Being There

by David Malouf

  Like all true works of art, Utzon’s great house and explosive sculptural ensemble was a gift. Our role as the receivers of it is to honour the gift with our affectionate gratitude, but also by taking it into our lives and using it as it was designed to be used, and passing it on.

  March 2009

  GLENN MURCUTT’S TOUGH LYRICISM

  All things are composed here

  Like Nature, orderly near.

  Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’

  GLENN MURCUTT HAS ACQUIRED a reputation as something of a maverick among contemporary Australian architects, especially when it comes to the conditions under which, as a figure of international standing, he organises his office and goes about the business of choosing commissions and working with clients.

  But artists are practical people. They choose the conditions, however unlikely they may seem to others, that allow them to do their best work. We should be more wary than some of Murcutt’s admirers have been of seeing the one-man, stripped-down office he works from (the rejection of that flock of assistants and intermediaries that gives status to most architectural enterprises) as a model of virtue and integrity in a corporate and corrupted world. Murcutt’s ‘eccentric’ choices – including his rejection of the speed of communication and decision-making offered by email, computers, the Net – may have to do with nothing more than an understanding of what, for him, works best: that is, keeps him in contact with all those aspects of his practice that involve the eye, the hand, the dimensions and limitations of a real body.

  Modern technology does speed things up, but it may also set the artist at a distance from the trades-manlike aspects of the work, which is precisely what some artists most delight in. There are a good many sculptors and painters, in an age when art is so often conceived by the artist but produced by others, who miss this side of ‘making’. Murcutt presents the more unlikely case of an architect who feels this way.

  What modern technologies largely affect is the rapidity with which choices can be made. This is useful in its way, but the fact is that what works best for most artists is slowness. The vehicles we have invented and the technologies we deal with get faster and faster, but our bodies go about the ordinary business of living at the old rate. The body’s natural pace is walking pace, andante, in which time is measured out in steps or in breaths. The very word ‘pace’ has its origin in the length of the average human stride. The choice for slowness is a recognition of this; a choice for the rhythms of body-time, and the longer arc, the slower pace, of earth-time.

  The spaces Murcutt has chosen to work in are private – not airports, offices, concert-halls, museums, but houses, structures that must necessarily take account of the body and its needs; the daily business of eating, sleeping, bathing, preparing food; the slow movement of day into night and of the sun’s progress across the sky as summer declines towards winter; the changing angle at which light or shade crosses a floor or climbs a wall. They bring indoors, and into the lives of those who inhabit them, an awareness of the larger clock we are attuned to, the earth; inviting the body to move back into a time that is measured by its own blood-beat and breath rather than the miniseconds in which a computer can sift images or make complex calculations.

  The rejection of machine-time, of computer technology, in the office and in the thinking that goes into his work, allows Murcutt, and his clients, leisure: to consider, react, question, talk through, and breathe. It is respect for all these, the time they take and the pleasure and profit we take from them, that the finished house is meant to embody and allow those who live in it to enjoy.

  When Glenn Murcutt was growing up in the late forties and early fifties, Australia, to an extent that might seem unbelievable today, was still a place that Australians themselves thought of as empty and unmade: in most ways invisible because unrecorded.

  No attention was paid to Australian buildings of the past, either public or domestic, and some of the finest of them were in a state of advanced disrepair. No one collected Australian furniture, or silverware or glassware: there was little awareness even that such things existed. The general view was that everything up to that point that had been made or done in Australia was ‘colonial’ and derivative. The idea that an established style of architecture – Gothic, Classical, Georgian, neo-Baroque – once transported and set down in a new and different landscape might itself be different, might in the translation have developed a local character, and that these changes might not be a matter of getting it crudely wrong but of getting it right for the new conditions, had not yet presented itself.

  The great work of Murcutt’s generation in the sixties and seventies was to make visible at last – either through museum collections or through a boom in scholarly publications and coffee-table books – what had been there all along but had not, till then, been part of general Australian consciousness: all that had been done and made over the nearly two hundred years of white settlement. Not simply paintings and sculpture, but tables, chairs, chests and domestic artefacts of every kind, including such novelties as carved emu eggs and poker-work breadboards, biscuit-tins, tea-packets, castor oil bottles, bus and tram tickets, posters – all the accoutrements and ephemera of daily living. An iconography of Australia was being created that would give Australians a vision of their past as both crowded and intensely lived; the sense of a history that in terms of day-to-day living was long rather than short and not empty at all but dense and richly layered.

  Nowhere was the discovery of a living past more evident, and, as it happened, more influential, than in the sort of buildings that were lovingly recorded and illustrated in two landmark publications of this period: John Freeman, Philip Cox and Wesley Stacey’s Rude Timber Buildings in Australia, 1969, and Harry Sowden’s Australian Woolsheds, 1972.

  For the first time, Australia’s rich heritage of rural buildings – bark huts, woolsheds, shearing sheds, barns – was not only made visible but was seen as embodying a practice that was deliberate rather than haphazard or makeshift, its choice of building styles and materials the result of careful consideration and adaptation to particular climatic conditions, and to the skills of local workers. The balance struck between efficiency and cheapness had created a unique and uniquely indigenous style.

  Glenn Murcutt responded to all this in his own way and within his own sensibility and interests.

  Buildings that had been seen as ‘rude’, if functional, now presented themselves to him as models for a new and functional elegance. Materials that had belonged to the world of the make-do and temporary – corrugated iron, reused timber, louvres – became, rather in the manner of the contemporary Italian art movement, L’Arte Povera, the stuff of an architecture whose aim was to turn limitation into opportunity, and, with what might appear to be the poorest means, create works of a definitive lightness. Essential to this was Murcutt’s recognition, as from one skilled workman to another, that the practice of local builders, often traditional builders in rural areas, embodied a rationale that, in its careful attention to ‘conditions’, was immediately adaptable to his own ecological considerations and was an earlier version of his own philosophy of ‘touching this earth lightly’.

  What Aboriginal people mean by ‘touching the earth lightly’ is leaving as small a mark as possible of their presence. It is a proposition that stands in the starkest possible contrast to the way our Western tradition sees things. We judge our achievement by the permanence of the mark we leave, the extent to which, in our dealings with the earth, we have changed and ‘improved’ it, reorganised it to reflect our vision; not of what it is but of what it might be, what we might make of it as the ideal backdrop to our own aspirations and needs.

  Touching the earth lightly, as Murcutt understands it, means that his activities on a site should make as small a disturbance as possible to what is already there. The house he creates should not so much command or compose the view as express it. By working in consultation with the land’s particular characteristics and conditi
ons, by playing in with its deep geological structure, its water-table, the seasonal movement of air around and across it, a Murcutt house becomes another part of the landscape’s organic history, its visible and invisible being.

  Murcutt’s awareness of the tension between transience and permanence, his interest in process, in continuity and change, and the way these affect light, temperature, moisture, the movement of air etc, the close attention he gives to the continuing history of a site, means that he is as much concerned with placing what he builds in the flow of time as in the fixed dimension of space.

  Architects for the most part find a place in the landscape where their houses can settle; or nestle, or nest. Murcutt’s houses hover above it, miraculously afloat; or they alight like birds, momentarily. They have, at first sight, the appearance of winged objects – weird flying-machines or spacecraft newly dropped down and belonging as much to air as to earth. Or, set as they often are among undulating hills, what they suggest, with their roofs welling in long-rolling sensuous curves, like sails filled with the wind, is fantastic ships making way in that other element that is also in continuous motion and flow.

  In either case, as air or watercraft, what we get from them is a strong sense of passage, as if we had caught them at the one moment when the eye can actually grasp them as still.

  A good deal of this sense of movement, of passage as I would call it, has to do with the lightness of the materials Murcutt chooses, and the fact that we associate these materials, as they have been used in the past, with structures that are temporary: with sheds, sleep-outs, lean-tos.

  In Murcutt’s case this is illusory, sophisticated play between association and fact, but illusion too is an effect. It is the tension here between an evocation of the transitory and the achievement of perfection, of what is once and for all done and made definitive, that gives these buildings their peculiar quality, as products not simply of a unique set of concerns and skills but of a unique consciousness.

  The beauty is in the detail; the way everything has been considered, taken account of, and in the elegance and economy of the solutions. The angle at which a roof-support is set or a window-frame cuts away and makes itself invisible. The way utilitarian downpipes are recessed, like baroque pilasters, to create textural interest in a façade. The small-scale and unobtrusive craftsmanship of the sleeping units at Riversdale, the artists’ retreat at Bundanon in the Shoalhaven, where the cabinet-work, very appropriately, evokes the interior of a yacht or the drawers of an antique secretaire. The way a picture window, again at Riversdale, creates an actual ‘picture’, composing the spiky vegetation of a rocky cliff-face behind into a framed still life.

  Perfection is what Murcutt has always been after. Hence the need to retain control of every element in the process, to keep every detail in mind, to be personally responsible for every change or revision in the project and to use, when he can, craftsmen builders he knows and can trust.

  What perfection means, in his case, is the achieving of perfect balance; between building and site (what is added becomes an extension of what is already there because it has been shaped to the same conditions), but also between austerity of means and, irrespective of scale, what I would call opulence of effect.

  Opulence may seem a surprising word to use of buildings that employ such humble materials but that is just the point, and constitutes the element of surprise that Murcutt’s buildings produce. Their elegance and fineness of detail, their lyricism, the sensuousness with which undulant motion plays against hard-edged horizontals and verticals – all this creates an effect that is rich, various, at times almost voluptuous, which the reference back to a world of tin sheds, add-on sleep-outs, backyard water tanks – the world of bush austerities – works against in a way that we can only think of as an architectural form of what in literature we call wit; of ‘heterogeneous forms yoked harmoniously together’.

  Writing of the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell, puritan fantasist and formalist master of such poems as ‘Upon Appleton House’ and ‘The Garden’, T. S. Eliot found the phrase ‘tough lyricism’ to describe the rare poise his works manage between hard intellect and sensuousness, richness and grace. It might equally be applied to the paradoxical balance and play in Glen Murcutt.

  The toughness in his case lies in his down-to-earth commitment to austerity of means, a refusal to make any gesture he cannot justify to himself as ecologically considered and necessary. His lyricism springs from the same source, though what we might call it under this aspect is not ecology but, more romantically, Nature: a response, directly through the senses, to the play between line, curve, angle and the natural phenomena – earth forms, air currents, seasonal light – that constitute the ‘site’.

  This dance of the senses, formally controlled, this lyric grace, is what defines the rigorous beauty of Murcutt’s work and is, as much as utility or conformity to ‘conditions’, the conspicuous aim of his art, and as he achieves it, not simply compatible with both but in the end inseparable from them, since they are functions of the same total view.

  BILL HENSON

  BILL HENSON IS A MAKER of magic. That the means he uses are entirely technical and are shared by the many millions each day who handle a Kodak or Canon only increases the mystery of what he achieves. What his photographs offer us is the unique and immediate presence of whatever they frame, and, by engaging us – by making us aware of the presentness of things – that enlivening sense of our own being, in space, in time, in the world, that is the real pleasure of art and all our reason for exposing ourselves to its difficult and sometimes disturbing artefacts.

  It is as well, when we evoke terms like difficult, to suggest immediately what we mean by them. Bill Henson’s work is not difficult to approach but it can be difficult to read. It uses a language of its own, which derives from one we already know but by redistributing its elements. To this extent it is like poetry. It bears the same relationship to ordinary opportunistic or serviceable uses of the camera that poetry does to everyday speech. As with each new poem we meet, we have first to learn the language: in this case Bill Henson’s language of looking, then of seeing.

  The looking is easy. The images Henson creates are direct and powerful. They appear to come fresh off the streets, the figures in them caught entirely unawares. Even the juxtapositions he makes within a ‘sequence’, teasing as they may be, are designed to lead us into and then through an organised space.

  But seeing is another matter. It involves a response to the charge that is set up between the various images and across the gaps between them – a charge of feeling, of meaning. It involves as well a recognition of the complex and disturbing arguments these images set up; on the one hand with the mundane or sensational aspects of the medium (news photographs, family snapshots, art reproductions, erotica), on the other, with the conventions of that discipline of seeing that belongs, in our culture, to the long history of painting, and especially, as it affects Bill Henson, with the masters of the High Renaissance and Baroque.

  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 the really striking feature of so many of the figures here is the quality of their gaze.

  Sometimes, as in Untitled Sequence 1979, what appears to hold a series together is the presence of all the various groups it contains at a single event. But this is the merest assumption on our part for which the pictures themselves offer no evidence; a wish to believe that there is, behind these intense presences, an actual happening and the shadow at least of an anecdote.

  In fact we can be certain of only one thing and it ought to be enough; that if these figures are present at a single event it is the one we are ourselves participating in, the series i
tself. The artist makes his own event by reassembling the elements of many others. Each picture, for all we know, may have been taken in a different city on a different continent, but they belong now to a single occasion: this one. What matters is their presence and our own. What I spoke of as characterising the figures in them, the intensity of their looking and being, demands an equal intensity of gaze, of attendance, from us.

  One of the earliest of Bill Henson’s works, Untitled Sequence 1977, consists of sixteen images of a young man masturbating – though all we actually see are isolated parts of the body at different moments in the act, none of them specifically sexual. The series plays with the notion of the sensational but is never, in any of its elements, sensational in itself. Its powerful eroticism lies in its encitement to voyeurism, in the immediate and shocking sense we get of muscle and skin texture as light and shadow create them for the tactile eye. The event, in this case, really does take place and we are there to observe it, but we catch only fragments. What is left out is the total and orientating view. Left out as well are the connections between the various parts of the body, and all those moments that the camera has not recorded and whose absence prevents us from following the act as a continuous spectacle. We are shown precisely what we are expected to respond to, and the gaps, alive as they are and activated by what goes missing in them, are also part of what we are shown.