[Gordon Kerry: GOOD TASTE vs GREAT
ART for The Australian due 9/4/07]
‘Upskirting’: Australian composer
and linguistic purist Percy Grainger would have loved it – not the activity, of
course (who does?) but the word. No acronym shoehorned into grammatical use
(‘SMS me’) or Greco-Latin neologism (‘demystification’), just two honest Anglo-
Norse monosyllables. What you see is what you get.
I used the word recently in a concert program about music
and art in late nineteenth century Paris, but was requested to remove it to
spare the sensibilities of the audience. The theme was the Moulin Rouge, the
Parisian dance-hall in which a bunch of absinthe-sipping men would gather to
watch a line of comely young women do a high-kicking dance called the can-can.
Sounds like upskirting to me, long before the
Australian Open. When Offenbach had the Olympian gods dance the can-can in his
operetta Orpheus in the Underworld,
Paris was both scandalised and thrilled. Talk about divine revelation.
But seriously, my point (which I doubt would have offended
an audience) was and is that great art in the humanist Western tradition very
often grows out of such challenges to comfortable sensibility. Some of the
greatest works are in highly questionable taste.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s
posters for the Moulin Rouge are masterpieces of design, and revealed amazing
technical possibilities to future painters. While
Looking a little further we have two counts of incest in
Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Cycle, the erotised death of a young woman in practically any
show by Puccini (and numerous other composers). It goes beyond opera of course.
In his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven literally goes from the sublime to the
ridiculous by depicting a cherub in the presence of God and following it
immediately a jaunty ‘Turkish’ march; Mahler, likewise, can swing between high
drama and klezmer in the flick of a conductor’s
baton.
In an immortal couplet, Dame Edna Everage
once sang the praises of the Aussie pie: ‘As round and rich as Zara,/ As tasteful as Patrick White...’ I hope that Harold
Holt’s widow, Dame Zara Bate was amused; Grainger, who applauded ‘vulgarity’ in
art, would have loved it, just as he preferred the blowsy opulence of Richard
Strauss to the lapidary precision of Ravel. Certainly White (who, as every publisher
knows, was an Australian Nobel-winning author) fills his stories with people
who belch and suck their teeth while experiencing their own little hells and
occasional redemptions, but even those works of art which seem non-threatening
tend to administer a mild shock.
As Francis Bacon (not the tasteful British painter, the
Elizabethan one) famously noted that ‘there is no excellent beauty that hath
not some strangeness in the proportion’. Jane Austen’s heroines are interesting
because of their complicated relationship to social expectations; one of Henry
James’ heroes does absolutely nothing with his life so as to defy (thereby
fulfilling) the prophecy of a tragic end. The seemingly abstract symphonies of
Haydn or Mozart are actually full of sudden emotional swings. Haydn’s tend to
be funny; Mozart’s are, in Maynard Solomon’s words, ‘shockingly voluptuous’ in
their depiction of grief. As Aristotle was aware, the emotional purging of
catharsis can be effected by laughter as well as tears - sometimes even by
both. The harpsichord’s cadenza, or lead break, in Bach’s fifth Brandenburg
Concerto may not be about anything, but its excess of spirit and amazing
virtuosity make it a direct ancestor of Jimi Hendrix’
exuberant solos.
Experiencing great art in whatever medium makes our sense of
things different, however briefly, but for that to happen we have to be open to
the act of perception. The late Susan Sontag’s much-quoted call for an ‘erotics
of art’ reminded us that too much interpretation of art can blunt our sensual
experience of it. At the same time, art which is detached from its context and
co-opted as a symbol of taste and refinement also loses its power to ravish or
disturb. One five-star Melbourne hotel seems to have the same plangent baroque
oboe concerto on a tape loop in its marbled foyer; classical music is used to
accompany TV nature docos, a genre known, according to Robert Hughes, as ‘bugs
f*cking to Mozart’. In both cases we’re not actually
meant to hear the music; it’s just there to remind us that everything is nice.
In the late 1930s Sergei Prokofiev, a composer who had
survived Stalin’s Great Terror, attempted to portray some glimmer of humanity
in his ballet Romeo and Juliet, one
of the western culture’s iconic tragedies. Six decades later ABC Classic FM
assures us that ‘ironing is thrilling’ when you’ve got Prokofiev’s music on in
the background. Concert promoters need to sell tickets and radio stations need
to chase ratings, but we need to be careful not to project a level of naiveté
onto the audience, misrepresent works of art and insult the creators and
performers in the service of marketing.
The Catalans have a distinctive Christmas tradition.
Nativity cribs include the usual suspects – Holy Family, shepherds, magi,
animals – but there’s also a man, called the caganer, taking a crap in the
corner of the stable. Shocking, yes; blasphemous, no.
It’s a powerful image of how the Incarnation is an acceptance of humanity in
its fullness; it stops the scene from turning into a kitsch fairytale.
Likewise, good art is the enemy of kitsch, offering the
opportunity to explore, reflect on and play out the implications of being human
in the widest sense. Shakespeare and Mozart, Austen and White (and many others)
are central to our culture and value-system for precisely that reason. But we
need to do the works and the artists the courtesy of giving them our attention
(so turn off the iron), of making an effort to know the work’s original
context, and understanding that they might just discomfort us. Only then will
what we see be actually what we get.
Gordon Kerry’s
tasteful opera Medea has recently been released on ABC Classics.