. It has always been the business of the plastic arts to render reality and at the same time, by recreating it in a different space, to bring into the world a new object, one that can be observed and even handled but which belongs as well to mind and consciousness, and speaks, through the visible, of what is there but cannot, until the artist has laid it bare and structured our way of seeing, be seen.
In fact 1973 was a late moment in the history of Australian ‘making’. Our fifth continent had for millennia existed in the mind of indigenous Australians; its physical reality had been remade there as myth, song, body and rock art, and in story-maps in the sand. Long before White, others, novelists and poets, had found existential terror or comfort in its vastness and given a voice to the experience, both shared and private, of its people. Painters with an eye, an inner eye, for what is local and primary had already ‘taken in’ what was new and commandingly challenging in it, the expanse of its horizons and soaring skies, the way its topography and vegetation are animated by the special qualities of its light and air. By 1973 the land had been remade in the consciousness of Australians as a second nature – nature domesticated, nature as Pastoral (one thinks of the imaginary temples that John Glover set down in a remote corner of real Tasmania, or the sketches the young Lloyd Rees made of his native Brisbane transformed to a classical city in the style of Poussin), nature in its wilder aspects as antipodean Sublime. All this was as much the product of rich imagination as of the recording eye, a world reconstructed in each artist and in each new work by a particular way of seeing, by many ways of seeing, since the land presents itself, from one part of the continent to another, in many lights and under many aspects, and to each observer in a different guise and with a different secret to reveal, as something both unique and ordinary, both familiar and new.
To see how all this works out in artists as various yet ‘typical’ as Von Guérard, Streeton, the Nolan of the early Wimmera paintings, Margaret Preston, the Boyd of the Shoalhaven landscapes, Fred Williams, John Wolseley, John Olsen, William Robinson, or to observe the use to which Ken Unsworth puts river stones or Rosalie Gascoigne a goose-feather, or the thistle sticks she translates from one landscape world to another, is to recognise the astonishing diversity of the scene and the multiple histories that are embedded in it. It is also to be brought up hard against what each artist brings to the scene, the different way each artist gets what he has grasped into shape, into the frame – or, in the case of photographers like Tracey Moffatt or Bill Henson, into the camera frame.
All this is a work of re-creation, of works made in the spirit of recreation or play, but sacred play, since what it seeks finally is a made place where world and mind, object and subject, are one.
And this is the point where two great and once widely divergent traditions cross: one the Western tradition of landscape thinking, and shaping and rendering, that goes back at least to the Renaissance, the other an indigenous tradition that reaches back millennia but has only recently, under European influence, found a way of achieving a more permanent form.
By taking on Western materials and techniques, one of the world’s most ancient forms of making has remade itself; attempting what might, till now, have seemed antithetical to everything it stood for: the fitting of its uncontained vision into the dimensions of a frame; the fitting in Time of what belonged originally, of its very nature, to the timeless and ephemeral, a map in the sand.
There are lessons here for every kind of making. The variety of what indigenous artists like the late Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, or John Mawurndjul or Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, create and have to show tells us much about how large a part the individual hand may play even in works where the subject is fixed and the role of the artist determined by strict custom. And in the commitment of indigenous artists to the sacred duty of recreating, in apprehensible form, their natural history and all its world of ritual and belief, we see in an open way what in other places has been obscured, that such work has its origins in a deep human need to take the places we inhabit into our consciousness; to make them places of the mind, and by reimagining them as objects that are graspable, to possess the world we live in as a part of ourselves, a second nature where we are at last fully at home.
Preface to the catalogue of the Biennale of Sydney, 2000
AN ANGEL AT BENNELONG POINT
IF, AS HUMANS, we had to name our supreme achievement in the realm of making, it would surely be that piecemeal work of hands and generations, the city.
Extraordinary, then, how often in such a collaborative enterprise, such a random collision of expediency and provisional hit-and-miss, of utilitarian dullness and commercialism and occasional caprice, a single building, the product of one man’s vision, has made all the difference, providing a city almost overnight with what it lacked, a defining centre, or adding to an existing landmark a late-born twin and rival to create a new line of force. Think of the Taj Mahal or the Golden Gate Bridge. Think of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. If such a building catches the world’s eye and finds a place there it becomes an icon, or what Wallace Stevens, speaking of poetry, called a ‘necessary angel’: a presence that speaks powerfully to the senses but whose real message is for the spirit. Set
such a building down in the muddle of a great city and the whole field composes itself anew. The city is drawn in around it, as if it had been waiting for just this miraculous object to appear and claim its place.
That, of course, is how it was when this building, Utzon’s Opera House, first arrived at Bennelong Point. And those of us who lived through the fifteen years of its construction – the piling up over weeks and months in all weather of so many tons of structural material, the assembling of so many hands, the precise calculations and engineering and technical know-how, the bringing in of excavators, derricks, cranes, lifts, girders to a site that swarmed like the pyramids, all mess and mud piles and unfinished arcs and unseemly arguments – will recall, when all the heavy work was done and those millions of tons had found their proper place and tension and the finished object was unwrapped, what a work of playful lightness it turned out to be, a shining thing from another order of reality that had miraculously stepped clear of the mind that had conceived it, shouldered off its crust, and was actually there, spreading its wings on a new shore.
But a city is a living organism, an enterprise not simply of towerblocks and thoroughfares and squares, but of daily comings and goings, of human needs to be catered for and interests served. Those too are transformed by whatever new thing is set down in their midst.
When Utzon’s necessary angel alighted at Bennelong Point the whole inner city shifted its ground. Circular Quay, The Rocks, Woolloomooloo and Walsh Bay took on a new existence. Macquarie Street found a goal, became what it was always meant to be, a grand boulevard running from Hyde Park to the water. And the lightness, the exuberant fantasy the building embodied and so powerfully spoke up for, provided a new vision of what a water city – and specifically this city, all light and vertical space and air – might aspire to be: a playground of the spirit, a model of how the useful and necessary may also, within the rules, become pure play.