David Malouf’s art essays reveal a critic of the first order

DAVID Malouf’s essays on the arts reveal a critic with wonderfully dangerous ideas.

David Malouf in front of Jeffrey Smart’s 1980 portrait of him.

AFTER the sober civil-mindedness of A First Place, the hard-won professional insights of The Writing Life, comes the holiday of mind and spirit. Being There, the third volume of David Malouf’s collected essays and occasional writings, is concerned with music, drama and the visual (and plastic) arts.

This volume is full of recollections of aesthetic bliss — whether in the form of operas, buildings, photographs or films — that have also inspired in the author a curiosity regarding the nature of art. Together the essays remind us that Malouf, who turned 80 last year, is not just a creative writer of uncommon grace and skill but also a critic of the first order.

What is it about his responses that justifies such a claim?

First, there is the range of his knowledge. That Malouf has read widely in terms of poetry and prose — from the ancient Greeks to the Australian present, from Latin to Latin American literature — is only to be expected.

But here he displays magpie expertise in Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s, vernacular 19th-century bush architecture, the long history of conceptual art, the qualities of individual conductors of the Sydney Symphony orchestra, the staging of Archaic Greek theatre, and so on, down to the occluded eroticism of Bill Henson’s photographic work:

Everything within the frame of a Henson picture, and in his arrangement of a series, is there to engage us — but on the artist’s own terms. A sense of puzzlement, dislocation, disturbance, is part of what keeps us looking. The central subject never quite declares itself, and it takes us a little time to realise that the real subject may be the act of looking itself ...

“... which is perhaps why,’’ Malouf concludes, one insight leading to another like a thought process overheard, ‘‘the really striking feature of so many of the figures here is the quality of their gaze.”

Malouf is a superbly cool appraiser of such hot subject matter, as a 1999 lecture on Hays Code era Hollywood reveals:

Eroticism on the screen arises naturally from the glamorising effect of light, its tendency to make flesh luminous and to give hair, especially blonde hair, the dazzling effulgence of halo. Think of what movies did to create that entirely new phenomenon, the peroxide, later the platinum blonde. There’s a key moment here, when in a line of apes in a cabaret act, one of them removes its animal head to reveal a radiant Dietrich, the Blonde Venus of the film’s title.

And he is engagingly unsnobbish when it comes to moving between registers of popular and “high” culture, which he does regularly and easily in these pages, whether celebrating the tawdry theatricality of Barrie Kosky’s staging of Nabucco or using Fred Astaire’s rendition of Cheek to Cheek to illustrate the opposition of music, which is non-representational, to the visual arts with their Aristotelian drive to mimesis.

This is neither intellectual peacockery nor faux-egalitarianism on Malouf’s part. Instead, it is an aspect of the second quality that makes him so fine as a critic: aesthetic coherence. Across the half-century or so spanned by these pieces, whether they deal with art happenings in London during the swinging 60s or the domestic architecture of Glenn Murcutt, Malouf’s critical responses remain extraordinarily stable. This does not mean they are static — rather that, irrespective of the object or event under discussion, the critic brings a consistent and lucidly elaborated set of ideas to bear. His principle, to crudely reduce the rich broth of his thought to a single flavour, is that of delight:

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 of witty.

This passage is not only characteristic of his method — proceeding via poetic association, a chain of rhyming words and images, while at the same time displaying the utmost lexical and semantic rigour — it is also a fine if partial iteration of Malouf’s philosophy of art. This personal aesthetic, founded on paradox, is outlined most clearly in piece on concert going from our Bicentennial year:

Presence — body. Our own body. The body of the hall. The body of musicians. These phrases mean something. They put the emphasis where it matters … The truth is, we get a heightened apprehension of this most abstract of the arts when we are most physically present, attending with the whole of ourselves and not just our ears.

“We appreciate best the miracles that are being performed, by real beings, when we are there, as at the circus, to take part in the moment of risk,” Malouf concludes. “Some quality of physical anxiety in us increases our attention and makes the performance on every occasion then a first one and unique.”

The key term here is attention. Elsewhere in the volume, Malouf approvingly quotes the 17th-century mathematician Nicolas Malebranche, who wrote that “attention is the natural prayer of the soul”. In our modern, secular context this idea is best expressed in relation to observer and artwork. Take this passage from an essay on the Wesfarmers Art Collection from 2002:

The 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 ... 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 this manner, argues Malouf, 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”.

No wonder this volume is called Being There: Malouf’s argument for art begins with us simply turning up — to hear, to see, to admire. Yet when we do front up, physically present ourselves to engage fully in the process he describes, something odd happens: we leave our bodies. “Any activity that demands our complete attention,” Malouf explains, “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,” Malouf suggests, “and we recognise the fact when we speak of 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.”

It turns out that Milan Kundera had it the wrong way round: it is the heaviness of being that is unbearable. Understanding this goes some way to explaining the cathartic effect that immersion in art can have for us, as well as furnishing us with a third reason for admiring Malouf as a critic: his orientation towards the aesthetic experience.

This requires a little expansion. For many of us, the critic is an essentially proscriptive figure: someone who forbids the bad — a scold, a dogmatist, an enforcer of rules from above — and only grudgingly prescribes the good. Critics such as these are ideologically front-loaded: they have an idea about what constitutes success in art and what constitutes failure, and they expend their energies in ensuring their judgments become monopoly positions in the marketplace of ideas.

But there is another kind of criticism. It does not presume that black and white film is inferior to chamber music, or that DH Lawrence is a greater novelist than Dickens. Instead, it places the responsibility with the reader, the gallery goer, the member of the theatre audience to become an active agent in completing the artistic process. This is a more challenging method of aesthetic appreciation than simply embracing the taste of an expert in the field, though it is also more rewarding.

This alternative criticism does not preclude subjective judgment or connoisseurship; it is not relativist in its approach. What it does do is transmit personal enthusiasm in manner that is contagious, rather than merely convincing. It leads by example — by transcribing with intelligence and passion what it feels like to see this picture, read that poem, hear that aria — in the hope that we might feel moved to replicate the experience.

On the evidence of Being There, Malouf is very much critic of the latter kind. In its pages he asks, again and again, that we recognise a kind of bodily democracy with the makers of art:

Is it 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,” says Malouf, “is an immediate and very physical sense of the bodies’ power and energy, both the performers 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.

This open-handed approach leads Malouf to some fascinating critical conclusions. In the case of opera, for example — that most shallow, fanciful yet elitist of artforms — the critic sees something far more powerful and popular in appeal:

It is, for all its artificiality, in its capacity to bypass language and deal directly from body to body, that opera, at its moments of greatest intensity, touches, and in an immediate way, on what is deepest in us, releasing older and darker apprehensions and forces than belong to our social life, or to education or culture.

We need such experiences just as we need dreams: “because they give us access to other states than consciousness knows, and bring so instantly and energetically alive in us deeper and more unknowable selves”.

To read paragraphs such as these is to be confronted by a conundrum. Malouf has always been regarded as a public figure of impeccable reason and tact — an urbane and gentle man who just happens to write novels, stories and poems of quiet beauty. Yet the classical tidiness of his lines distracts us from his wondrously dangerous ideas. Being There is a volume that argues on behalf of the chthonic forces that make all true art an enemy of bourgeois nicety; indeed, he is on the side of the body against all those apparently respectable authorities who would police or circumscribe its capacity for tenderness or violence. In short: Malouf talks like Henry James but walks like Walt Whitman.

English critic Cyril Connolly once divided Europe into two categories: northern “drinkers” and southern “f..kers’’. Malouf would not, I suspect, countenance such naked vulgarity. But if there is a single figure in our literary or broader artistic culture who has nudged our nation from the former category into the latter — gravid self-loathing towards a light, cynical pagan gracefulness — I don’t know who it is. All I do know is that we are an infinitely happier, healthier people for the push.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Being There

By David Malouf

Knopf, 368pp, $29.99 (HB)