Women in Dark Times (37 page)

Oulton is not a landscape painter, although when she first launched on to the art world in the 1980s – with phenomenal success – that is how she was often classified. She does not paint scenes or capture moments, where the instant of recognition, however dire or awesome the content of the image, somehow works to make you feel at home and at ease with yourself (a kind of team spirit with nature which thus never really threatens, or is registered as threatened by, the one who is looking). If Oulton has a connection to the landscape tradition – which again she is happy to acknowledge – it is in the way she slides paint across the surface of her work, as if the landscape resided not in a story beyond the painting but in the very gesture and the movement, the unending restlessness, of the paint. That movement is not a metaphor, although some critics have tried to suggest that it is. It is not standing in for the world. Rather the movement itself ushers into existence a world which this type of meticulous, sensuous attention might, just, be able to create. Cy Twombly’s works often give the impression that they are being painted before your eyes, or that some creature has screeched across the canvas. As Frank O’Hara put it in 1955: ‘A bird seems to have passed through the impasto with cream-coloured screams and bitter claw marks’ (not an image of a bird, but a bird as making the painting).
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Similarly, when you look at a work by Oulton, painting seems to be carrying on at the moment when, given the emphatic presence of the exhibited canvas, all painting is meant to have stopped. Crucially, this is not the bravura of flinging or dripping paint, which is a whole other story, any more than ‘potently aggressive’ or ‘baldly ejaculatory’, terms used of Twombly, would be right in her case.
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Something is being flaunted that would normally be hidden away – like a woman using paint to display all the bits and pieces of flesh which paint is meant to conceal when she steps forth as finished product (paint as its own sabotage, in your face, as one might say). The analogy is more than casual. Women are routinely compared to landscapes and paintings. In Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu
, Charles Swann’s love for Odette only takes flight against all his misgivings when he can compare her with a Florentine painting which bestows on her ‘a truer and nobler form’ and places his desire ‘on the sure foundations of aesthetic principle’.
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Imagine, wrote Zoe Williams on the announcement of the pregnancy of the Duchess of Cambridge in December 2012, a world where women would no longer be talked about in terms of ‘how attractively their flesh was arranged and how they were managing to maintain that composition’.
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Imagine a world where women were not required to be picture-perfect, which allows us to go on ignoring everything about that world, including women, which we have damaged. Or a world whose increasingly endangered surface was not simply available to be aestheticised (the ravages of tourism that turn the whole universe into a beauty trap). Oulton’s paintings are undoubtedly beautiful, but they also feel alarmed, even deformed, by their own grace. As though they can only subsist by permanently scraping away at their aesthetic poise (no gesticulating ‘here, look at me!’ although the aim is of course profoundly to be seen). Oulton’s work induces a very peculiar form of intimacy. We are being invited to a tryst – not without torment – between the artist and herself. This is how Oulton describes the process with reference to her early work in her 1987 interview with Sarah Kent:

The intimacy is in the touch, they are worked with a very small touch and the vastness grows out of smallness. Each brush mark is visible – nothing is hidden. They’re one skin deep. It’s very important to me that they spread across the canvas and that one brush mark is never on top of the other . . . I’ve developed a way of sliding one colour on top of another so that you get an optical mix like a glaze, but it’s applied like an
alla prima
approach in that there’s no underpainting and no overpainting. I accept what appears on the canvas . . . it’s only touched once.
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A few years later she elaborates: ‘During the day I rarely step back from the canvas so decision making depends on very small shifts from one point to another . . . no overall composition but spreading across by attending to minutiae, letting the whole take care of itself.’
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We have seen this before throughout this book, women offering a new form of power that only proceeds by shedding itself: ‘potent impotence’, ‘the power of the powerless’, as one commentator has put it in relation to her work.
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Remember Luxemburg calling up water and earth – calling up Oulton we could almost say – to invoke the true spirit of revolution: ‘It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth.’ Oulton provides another template. Nothing forced on top of anything else, no hierarchy of elements, no overarching or magisterial distance, minute shifts, a vastness that never loses sight of its (humble) origins in the minutiae of things, fragments which slide into without commanding each other, touch. Thus Oulton edges herself across the canvas – as if the only way to advance is by remaining one step behind your own tread. ‘I am’, she says, ‘left scurrying on behind.’
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Above all, no omnipotence, nothing ‘overall’ – which is why the greatest challenge to her own inclinations will come when she starts, as she has in this past decade, to paint the earth from the air above. In the meantime, we might ask ourselves: can we still envisage a world – against the crushing weight of aeons of civilisation with its brute conquest of nature – whose elements might be left to go their own way, to take care of themselves (‘letting the whole take care of itself’)?

For Oulton, this is a form of freedom, for herself as painter, for the components of her work: ‘If you relinquish the option of describing objects and places you are left free for separate painterly elements to act according to their own particularity.’
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Marion Milner’s
On Not Being Able to Paint
, discussed in relation to Charlotte Salomon, could be read as a manifesto for letting paint go its own way. For Milner, the demand that colour should follow its natural forms was a type of ‘bondage’.
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Likewise, Oulton is ‘repelled by authoritarianism’, as one critic put it with reference to the earliest paintings.
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‘Surely,’ to cite Milner again, ‘the idea is revolutionary that creativeness is not the result of an omnipotent fiat from above, but is something which comes from the free reciprocal interplay of differences that are confronting each other with equal rights to be different, with equal rights to their own identity?’ This is painting as democracy, painting in which no one element is allowed to command or trample on anything else (remember that Milner was writing in the context of fascism). In her review of Oulton’s 2010 exhibition,
Territory
, Germaine Greer suggests that the reason there have been relatively few women landscape painters has to do with ‘authority, with the act of throwing a frame around a feature of the seen world and detaching it’.
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Oulton is explicit in her critique of the landscape tradition that precedes her, the destructive mastery, the double-edged appropriation ‘both in the real world and in the painted landscape’. ‘I see it as a kind of parallel.’
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Her devotion to paint is therefore a radical, political gesture: ‘finding a new way of approaching the subject of paint.
Treating it less brutally
.’
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Once again, as has been the case with every woman in this book, it would be naive to see this creativity as immune from its own violence. Oulton has been described as portraying objects, insides on the outside, as if they had been flayed or disembowelled. ‘The subject of Thérèse Oulton’s paintings,’ writes Andrew Renton, ‘becomes the removal of the object; the gentle dismembering of the skeletal form.’
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(Although the idea of
gently
dismembering something is a bit coy.) In some of the early paintings, you can if you want to – I myself don’t in fact want to – more precisely identify the shapes as skin and bones, ribs and torn strands of hair.
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The sumptuous reds of
Abstract with Memories
have been compared to an ‘old sore’, ‘an inflammation’, painting in a state of ‘dis-ease with itself’.
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But this is not the violence of the overarching, magisterial gesture. It is something more like violence haunted by its own wounds. Perhaps, perhaps not, Oulton muses, this is a ‘female sensibility’.
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The title of her 1986 series
Letters to Rose
has been read as a ‘reference to the lost history of women through the ages’ (‘rose’ is also an anagram of ‘eros’, as Duchamp pointed out when he named himself ‘Rrose Sélavy’ or ‘eros, that’s life’).
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Oulton is not sure whether the new aesthetic she seeks should be defined in gender terms: ‘It doesn’t necessarily belong to the male or female.’
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Men can venture here too (they can risk what Marion Milner referred to as ‘the suppressed madness of sane men’). But only, she suggests, if male painters stop projecting on to women ‘those attributes that [they] have not acknowledged within themselves.’
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What would it take to make such an acknowledgement? We are talking about a form of blindness as disabling as it is cocksure. The old masters, she continues, ‘put you firmly in space and disregard those areas of experience that don’t add up’.
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Could there be a way of painting that does not imply ‘a god at the centre of his universe’?
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Instead, Oulton’s aesthetic involves a mind confronting the limits of its powers, the point past which it can no longer penetrate. This fragile way of being, in touch with what exceeds our mastery and most surely threatens it, has been central to all the women in this book. It has been something which each of them, whatever the external and internal danger, has been willing to embrace (it has not always been a matter of choice). For each one of them, creativity has meant a confrontation with something radically unknowable, a domain which, I have been arguing, no one, and certainly not feminism, can afford to ignore. It is my belief that of all available political languages, it is feminism that ‘knows’ or speaks to this best. Painting adds a key dimension which, for me, Oulton enormously clarifies. It is matter, the noncompliant rawness of the world, which obliges the ego to lay down its arms, like the unpredictable scandal of a new birth, which is where this book began. Substitute ‘woman’ for ‘matter’, ‘stubborn and unruly’ for ‘noncompliant’ – although noncompliant is also right here – and we can also see the gender implications, why the ego might put up such a fight. Male painters, to repeat her formula, must stop projecting on to women what they cannot acknowledge in themselves. They must stop using women, landscape, paint, as a way of shielding themselves from the dark. Discussing the early paintings, Stuart Morgan took as one of his key images fossils in the bowels of the earth – ‘the densest form of materials’ – which defy the mind/spirit dichotomy because they contain and emit their own light. Something barely graspable is being evoked. This is a realm which psychoanalysis calls transitional space, or which philosopher Gillian Rose defines as ‘the broken middle’, where the contradictions of the world hold and break.
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Oulton’s interest, John Slyce suggests in relation to the
Slow Motion
paintings, lies ‘in the “complicated middle” where the falling apart of one form leads to the coalescing of another’.
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‘My real’, Oulton states, ‘is an inbetweenedness, a cacophonous meeting ground of the invisibles.’
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In the catalogue for her 1988 exhibition
Lachrimae
, Oulton cites psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, companion and muse to Rilke, Nietzsche and Freud, on the affront that matter poses to the mind: ‘We understand as “physical” just that which is not psychically accessible, that which we do not feel to be identical with our own ego.’
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In her
Freud Journal
, from which these lines are taken, Salomé elaborates:

Things stand outside, over against us, and thereby are actually in being outside us, simply because the ego’s pure activity is unable to penetrate them completely and comes to a halt at some sort of boundary.
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For Salomé, it is not just the world that is recalcitrant to our will. It is also the hidden chambers of the mind. In this she too is very close to Marion Milner. The debris of the earth and the unconscious, where our deepest thoughts lie concealed, are, for Salomé, intimately connected (lower depths both). The best way to convey the inner life, she suggests, is therefore to deck it in physical images of the external world: ‘We can bring the psychic closest to our understanding only by more-or-less personifying it in physical form, and we grasp the psychic only in images of the external world.’ Provided, she insists, you remember that both domains are ‘equally incomprehensible’.
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If you are trying to convey them, the trace of the impossibility of doing so must be part of what you see. She has written a painter’s charter, or rather, I will risk suggesting, a charter for Thérèse Oulton (hence no doubt Oulton returning the compliment by citing her). Something slips our mental and physical grasp, provoking a fear which no amount of focus can allay. ‘Had it been in focus, you might know it,’ Oulton states in relation to
Abstract with Memories
. ‘But if every detail is in sharp focus and you still don’t know – there’s anxiety about the unknowableness.’
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