Women in Dark Times (36 page)

Bartana therefore takes up her place in the pantheon of women – again alongside Luxemburg, who was, remember, imprisoned for her resistance to the 1914–18 war, and also once more Virginia Woolf – who have exposed the unacceptable cost, at once political and personal, of war (on this, in addition to
Three Guineas
, Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway
and
Jacob’s Room
are probably her most famous texts). One exhibition of her work,
Wherever I Am
, at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 2004, placed her together with American Palestinian artist Emily Jacir and the photographer Lee Miller (the title of the exhibition in itself bears witness to the radical drift and movability of these three women’s lives and work).
52
Miller is renowned for the images of ‘martial violence and gore’ which she sent from the front line back to
Vogue
during the Second World War, including perhaps most famously her telegram ‘Believe this’, cabled from Germany at the time of liberation to its editor, Audrey Withers, and the photo of herself in Hitler’s bath in his abandoned country retreat in 1945.
53
She was the only woman photographer to get so close to battle (another woman who, literally and metaphorically, went too far). The link between Bartana and Jacir is obvious – Jacir relentlessly charts the indignities of Palestinian lives. Miller might at first glance seem less likely. Except that, as we have already seen, her moment is in fact their moment – the moment to which Bartana and Jacir return – and nowhere more so than in her dismayed, prescient response to the end of the Second World War and the triumphalism with which Miller refused to identify: ‘If I could find faith in the performance of liberation I might be able to whip something into shape which would curl a streamer or wave a flag,’ she wrote to Withers in December 1944, ‘but the pattern of liberation isn’t very decorative by itself.’ It was in fact ‘harrowing’. ‘I, myself,’ she continued, ‘prefer describing the physical damage of destroyed towns and injured people to facing the shattered morale and blasted faith of those who thought “things are going to be like they were” and of our armies’ disillusionment as they question “is Europe worth saving?”’
54
For every woman in this book, elation is nearly always bad history, a thinly veiled form of despair.        

*

When Rosa Luxemburg left Poland at the age of nineteen hidden under the straw of a peasant’s cart, she could not possibly have known what awaited her, or what, as a revolutionary thinker and activist, she would create. But her impatience with national belonging, her desire to keep moving, was a constant in her life, even when she committed herself to one place and cause, even when she found herself behind bars (hence, whenever she was in prison, the extravagance of her imaginative and political reach). Luxemburg, I suggested, presented us with a question: how far should revolutionary thinking go? What limits should it set for itself? A question which, in her case, applied to nationhood and to the revolution alike. It was because she could see beyond the constraints of ethnic and national exclusivity, beyond state boundaries, that her vision reached for the stars.

The question of revolution is where this book began. As state violence turns more and more ugly in response to the uprisings across the world, we need to ask to where the revolutionary impulse should travel, what are the forms in which it can go on expressing and believing in itself. As always, at issue is what is permitted to be thought and to be seen. ‘A revolution’, writes Canadian artist and magazine founder Chantal Pontibriand in her contribution to the
Cookbook
, ‘is like a photograph’ because it raises so many of the same questions: ‘What do you see? What does it exclude? What does it conceal in its fine grain?’
55
The negative, she suggests, is especially telling, because it lurks in the dark (the dark room as a prototype for what lies beneath the surface of history). As so many of the women in this book have suggested in their way, the world of the unconscious is not the antagonist of political life, but its steadfast companion, the hidden place or backdrop where any true revolution must begin: ‘Revolution . . . brings out the energies, the potentialities,’ Pontibriand continues, ‘just as well as it emerges from dreams and nightmares.’
56
This was for me Luxemburg’s founding insight – that revolution is seeded from what is unknowable and unpredictable, sharing therefore the colours of dreams. Today in fact photography has changed and is rarely ‘that piece of paper which slowly comes to life as it is exposed in a water basin in the darkroom’ (the very image Eve Arnold used in relation to Monroe).
57
And yet for that very reason, new photographic forms might still provide a ‘recipe’ for revolution, for Luxemburg’s cherished spontaneity, the unpredict­able shapes of the world: ‘The digital image works like DNA, it is multicellular and comes up with infinite variations.’
58

When I put my women thinkers and artists together for this book – a combination which felt as pressing as it was also mysterious – I had no idea of just how many connections, spoken and unspoken, would bind them. Luxemburg struggled for socialism all of her life. Today the crisis of the world economy – the collapse of the safety net for the vulnerable, the widening gap between rich and poor, the corruption of finance, the fundamental loss of economic faith – has brought socialism as a possibility back on to the agenda. We should not therefore be surprised that the critique of nations, the drive to a new barely imaginable future, should bring the call for socialism trailing, but also revitalised, in its wake. Another entry in the
Cookbook
, with the title ‘Programme’, is laid out as a political pamphlet and begins: ‘Programme in the framework of a general development of socialist thought in its current stage of social development’, although not as a ‘codex of dogmas and final truths’ (no sterile spirit of the night-watchman state, to evoke Luxemburg once more).
59
‘We believe that capitalism is not a totality,’ another entry asserts. ‘The task of the intellectual and artist is to engage in a thoroughgoing unmasking of the myth that there are no alternatives to the global capitalist system.’
60
Bartana offers her revolutionary project in delirious mode. But perhaps she is bringing to the surface what any revolution worthy of the name must recognise. There will be no meaningful transformation without a reckoning with the most painful undercurrents of historical memory, of what we have let ourselves become, of who we are.

Finally, we might therefore ask: what windows of the mind does Yael Bartana’s work open, what place in our inner world is she asking us to accept? The most famous concept of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who worked across the two world wars, was that of a transitional space between the mother and infant, a space which emerges as they each slowly and painfully relinquish the other from omnipotent control (the original space ‘in between’). A space of disillusion, it was also for Winnicott the only site of creativity and the germ of culture. In the life of a child, the first sign will be some object or toy which she clings to for dear life, as a way of mediating the cruel transition into the separateness and loss which is the foundation of being human; he was not being sentimental – there is psychic pain in this space, however creative it might be (the two are inseparable). Never ask the child, he insists, whether the object she is clutching is real or unreal. To do so is to violate her freedom. He was making a plea for democracy on the back of the Second World War.
61
He also once described a patient who had to go looking for their past in the future, as the only way of re-finding, after the fact and in response to an anguished history, who they are. There is no limit to the scope of Bartana’s vision: ‘We direct our appeal not only to Jews. We accept into our ranks all those for whom there is no place in their homeland, the expelled and persecuted. There will be no discrimination. We will not check your identity cards or question your refugee status.’
62
Our question should be, not: is it possible? But: what is it already, now? What, simply by dint of being created, does her work force us to acknowledge as already pulsing deep inside our histories, together with the other, better, future we must not stop struggling to invent?

7

Damage Limitation

Thérèse Oulton

Landscape is treated as inanimate, which has had drastic results for actual landscape . . . It is to the detriment of everything that is treated as ‘out there’, including women. [Landscape] is dying because of that treatment as though it had no life but were mute, victim. I’m trying to develop a method that allows that which is mute – the paint – to have a voice.

Thérèse Oulton speaking to Sarah Kent, ‘Interview with Thérèse Oulton’,

Flash Art
, 127, April 1987

I was looking for a compendium of evidence as to the human.

Thérèse Oulton, ‘Brief Notes on a Change of Identity’,

Territory
, 2010

The clue as to their subject is in the
not
being able to place.

Thérèse Oulton, interview with Nicholas James,

Interviews-Artists
, 2010

One of Thérèse Oulton’s paintings from 2005 is called
Speechless
(see illustration section, page 5). Pale green-yellow light swirls and floods through the middle of the vast canvas, barely held in place by the slim, dark green vertical panels that do duty on either side of the frame. In the centre of the image something – in slightly, but only slightly, denser colours (green, yellow, and orange intensifiers of the basic palette) – emerges from the light, a shape that does not differentiate itself from, so much as spill and find itself dragged back into, the surrounding glow. The most obvious allusion – as with other paintings by Oulton – is to Turner, perhaps the late
Sunrise with Sea Monsters
of 1845 or
Crimson Clouds
, painted much earlier, somewhere between 1820 and 1830. In fact, it is only because the emerging shape in the first is so unsettling that it has attracted the epithet of monsters (it is most probably a fish); just as it feels like a type of violence, solicited but also resisted by the second, to identify the short sharp crimson daubs, stabs against a pale sky, as blood red. The violence of Turner’s paintings is legendary – see
The Slave Ship
,
Rough Sea with Wreckage
or
Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves
– although, given the elemental fight staged on the canvas, it can seem redundant to spell out the more concrete, tangible subject matter, however crucial these points of reference might also be. In Turner the real violence is in the elemental wreckage, the struggle of air, light and water against the worst of what the civilised world would make of them (as well as the reverse). Oulton acknowledges her debt, but, like all creative debts, only as a form of defacement. In her work, all props and grounding points have been removed. You cannot (even pretend to) take your bearings. You are left with pure ferment, a dizzying rage. You are left with the prospect of a world growing mute under assault. Although her medium is matter, Oulton, like Turner, subjects you to a radical confusion of elements: air as water, mud as light, light as sound, or rather sound where it should be but has gone missing. Just for a second, the coils of light in
Speechless
can be imagined as an open mouth with no voice. From the beginning of her career, Oulton has presented us with a question. What can an artist do when she, when the world, has been so damaged by those who inhabit and own it that it is in danger of being rendered speechless?

If Thérèse Oulton provides the final portrait of this book, it is because she takes us back to basics, to the rawest substance in which all my stories, in which all our stories, take place. Most simply, she is the modern woman painter who most compels and disturbs me – a mix I find irresistible – because of the demand she seems to make on anyone faced with her paintings. Oulton suggests that in order to understand what is wrong with the world, we must descend into the core of the earth. She turns the world inside out, peeling back its skin. ‘The skin’, writes Margaret Walters on her 1992 exhibition,
Abstract with Memories
, ‘is the sum of the inside, a record of its life.’
1
I find myself imagining her deep beneath the surface, grating, scratching, digging her nails into crevices, gathering stone fragments, winding her fingers around rough edges of rock, wading through sludge (she describes herself as a devoted walker but that is not quite what I think she means). ‘The heavier the structure of givens you have to deal with,’ she stated in 1988, ‘the more intricate your means must be.’
2

Although Oulton once described herself as turning ‘painterly mud into light’, the image strikes me as misleading.
3
Even where light is somewhere her topic, it illuminates nothing, becomes instead the full-on glare of itself (obliterating as she puts it).
4
The last thing she would want to do is enlighten. She is far too wary of the sins that have been committed in enlightenment’s name (the baggage of conquest and empire). In relation to her
Clair Obscur (Obscure/Dark Light)
paintings of 2003, she talks of trying to paint the experience of light, not just as our sole possibility of seeing, but also as the ‘burning out’, the ‘disintegration’ of vision.
5
‘Darkness’, she has said, ‘is a better form of freedom’ (to cite the second epigraph to this book).
6
Deeply suspicious of reason, she has talked of ‘a throwing off of reason . . . where everything is wrapped in meaning immediately’.
7
Reason names, labels and catalogues way too fast. Oulton is not interested in knowingness, in getting on top of things in order to tell them what they should be. Rather she wants us to look at the world as if we were ourselves a piece of the dark. Hence her immovable commitment to paint – unlike so many contemporary artists who proudly announce they have gone beyond it. To take the measure of what is happening to the world around us, Oulton’s paintings instruct us, you must besmirch your vision, smear mud across your eyes. The only way to look at the earth is by becoming a piece of the detritus you are trying to see. We have encountered a version of this before – women, wilfully and against all etiquette, descending in the scale of things. We could take as just one example the pantheistic Rosa Luxemburg, whose political vision swept across continents, comparing herself to a ‘ladybug’: ‘I am inexpressibly happy with this sense of my own insignificance’;
8
or Charlotte Salomon painting straight into the suicides of her family as if becoming these deadly apparitions, from each of whom she most needed to protect herself, was also her only way to register her own life and to survive.