Women in Dark Times (38 page)

Again you have to see the work to get a full sense of this. I found myself looking at paintings from
Abstract with Memories
(
Abstract with Memories No. 1
and
No. 2
,
Transparence No. 4
and
No. 8
) in the company of Melissa, a specialist in conservation (see illustration section, page 8, bottom). We were both overwhelmed by the density of paintwork which, when you get up close, you see has not been layered but rather pulled where it thickens; by the repetition of patterns with the slightest almost imperceptible variations moving steadily across the canvas while seemingly going nowhere; by the temptation to name and classify the dark, sometimes indeed fossil-like shapes and textures, as, say, fragments of stained-glass windows, decaying crinoline or the insides of a throat; or to see in the shadowy shape at the base of
Transparence No. 8
a disappearing relic of Bacon’s screaming pope. None of the associations work. You have to get inside the paint. You have to allow light to do the opposite of what you think it should do. ‘The texture bounces the light round,’ writes Margaret Walters, ‘so the eye can’t stay put. If it tries to dwell on a thought, an association, it flickers off to something else.’
39
In an interview in 1995, Oulton spoke of ‘the chaos of multiplying associations, conscious and unconscious’.
40
We have seen this before – Luxemburg and Monroe both describing how their minds could never be held to a single place, or Salomon insisting she go out of, lose, herself in the worst of what she had to face. Oulton has made a willingness to tolerate that experience the condition of viewing her paintings.

She has also done something else. Cleavage, crevicing and craquelure, I learnt from Melissa, are conservation terms used to describe the decay of paintings over time. In
Transparence No. 4
, the basic blue of the painting is broken over whole expanses by exquisitely distributed tiny white scratches and lines. ‘We look at a painting and think the main event is there in the picture,’ art critic Alexandra Harris observes of Chloe Aridjis’s 2013 novel,
Asunder
, which makes craquelure its theme, ‘but there’s another story to be found in the network of cracks that run across the surface.’ ‘Painters create order from disorder,’ muses Marie in the novel, ‘but the moment that order has been created, the slow march towards disorder begins again.’
41
Craquelure narrates the physical history of a painting; to that extent restoration is not, as it might claim, the retrieval, but the deformation, of time. In an essay on the life and death of images, philosopher Howard Caygill ponders, with reference to Picasso’s 1913
Construction with Guitar Player
, ‘whether the artist can be located definitively at the moment of creation or destruction’.
42
Picasso destroyed this painting, which we only know of from a set of photographic prints, including one of him standing in front of it. For Caygill the episode highlights the relationship, which is latent to every artwork, between creativity, destruction and care. The paintings of
Abstract with Memories
are among Oulton’s lushest and most dense – one thing you always feel in front of her paintings is the care she lavishes on her work. But the level of discomfort has been raised (although never as ‘a decision to repel’).
43
‘Hopefully,’ Peter Gidal stated early on, ‘her paintings become more and more difficult to like, for those who do.’
44
He is arguing for difficulty as part of the work these paintings require of us. Melissa told me to look at the back of the canvas of
Abstract with Memories No. 2.
The density of the paintwork in the central, fractured section is bleeding through, ‘ghosted’, on the reverse – as if a canvas could almost be drowned by itself. In
Abstract with Memories
, Oulton has incorporated the death of painting into the process of her art.

If Oulton cannot be described as a landscape painter, she is not an abstract painter either. Of the most tired and worn-out dictates in the world of art, the opposition between abstraction and figuration is the one she most obviously flouts (this is how John Slyce describes the complex middle where she resides).
45
The title
Abstract with Memories
is taken from Paul Klee, who wrote in 1915 in the middle of the First World War: ‘I have long had this war inside me. This is why, interiorly, it means nothing to me. And to work my way out of my ruins, I had to fly. And I flew. I remain in this ruined world only in memory, as one occasionally does in retrospect. Thus, I am “abstract with memories”.’
46
(Esther Shalev-Gerz uses this quotation, returns exactly to this moment in her 2000 Weimar exhibit,
Inseparable Angels, the Imaginary House of Walter Benjamin
.)
47
Klee’s flight into abstraction is only partly successful. The war catches up with him in memory because it was part of his inner life before the war even began. In a way, Klee has to work his way out of the ruins twice. Taking his title, Oulton makes herself part of a world so damaged that it is no longer clear if that damage can be fully registered either in a painting or inside the head. ‘How,’ Klee asked, ‘shall I most freely cast a bridge between inside and outside?’
48

‘Abstract with memories’ is a strange formula – memory feels like an intruder in the world of abstraction, making it too personal and too dense. And yet Oulton’s paintings in her series of this title do stage something akin to the process of memory, as each minute, partial repetition across the canvas becomes the ghostly trace of itself (one critic describes the repetitions as ‘timed space’). As if, in the face of such ruin, the only way to remain human is by feeling your way step by step, by groping across a barely recognisable terrain. ‘Residues of past disturbances’, Oulton wrote in 1994, ‘forever bear their trace.’
49
‘Oulton’s painting’, writes John Slyce, ‘is best described as speculative. She seeks to recover the shadow of memory in paint.’
50
It is strange that works so harmoniously crafted can also convey the impression of something on the verge of falling to pieces, holding together and tearing itself to shreds. Oulton is not painting war any more than Paul Klee, but, like him, she is recording – inside art that might seem to have fled the battleground – the indelible marks of history.

Without platitude or false pathos, without manipulation, all the women in this book have sought to inscribe their presence inside their own historical epoch. They are all trying, whatever the world has dealt them, to make their personal story part of a pageant larger than themselves. This form of dignity is not readily granted to women, who mostly have to seize it for themselves – women not just hidden from history, not just assigned walk-on parts, but also assumed to be bereft of all historical understanding (another way of making them pawns of everyone else’s game). On the eve of the Second World War, Rebecca West wrote her monumental study of Yugoslavia,
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
, tracing across the land of the First World War the unmistakable signs of the one that was about to commence (she made three extended visits to Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia between 1936 and 1938). The ‘sole prescription for a distinguished humanity’, she concludes her prologue, is that we take the trouble to understand how we ‘shall die and why’. West is appealing to a form of ethics which once again involves our recognising the limits of human power. ‘We must learn to know,’ she writes, ‘the nature of the advantage the universe has over us.’
51

*

Oulton has in a sense spent her whole career as a painter paying tribute to that advantage. So it should have come as no surprise – although in fact it was shocking not least to Oulton herself – when her recent work began to chart the ways in which that advantage is being progressively destroyed. The 2010 collection of paintings called
Territory
enters a different terrain. It lifts the viewer, for the first time in her work, above the earth, giving us the lie of the land. A set of what can only be described as miniatures, compared with the scale of her earlier canvases, take fragments of territory – again landscape would not be the right term – and paint them as if they are disintegrating before your eyes. ‘Perhaps,’ she muses in ‘Brief Notes on a Change of Identity’, ‘the small scale of the paintings was in some sense to militate against the meaning of power inextricably linked to viewpoint,’ against the ever-present risk that looking will become ‘proprietorial, the eye the disembodied owner of all it surveys’.
52
We may have the impression that we are looking out comfortably from a plane, but we are rather, as Germaine Greer comments, ‘hanging in space, in free fall’.
53
At first, these seem to be images of more identifiable places – land, sea, river, bridges, industrial complexes, quarries and mines, cities on the shore and in the plains, viaducts and pipelines – painted in detail which could almost be described as photographic. Just for a minute you might think you are being offered the world. It is a decoy. Where photography makes things present, reciprocating your attention, everything here feels as if it is contracting; the more closely you look, the greater the sensation that it will be whittled away. Oulton takes back with one hand what she gives with the other, conjuring up an aesthetic response she simultaneously lays waste to. These paintings are her ‘field notes from a catastrophe’.
54
As you stare at the crumbling minutiae, you slowly realise that what you are seeing is the world being eroded into dust.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. There has been a slow drift – although drift is not quite right – to this point, a point which makes her, perhaps unexpectedly but no less urgently, the painter of the moment, since today we know there is a real chance that the world will not survive. ‘At one instant, a monumental land-mass seems to spread across the canvas,’ Richard Cork wrote of the
Lines of Flight
paintings of 2003 to 2005. ‘Then quite suddenly, it trembles on the verge of dissolution. The apparently solid elements within the painting break apart, making us aware of its fundamental vulnerability.’
55
I was able to see some of the
Territory
paintings alongside
Camera Obscura
and
Scanner
from
Lines of Flight.
In
Camera Obscura
, tiny multi-coloured molecular shapes are pinpointed with jewel-like precision against a surface precariously divided between a grey and a white area of shallows, curves and patches suggesting – perhaps – water and mist. The energy of the painting makes it impossible to tell if the two spaces, like the chambers of the mind, are trying to merge or are resisting the other’s presence; all you know is that their motion, whether towards or away from each other, will never cease (see illustration section, page 8, top). In
Scanner
, patches of dark pigment on the far left side of the canvas conjure some kind of matter, but matter which has failed to solidify, and which is in any case no match for the skeletal, flailing shapes which drift, in muted golds, browns and whites, across the body of the painting. As I moved my eyes across to
Territory –
to the grey and brown on grey earth of
Untitled II
and
IV
– it felt as though the disintegrating particles of these two images, as fragile as they are unstoppable, had migrated from one set of paintings to the next. Except now they have been grounded, their fragility part of a crumbling universe and a rebuke to a world that has refused to see, refused to listen. Oulton instructs nobody, even though her paintings have always required the most careful scrutiny, but it does seem as if we are being told to look even more closely than before.

As with
Abstract with Memories
, this is a type of history painting (‘residues of past disturbance forever leave their trace’). The view from above is no vantage point, but it does, as Oulton herself puts it, give us ‘insight into the past’, access to ‘deeper, older surfaces’, to phenomena ‘long since invisible from mere ground level’.
56
We see histories which have risen to the surface – such as the traces of medieval strip farming visible alongside the harvest patterns of gigantic agri-business.
57
In discussion, Oulton refers to the processes – heavy industry, cement mining, drainage, dumping of toxic waste, drowned landscapes, nuclear power stations built on shifting sands – all of which are leaving their scars on the earth. Above all what she is painting is the ‘overlooked’: ‘I don’t want to overlook the reality of how the earth looks now . . . I wanted to really
look
at it all.’
58
‘Photography with its bland eye,’ she comments, ‘doesn’t see the difference between a fetid pool and a snowy mountain, a clear blue sky and a purplish smog’ (it captures everything too evenly within its frame).
59
Whereas with paint, nothing is ever quite level with itself. Again, the temptation is to overlook the ‘bits we would rather not acknowledge’ – like the old masters who disregard what does not add up in what they see. For the same reason, Google Earth, suggested by a friend as a possible tool for this new project, is the ‘wrong sort of infinity’ (remember Luxemburg on infinity
as infinity
rather than the fatuous image of the universe as a kind of ball).
60
Oulton has found a way to paint the political consequences of turning a blind eye. In one of the paintings, you can imagine a steamboat cruising up the river in the midst of desolate land only visible from above. The disjunction of the two spaces on the canvas makes it clear that the steamboat passengers would never see the ravages of the world through which they glide.