(NEWSPAPER COLUMN, 1969)
‘In OUR age,’ said Auden, ‘the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act.
‘So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it’s not terribly good, even if it only appeals to a handful of people, they remind the management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Labourens is also Homo Ludens.’
I was thinking of Auden and his Homo Ludens the other morning as I listened to yet another public figure on the radio getting cross about Christo’s plan to transform a slice of Australia’s coastline into a work of art.
In case you haven’t heard, Christo plans to wrap up like a present one and a half miles of shoreline near Little Bay, north-east of Captain Cook’s landing site in Botany Bay.
By concealing the cliffs and rocks and stones he hopes paradoxically to reveal it. Wrapped Coast will be on display for some ten weeks before it is returned to its natural state.
‘Puerile,’ announced one public figure on the radio show I was listening to. ‘Absolutely ridiculous,’ said another, ‘in fact, the most stupid idea I have ever heard of. This is exactly the kind of thing which gives modern art a bad name.’
‘But it’s a wonderful concept,’ argued my second daughter, who wants to be a poet and who naturally believes in the idea of artistic transformation: ‘Christo’s creating a living work of art.’
All these divided opinions got me thinking. What is art for? Aren’t there more important, more constructive, things to be doing right now, such as protesting about our sons going off to war in Vietnam? What is the point of any art—good or bad—in times such as these?
Specifically, what is the point of employing one hundred and ten labourers and fifteen professional rock climbers to haul one million square feet of fabric and thirty-five miles of rope to cover up naturally beautiful cliffs?
All week I’ve been thinking about the meaning of art, its use in our lives, and yesterday I ferreted out a poem I used to love when I was a girl growing up near some cliffs similar to those that attracted Christo. I used to quote the poem to myself as I swam in the sea beneath the cliffs, dreaming myself into existence.
The poem was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh:
… What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life …
By yesterday afternoon I had worked myself up into such a state that I decided to have a look at Christo’s project for myself. I took a bus from the city down Anzac Parade, a trip I haven’t made for a long, long time.
I passed the University of New South Wales (where my elder daughter studies the more reliable rules of mathematics rather than the lawlessness of poetry), then the old rifle range at Malabar where I was stationed briefly during the last war, and finally we came upon Long Bay Gaol. I wondered if the prisoners could see the drapery from their cells.
It feels pretty remote out that way, a million miles from Sydney Town, rather than ten or fifteen. As the bus drew close to Christo’s project, you could see a lot of activity: it resembled nothing less than a building site, and conversation immediately started up.
‘Whatever happened to real art,’ said the woman sitting next to me. ‘I mean proper paintings of people with faces.’ ‘If that’s art I’m bloody Michelangelo,’ said the bus driver, turning around to join in.
I was the only one who got off. As I walked towards the strange apparition I passed men in hard hats wearing special tools slung around their waists. ‘Beautiful day,’ said one.
I stopped and spoke to a young man having his smoko. ‘What do you think of it then?’ He turned and looked out over the vast, weirdly covered landscape.
‘To be honest, I used to think Christo was a whacker,’ he said, ‘but now I think this is sort of like a dream.’
Sort of like a dream. You couldn’t get a better definition of art than that: art is the place where we dream our lives, where we momentarily leave the heaviness of life behind.
‘Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly,’ wrote Flaubert, ‘ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and the bitterness.’
I understood, looking at those disappearing cliffs, that in covering up such natural beauty Christo was asking us to see the grace within. By covering up the ordinary world in front of our eyes he was pushing us towards the intense significance of all things. He was reminding the management.
For what is art but an act of grace, a creation of some alternative world so that our own world is momentarily shot through with meaning? If we don’t know why life itself exists, surely art is our last poetic gesture towards the mystery at the heart of us.
This is the reason art still exists through wars, through famine, through our deepest misery. It is the reason why I welcome with open arms my second daughter’s potentially foolhardy vocation as a poet, even though she may well spend the rest of her life in poverty.
Art is not measurable in dollars and cents, or only in proper paintings of people with real faces. Art is an invisible commodity with the highest of invisible values.
‘Surely the arm of this woman is too long?’ said a woman to Matisse of one of his paintings.
And Matisse replied: ‘It’s not an arm, madam, it’s a picture.’
To which I might paraphrase: ‘It’s not a wrapped coast, madam, it’s an act of faith.’
Please, Mr Bus Driver, walk over from the bus depot one lunch hour and have a look. Each of us dreams, and sometimes it is not only the management that needs to be reminded that Homo Ludens translates as humanity engaged in joyful play. To dream, to play: art’s life, found wherever life is found.