Alison Croggon (Image courtesy Jacqueline Mitelman)
“As an artist, my relationships are experiential rather than theoretical. I certainly share with scientists and philosophers a desire to make sense of my existence. It is just that my approach is poles apart. It is a fragile, highly intuitive process, in which sensory acuity and memory are subtly intertwined.”
~ Jonathan Mills, State of the Arts lecture 2010
I had an English teacher in high school who one day strode into class, looked around belligerently at his students, and demanded to know if any of us read poetry. I did. I had read the dusty anthologies we had at home from end to end, and supplemented them with random buys from school jumble sales. I was a passionate and indiscriminate reader, devouring Alfred Noyes and TS Eliot with equal enthusiasm.
But this teacher so clearly thought that no one – and especially no one in this class of scruffy 13 year olds – could possibly read poetry for pleasure, that I didn’t dare to raise my hand. I sensed that he himself didn’t like poetry much, and that the price of outing myself would have been his unexpressed contempt. Certainly, he was a bad teacher of poetry.
I guess it wasn’t all his fault: the pedagogical approach to poetry was discouraging. I don’t know if schools still do this, but back then a staple of English comprehension lessons was the question: “What is the poet trying to say?”
This question enraged me. I didn’t think the poet was trying to say anything: the poet said it. The poem was what it said: it wasn’t there to be nailed down to an unambiguous message, but instead, like life itself, shimmered in its sensual ambiguity.
The meanings of a poem exist as much in its sounds and rhythms as in its semantic sense: but it was precisely those material aspects of language that were dismissed in the insistence on a particular kind of comprehension. After all, the suspension of certainty that is at the heart of any work of art is not easily translatable into exam questions.
Later, when I read Baudelaire’s insistence that “a poem must be a debacle of the intellect”, I knew exactly what he meant. Poetry is the place where the legislating impulse of language, even to its very grammar, is exploded from within, where our desire for order and control meets the anarchy of existence.
This subversion of the human wish to control reality is where art finds its power. It isn’t always a comfortable power, but it is always liberating, opening the consciousness to new perceptions of the world we live in. As Jonathan Mills claims in his lecture, art is one place where the many possible ways of perceiving and understanding can be articulated.
It resists paraphrase, claiming for itself a primacy of experience that is parallel to, if not the same as, life. And like life, its liberations are too often chained by the insistence it conform to a very limited idea of what “meaning” is.
In her famous 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag called for an erotics of art. “What is important now is to recover our senses,” she said. “We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”
All anyone needs to understand art is to look, to listen, to feel: all else follows. They are, not uncoincidentally, exactly the same skills we need to love. Yet our education system leads us to believe that this is not enough. I’m sure that this is the primary reason for the hostility so many people, including my English teacher, feel towards art. Having been taught that they ought to look for meaning in the wrong places, art makes them feel stupid, as if they are found wanting.
That’s not the fault of artists nor of those who reject their work. But it does express a terrible failing in our culture, a constriction of our thought, that has far wider implications. And as Mills suggests, if we are to face the challenges of our future world, it’s a failing we need to address.
Alison Croggon is a theatre critic, blogger, poet and novelist. Her blog Theatre Notes is one of Australia’s most respected reviews, criticism and play news.
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Lovely article. Thanks.
Beth Spencer
10 August at 12:54PM
thoughtful and insightful as always from Alison, plus a great extension to the lecture.
Marisa
10 August at 01:57PM
'All anyone needs to understand art is to look, to listen, to feel: all else follows.'
How true. But we are bombarded with words that seem designed to make us feel lesser beings. The reviewers and catalogue writers, the program notes contributors have (with regrettably few exceptions) a tendency to confuse and obfuscate. Those in the visual arts world are the worst. The exhibition catalogue is designed to leave you scratching your head, saying 'duh. I don' unnerstand'. (Acknowledgement due to, I think, Paul Jennings). And don’t smile when looking at that Rubens in the Old Masters gallery. Someone might get the wrong idea.
To step back in the continuum, replace the word 'understand' above with 'enjoy'. If we do not enjoy, there is no motivation to move to appreciation and understanding. And enjoyment unquestionably comes from allowing the feelings to flow. (This is the fear of the guardians of our morals, who think feelings are dangerous things. In their view understanding must be the precursor to confining feelings to what are perceived to be safe. Raw, emotional response is the devil’s work.)
The education system is blamed for much nowadays, and is often challenged for being too touchy/feely and insufficiently rigorous and pedagogical. But why not start with the focus on feeling at an early age? Who can argue with the power and excitement of together banging drums, or feeling wonderment at Alice in Wonderland? A little rigour later on can then lead to deeper feelings listening to, say, Taikoz, which may well, with careful nurturing, lead to an interest in the Shakuhachi, or even Haiku. The young may even grow up to understand those fine arts catalogues. Introducing a variety of influences is also important. Gamelan music, Chinese instruments, Middle Eastern visual art and dance as well as our own Aboriginal and Islander music, art and dance forms. Otherwise there is a risk that the young grow up steeped in a western tradition, which can be a straightjacket in the context of feelings other than puzzlement when confronted by foreign or contemporary art forms.
There is an important circular relationship in ensuring ‘all else follows’: a sort of feedback loop. Unquestionably, knowledge and hence understanding can enhance both feeling and enjoyment. Peter Greenaway's deconstruction of The Last Supper is a great example. To observe his work is to open up new ways of looking at visual art in general. And it certainly enhances the enjoyment of, say, Bach preludes and fugues to have someone point out the multiple voices and their interplay. But these kinds of knowledge are not, initially, necessary in order to feel something in the Old Masters gallery or while listening to a classical radio station.
There is, however, a slight problem with the distinction, real or imaginary, between entertainment and art. This distinction was stressed by Simone Young in her recent Peggy Glanville Hicks address, and also alluded to by Jonathan Mills in his State of the Arts address. I believe there is a spectrum. To me, a Three Tenors arena spectacular or an Andre Rieu Strauss homage are both cultural events. They both build on a bedrock of the arts. They both engender feelings, in an atmosphere of pure entertainment, that are much the same as those we might feel listening to an Opera Australia performance or the Berlin Philharmonic playing Brahms. Listen, feel and indeed all else may follow, including, in some, a desire to learn more about the arias heard or composers with the name Strauss. Is romantic literature solely entertainment and not art? Having, against my better judgement, attended a Wheeler Centre event on the topic (the Mills and Boone variety) and listened to three highly intelligent and articulate women writers of the genre, I came away with a clear view that it is truly an art form (although not perhaps one where much understanding is necessary for enjoyment). Feelings are certainly evoked: even the inimitable moderator, comedian Alan Brough, admitted to having blushed at some passages. Feelings indeed!)
Perhaps we should demand of our politicians that they stop from time to time, to view or listen to some art form or other, and feel some joy, fear, discomfort, distaste or other pure emotion. Maybe then all else would follow, including perhaps a modicum of understanding and maybe even a desire for overarching cultural policy development.
JohnofOz
10 August at 03:03PM
John, we're pleased to have changed your mind on romance writing.
We don't mean to get post modern about it but are the lines between art and entertainment so blurred now that it becomes hard to distinguish them?
Wheeler Centre
10 August at 03:38PM
I'm with you John - best part of visiting the AsiaPac Art Triennial last year in Brisvegas was the plaques for kids - not a weasel or wank word in sight to describe the high falutin' art!
Lara
10 August at 03:42PM
Spot on,Alison. I don't need to understand "Nessun Dorma" for it to make my skin tingle, I just need to hear it. Or, despite the analysis offered in school English lessons (which indeed may have helped my understanding a little), I only have to think of Gerard Manley Hopkins "The Windhover" for tears to start at such a beautiful and perfect thing ... and, as you may gather from my examples, I am by no means an "arty" person ...
10 August at 03:58PM
Hi all - thanks for your responses! JohnofOz, the "all else follows" does, I agree, gloss some things. The next step is curiosity - what is it that makes me feel what I feel? - and that can lead in all sorts of fascinating directions, if properly encouraged. One problem is that critical thought is so often thought to be the enemy of enjoying art (or life), rather than its handmaiden and accomplice. And I guess the shyness people naturally feel in approaching something that is essentially so interior and private. It exposes vulnerability, after all.
There is a strand of thinking about art that enjoyment or pleasure or delight is a secondary or unimportant or even decadent effect. I confess I've never understood it. But aside from the derogation of pleasure, that seems to me to take a very narrow view of pleasure itself. Engaging with a difficult and challenging work can be among the greatest pleasures - I often think of my first encounters with Paul Celan, whom I found both baffling and beautiful. The only way to work through that was to keep reading him, and I still remember how it felt when those poems began to flower into comprehension.
The art/entertainment divide is vexed, for sure. I'm not sure why it's a line that needs to be policed - not all entertainment is art, to be sure, but that needn't mean it has to be mediocre or stupid; and at the same time, not all art is, or should be, entertainment. I'm not sure the rewards I can get from Beckett at his most stern come under the heading "entertainment", but they are certainly rewards; the demand that art be entertainment can turn into a kind of tyranny, just as much as the other way around. I just wonder why it's always presented as if one can only have one or the other, rather than both. The greatest art has always incorporated both vulgar and high culture, pace Dante or Shakespeare.
Alison Croggon
10 August at 06:30PM
Ah, curiosity! The antithesis of complacency and the conservative. This too is a dangerous pool in which to swim . It has nothing to do with productivity or economic progress. Nor with stability. But where would our civilisation be without it. We would be resting our heads on the shoulders of the great, not standing on them to achieve progress. No Darwin. No Newton. No Fleming. No Picasso. No Schoenberg. No Stockhausen. It is the great driver of progress, not only in the arts and sciences. I wonder what our educators are saying about its promotion. Some cats may be killed but this is surely a small price to pay.
JohnofOz
10 August at 09:20PM
Thank you so much, Alison. This really spoke to me. A much-needed and inspiring tap on the shoulder! (And I'm so drawn to things I find both beautiful and baffling.) I think the same applies to making art too - look, listen, feel - and pay attention to what follows. I sometimes struggle with a kind of divide between my critical thinking head and my creative, art-making head. It often feels like the two get in the way of each other. I wonder if you have any thoughts on this?
ingrid
11 August at 10:57PM
Hi Ingrid - sorry for the delayed reply. I know exactly what you mean by the divide between the thinking and creative minds, although I do think art is a critical art, and criticism can be, equally, a creative act (although it's a responsive creative act, what Montale called "the secondary art".) I don't doubt that these different kinds of thinking use different parts of the brain, and sometimes they can seem seriously at odds, each tripping the other up. I guess I've come to think of them as complementary, and that struggle has been fruitful for me. When I first started reading critical thought seriously, it felt like a scaffold that gave me somewhere to leap off. I guess too in my poems and novels I've learned to permit myself to jump into the dark, to let the thing happen, even if I don't know what I'm doing. That suspension of certainty I talked about earlier: which now I come to think of it, is the same thing I try to keep when I'm approaching art. I don't know if that answers your question...
14 August at 08:45AM
Hi Alision,
Great article. Thanks for sharing. However you mentioned that "a poem must be a debacle of the intellect" belongs to Baudelaire. From what I gather, I think it's belong to Andre Breton and Paul Eluard (Notes on Poetry): "A poem must be a debacle of the inttelect/ It cannot be anything but/ Debacle: a panic stampede.. " etc.
26 July at 11:50AM