Women in Dark Times (39 page)

Territory
is Oulton’s loving record of the violence being done to the earth, a violence latent to the earlier painting but now raised to the surface (none of which stops the paintings also from being exquisite). Tiny protuberances on buildings, probably factory chimneys, look like stunted limbs; shorelines are sucked into the sea; buildings seem on the verge of sliding into the mud from which they are so minutely distinguished; whole cities appear to possess the same precarious density as the sky; sweeping highways, blandly thrusting their props into the ground, look at second glance like packs of cards on the point of collapse; a viaduct running through a space lush with green and purple resembles a flimsy stage prop (see illustration section, pages 6–7). In some pictures, the air – dense with matter – almost takes over the whole canvas, simply but irrevocably closing in on the land beneath. One commentator described the point where the sky starts to command the image as sending the viewer, who might think she is on land, out into the ether, an experience of vertigo (from which Oulton, she tells us, also suffers). In a more recent image, two strands of cobalt blue run from the front of the painting through a deserted brown space into the sea at the back, as if water is now – or once again – the true frame of the world, with the land as its increasingly powerless interruption (the bits of cracked earth look like a scab waiting to be peeled); in another it is as if the shore and the land, on which a hollowed-out shape is cut out like a scar, are both being claimed by sludge threatening to spread across the surface of the picture. There are splashes of green, fertility with no seeming purpose. Differentiation – unbelievably given the meticulous nature of each detail – fails. The overall effect is of a deeply loved face now hollowed out by decay, the closest I can get being this famous description by Proust of Swann at the end of his life:

All eyes were fastened on that face the cheeks of which had been so eaten away, so whittled down, by illness, like a waning moon, that except at a certain angle, the angle doubtless from which Swann looked at himself, they stopped short like a flimsy piece of scenery to which only an optical illusion can add the appearance of depth.
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While the guests at the banquet stare at Swann with ‘an almost offensive amazement, in which there were elements of tactless curiosity, of cruelty, of relieved and at the same time anxious self-scrutiny’, the narrator – and the reader watching through his eyes – is smitten with grief.
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Oulton has wrested looking from perversion (offensive amazement, voyeurism), which is no small achievement in itself. She is asking for a particular form of vigilance, that we pay attention to how we ‘shall die and why’. You cannot look at these paintings without feeling accountable (once again the violence belongs to all of us). There is, she says, ‘the finest membrane between what you are and what it is’.
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Being lifted above the earth also has another meaning. Oulton has always been rootless. She belongs with the other women in this book who have made a virtue of not belonging, of being at odds with the hard-edged – proprietorial – distinctions and grids of the universe. Remember Virginia Woolf: ‘As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’ In the hands of Oulton, the idea of rootlessness sheds its metaphorical cover, bringing what was once a dream of freedom tangibly and painfully to life. ‘Fewer and fewer people’, she observes, ‘do actually come from, stay on, one patch of earth anymore.’
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Wherever there is lack of the familiar, ‘of the beloved known’, then, she continues, land takes on a shifting quality that reflects the surface of a life: ‘forlornly body-less, left only with sight, no comfortable feet on solid ground, no reassuring touch’.
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Thus Oulton brings us full circle. It was Luxemburg who first accused capitalism of wreaking havoc across the earth, but she did not live to see the half of it. Oulton has found a way to paint such that we feel the ground being destroyed beneath our feet. ‘You can’t’, she says in discussion of these paintings, ‘imagine where the feet are, you can’t rest yourself as a body, only visually.’
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(I would argue that not even visually can you rest yourself.) ‘You can dispense with rootedness. You have to.’
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Even then, rootlessness can still have its (aesthetic) advantages – the ceaseless movement, the hostility to fixities which has characterised all of Oulton’s work. It can still act as a political undercurrent, a way of defying the powers that be: ‘matter constantly shifting about unfit to be the landscape of political control’. These paintings are the record of devastation like no other, but they also pay tribute to a world slipping out of the hands that would throttle it.

In ‘Brief Notes on a Change of Identity’, Oulton cites Viriginia Woolf: ‘There was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea, as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.’
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Throughout this book it has been my argument that women have a unique capacity to bring the dark side of the unconscious, of history – whatever is bleeding invisibly beneath – to the surface of our lives. I see it as both a gift and a task. For me, there is no one in the world of contemporary art who performs that task so brilliantly as Thérèse Oulton.

Afterword

We as women have been reasonable far too long. I realise this is not the way that women are mostly seen or talked about. More often women are assigned to the other side of reason, emotional where men are calm and reasoned, and in the case of feminism, excessive, unreasonable precisely, in the demands that it makes. Or perhaps not in the demands themselves, at least not in a Western world which boasts of its freedoms. Challenge anyone, man or woman, presenting themselves as Western subjects on the streets of, say, London as to whether women have the right to equality, and most are likely to say yes. ‘I often wonder what state feminism would be in,’ a letter from Mark of West London in the London
Metro
put it, ‘if it wasn’t called just that. Imagine if it was just called “equal rights for women”.’ Perhaps, he then muses, ‘people who might otherwise be reluctant to endorse feminism would be able to see quite clearly what it is and what it stands for, and support it as a result.’
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What unsettles, he is suggesting, is not the aims of feminism but something about the atmosphere the term feminism creates. ‘Feminism by any other name’, the
Metro
headlined this page of correspondence, ‘would be a worthy cause to celebrate.’
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Feminism, we are being told, should wear a mask, pretend to be something else (feminism ‘by any other name’). ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ If there is an allusion to that famous saying, it is surely unconscious; the fragrance of feminism is not what is being talked about. There is also a suggestion here of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’, a subtle or not so subtle homosexual hint. Using lesbianism to dismiss feminism, as in a ‘bunch of lesbians’, is of course a regular anti-feminist ploy. The word feminism upsets people – men, but not only men – too much. It agitates, stirs things up, messes with our minds. Like an ugly stain, blood oozing across the page, Banquo at the feast. As if people offload on to the idea of feminism everything that is unmanageable in life: the secret pathways of the mind, bodies, violence, sex and death. This may well be partly to do with the evocations of the word (its semantic sisterhood, as one might say). Unlike ‘equal rights for women’, feminism brings femininity and femaleness too close – especially the latter with its intimation of the animal under-layer of a civilisation so often claimed as the unique property of the West. Because feminism is unapologetically concerned with how women live, or cannot live, their lives, because it therefore cannot but raise the question of what women are for men (and the reverse), as a political movement it is always in danger – in fact this is the point – of sexualising itself. But assigning feminism, like women, to unreason also serves another purpose. It leaves reason intact as the domain in which mankind continues to invest its credos and its powers, while carrying on with business as usual – pillaging the world, making it unfit for human habitation, and enacting its undiminished, in many ways increasing, violence against women. Claiming reason as a fiefdom is an efficient, if deadly, way of denying what is insane about our world whose instances of unreason, for anyone who chooses to look, are everywhere to see: the unreason of the human soul, the unreason of violence and of our sexual lives, the unreason of state which Europe staged in the last century like never before and whose scars we still bear to this day. Feminism should alert us to the world’s unreason. But it should also insist, like so many of the women in this book, that to respond by making reason’s diktat our sole mantra and guide is as impoverishing as it is deluded and dangerous.

Pick one newspaper at random on any day of the week. Evidence of cruelty against women is to be found on almost every page.
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In Tahrir Square in July 2013, protesting women, whose voices were so central to the revolutions in Egypt, were surrounded and assaulted by groups of armed thugs. Before raping the women, the men spin them round and strip them naked. Humiliation, as much as sexual violence, seems to be the aim (violence against women must not just be done but must be seen to be done). The women call it ‘the circle of hell’.
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Vigilante groups of rescuers, armed with knives and flame-throwers, surround the women with protective fire and steel, and then find themselves assaulted in turn, the victims of their own defence. A woman in Iran swims twenty kilometres in the Caspian Sea in full Islamic dress, only to have her feat unrecorded because she is a woman – her woman’s body too ­vis­ible as she comes out of the water. In an earlier open water event, from which women are banned, the propellers of police boats trying to stop her from participating had sliced her hip and legs. It would seem that women’s bodies are there to be punished, that the mere sight of them is in itself a punishable offence. On the same page of the newspaper, we are told of two women activists in Saudi Arabia who face jail sentences for delivering a food parcel to a Canadian woman who had told them she was imprisoned in her house and unable to get food for her children. The judge found them guilty of ‘supporting a wife without her husband’s knowledge’. Both women had previously been involved in organising protests on behalf of women. One of them had put herself at risk by posting footage of herself driving a car, which is illegal for women in her country, on YouTube. (Later a cleric will argue that driving risks damaging women’s ovaries, in response to a campaign call for women to take a day of action by taking to the wheel.)
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In the same week, in the same issue of the paper, two senior women in British publishing are reported as having left the profession – one of her own accord, the other it seems because she was pushed. A few days earlier, W. H. Smith’s woman boss stepped down and, six months before that, the woman who had been running Pearson, the owner of Penguin. All these women were replaced by men. On an adjacent page, we are told that Elizabeth Fry, the English prison and social reformer, is to be replaced by Winston Churchill on the UK £5 note. After an outcry, it is announced that the face of Jane Austen will go on the £10 note, a triumph for feminist protest immediately sullied by the rape and death threats received by Caroline Criado-Perez, who had organised the successful campaign. Kirstie Clements, the former editor of US
Vogue
, breaks ranks to describe the assault on women’s bodies that is today’s fashion machine. Girls who can’t diet their breasts away have surgical reductions. Mounted on platform heels, they are so thin they cannot stand, and have to be buttressed in case they collapse. One model with so little energy she could barely open her eyes was filmed lying prone next to a fountain to get the last fashion shot.

All these stories are different, although in the year that has passed since I chose these news items you could select a run of equivalent stories from papers almost every day of the week. Some of them – the £5 note and the demise of women in the publishing industry – can be seen in terms of a backlash against feminism’s past success (the industry is being re-masculinised). But we blind ourselves if we respond to the stories from Tahrir Square or Saudi Arabia by insisting that women are simply freer, that such things do not happen to women, in the West. At the time of writing this, violence against women, and the sexual abuse of young girls, as reported in the UK has reached new heights.
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Something vile is increasingly coming to light. The revelations about Jimmy Savile turn out to be simply the most obvious example. We now know he was just one piece of an entertainment culture where such abuse was as rampant as it was tolerated and ignored, yet the very fact of his quirky fame and popular appeal also allows the scandal to be dismissed as the behaviour of a freak – although not quite, as hundreds of victims of abuse in the industry have stepped forward since the story broke, a strong, steady run of complaints from women speaking of abuse that could not previously be spoken and that shows no sign of diminishing since the Savile story first broke (even if some of these women’s voices are not credited in court due to the decades that have passed, the gap – which psychoanalysis would treat as normal – between trauma and speech). Far harder to dismiss is the dull refrain of violence against young girls which covered the papers in the spring and summer of 2013 both in the UK and the US. The murder of five-year-old April Jones by Mark Bridger, her neighbour in Wales, and of twelve-year-old Tia Sharp by her grandmother’s partner, Stuart Hazell, and then in the US the abduction, sequestration, rape and impregnation of Amanda Berry and two other women in Cleveland, Ohio. We need to be careful. These stories are meant not just to appal but also to excite. The fact remains, as noted by the first report of the agency UN Women, published in 2007, that more than half the working women in the world are without any legal rights, a similar number have no protection again domestic violence, and sexual assault has become a hallmark of modern conflict.
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On International Women’s Day, 8 March 2013, fifty signatories, ranging from human rights lawyers Helena Kennedy and Philippe Sands to singer and songwriter Annie Lennox, observed in a letter to the
Guardian
that women aged fifteen to forty-four the world over are ‘more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria combined’.
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