. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned is therefore a work – Bartana is an artist – with more than one story to tell, more than one history she is bringing to the surface, melding them into what for many would be a shocking, unwelcome combination (another bid for intimacy). Just when you think you might have ‘got it’, that you might be beginning to know where you are, however strange, she takes you somewhere else, sometimes in the same gesture, the same filmic image or sequence into which she condenses worlds upon worlds. In the second film of the trilogy, Mur I wieża (Wall and Tower), a group of young men and women, full of the energy of the Zionist pioneers, recreates an Israeli kibbutz next to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, where we see Israelis learning the Polish words for land, freedom and peace. And yet it becomes impossible – as we witness the barbed wire and the building of the watchtower – for memory not to splinter among its myriad associations: from ghetto, to concentration camp, to kibbutz, and from there to the checkpoints and the wall in Israel today that scars the landscape in the name of security, seizing the land and cutting off Palestinian villagers from their schools, fields and homes. The film is, in her words, about ‘creating historical measures by way of repetition’, as a way of enabling ‘an alternative way of thinking’.42 To many, for whom no such link is permissible between the persecution of the Jews in Europe and Israeli government policy today, such a mental trail would be pure scandal. And yet Bartana does not completely relinquish the earliest Zionist vision. ‘In favour of liberation’, she states, Zionism was ‘an experiment for which I still have a huge amount of respect’.43 Even if it always contained its dark side: ‘a dream-nightmare that became just a nightmare’.44 And then, making her own words that were originally Hannah Arendt’s on the earliest Zionist pioneers: ‘We the Jews, victims of hostility and hatred, escaped to Palestine like a people trying to escape to the moon.’45 She is sourcing the unconscious dimension of history – the only difference from the other women in this book being perhaps just how explicit, wilful almost, she is about the whole thing.
On the soundtrack of this second film, the Israeli national anthem is played backwards. This is not the first time Bartana has played on such inversions, violating the sanctity of the nation. One of her most powerful films, A Declaration, of 2005, shows a young man rowing across the bay to Andromeda Rock off the shore of Jaffa, where he substitutes an olive tree for the Israeli flag. At one level this staged confrontation could not be more simple: the olive tree, which has been at the centre of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian land and a symbol of Palestinian resistance, replaces the most powerful, immediately recognisable insignia of state. But Bartana does more. Through the way she films, she is making a more complex claim. The slowness, the weight of the gestures, the repeated close-up focus on the breaking waves and foam, make this film – as much as a defiant act of substitution (what on earth is an Israeli flag doing flying on such a tiny piece of rock?) – a tribute to the two things which brute nationalism has no time for and has to subdue: the pace of nature and critical, resistant thought. We are being ushered into creative, contemplative time, against which the skyline of Tel Aviv that we see on the far side of the bay feels impotent.
Bartana is charting the death of an ideal. But she also manages to inscribe that ideal into her art. The four-channel video Low Relief II of 2004 depicts protestors struggling with the army or police, the image modified to give the impression of an ancient sculpted bas-relief (political resistance as iconic, history passing into antiquity before our eyes). A Summer Camp of 2007 ostensibly narrates the reconstruction of a demolished Palestinian home undertaken by local villagers together with the support of Israeli and European volunteers. On the back of the double-sided screen a run of black and white images depict what appear to be Europeans riding camels through the desert taken from the 1935 Zionist film Avodah.46 Bartana has found an aesthetic form capable of registering just how easy it is for utopia to disinherit itself.
Bartana has no interest, therefore, in making her work innocent of what she feels most urgently in need of critique. As I have argued throughout this book, the feminist call for freedom, the fight for justice, does not require the banner of innocence on its flag. She knows that creating a movement – including feminism, I would say – always risks re-joining the trappings of power and authority it most fervently wants to reject. That is why monumentality is so central to her trilogy, why ceremony, pageantry, the insignia of statehood haunt and repeat across the work, why indeed – starting with Sierakowski’s exhortation – the trilogy often has something of a masculinist air (albeit inflated to its own bursting point). Nightmares takes place in a now abandoned stadium, which was constructed out of the rubble left by the destruction of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, subsequently used as the setting for the majority of state and party ceremonies under Communist Poland. Standing in his derelict arena, Sierakowski, lord of all he surveys (which, bar a few earnest spectators, is mostly nothing), cannot help but evoke this history, together with the aesthetic traditions – Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, early Soviet cinema – which accompanied it. ‘I never gave up on Riefenstahl,’ Bartana replies to Galit Eilat when she suggests that she has (or perhaps should have).47 The final film, Assassination, concludes with the raising of a monumental statue of Sierakowski to mark his transition from hero to martyr (it is already huge, but shooting it from below massively, almost ludicrously, inflates its size). She is evoking that history, not, she insists, repeating it.48 But you have to get up close. This is for her an ethical issue, a matter of human responsibility: ‘You don’t take responsibility for something you don’t identify with.’49
What, then, is the role of the woman in the dreams and nightmares of her nation? What, more simply, does the modern nation state require its female subjects to be? Today, in many countries of the world, women are full citizens in a way Luxemburg could scarcely have imagined – although, as we saw, she gave increasing support on this issue to her close friend and comrade Clara Zetkin, who was at the forefront of that struggle. What has been the price? This, I would suggest, is the question that has been somewhere propelling this decade of Bartana’s work, in its ‘absolute’ – her word – devotion to the critique of nationalism in its most militant guise.50 In Israel, unless she refuses, every woman is a soldier – emancipation as the freedom to carry a gun. The irony would not have been lost on Luxemburg. How, then, can you pluck the woman, or any one of these women, from the ranks? The Andromeda Rock of A Declaration of course already contains its reference to a woman chained to a rock (an image still aesthetically venerated today – Louis Smith’s for me ghastly painting Holly of a model chained to a rock was shortlisted for the 2011 BP Portrait award, and adulated by some critics).51
Bartana’s first film, Profile of 2000, records a range practice of female army recruits, rifles cocked and pressed against their faces, shooting at a male dummy target in response to the voice-off command of a woman sergeant whom we never see. The women are lined up (as you would expect). But the camera is held on the face of just one of them in the forefront of the image, behind which you see the array of bodies – female although you only really see their legs and boots – stretching out behind her in a single line. Slowly, through the tiniest almost invisible gestures and expressions, you start to realise that this one recruit is losing her way. She drops her gaze, leans almost too closely on her rifle as if it is holding her up rather than the other way round. She does not belong. She clearly does not want to fulfil the task that Israel as a nation sets its citizens before any other (compulsory military service as the initiation rite of the state). From the same filmic angle, Bartana succeeds in capturing the serried ranks of statehood – what it means for an Israeli woman to enter the polity – and in giving permission to one of its subjects to fail. Quietly the close-up does its work (as it does in Shalev-Gerz’s First Generation, with its almost unbearable focus on the faces of its subjects), taking the myth of self-mastery, individual and collective, apart at the seams
.
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 everyth
ing 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?
Women in Dark Times Page 26