Gestures of pleasure
By Tiarney Miekus
Eleanor Louise Butt never starts a painting with a plan of how it will finish. As with Resonant iterations, her paintings are often created in a series where the decisions, trials and pleasures of one painting informs the next, technically and philosophically. As iterations—as opposed to repetitions—each painting is free of the burden of being its own statement. It is within the accumulation of material that meaning is found—and in this materiality, these paintings emerge as a series of formal difficulties that Eleanor creates her way into and out of; how colours are flourishing or failing, what a line does or doesn’t do, the necessity for movement and energy, brushstrokes that hang on the precipice of stability, persuading the eye to move pleasingly but not too pleasingly, setting the painting’s agreeability against juicy blotches, bulging oozes and slimy lines. “Jostling” is how Eleanor describes these oscillations.
Creating in this way is partly a matter of instinct. If you ask of Eleanor why orange is dominant throughout these paintings, her response is an appreciation the colour’s warmth and being taken with the use of orange in three of her favourite paintings by Léger, Bonnard and Picasso—and that a friend was disposing of old paints which Eleanor inherited, and the orange “felt right”. Ask Eleanor why a brushstroke is the way it is, and she’ll tell you it “just felt good” or it was “pleasing”. Words like ‘good’ or ‘right’ or ‘pleasing’, which we can take as a kind of bodily or affective pleasure, even when it’s abject, aren’t always given their deserved weight in approaching why painting happens and how we respond to painting.
Yet leaning too much into intuition disregards how composed these works are, too. Eleanor is a thinker and a reader, and is highly self-reflective of how and why she places oil on linen and cotton. While some paintings take 45 minutes, others are layered over weeks. The works in Resonant iterations were painted from the artist’s home studio in the Dandenong Ranges with a panoramic view of treetops. And the process was quick, with the series painted in three to four months from April to July 2021.
While Eleanor was working, on a table in her studio were three opened books showing paintings from Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Philip Guston. Eleanor didn’t paint under direct influence of these artists, and nor is she interested in an explicit dialogue with them, but something within the spirit and sensibility of these works motivates her. Such points of departure come from other painters, too; an artist book on Joan Mitchell that’s flipped through at breakfast, or a sentiment that floats from a podcast on artists like Frankenthaler or Cecily Brown.
In an oblique continuation to what was laid down beforehand—whether by her hand or the hand of others—some paintings in Resonant iterations appear more figurative, like Sculptural form (after Moore) in green, orange, brown, and white. These organic-feeling lines stem from Eleanor’s sketches of a Henry Moore sculpture at Tate Britain. What interested Eleanor was the physicality of her sketches and the visceral sense of re-doing and re-living those lines through painting; she literally wriggles when describing this process. Other paintings are more abstract, such as Dual forms (orange, brown, white) which has a solid orange centre that appears so certain and weighty against a mixture of strokes and brushy scratches—it’s where meaning itself becomes iterative and illusive.
Eleanor holds these newer paintings as her most psychological works yet. External resources, like a passing shape or a conversation, or viewing overseas exhibitions, might be stimuli for a painting, but in a year of lockdowns such prompts became scant and Eleanor found herself painting more “from within, and in relation to things”. Marks are made in reply to one another, but they are also slippery; it’s like the perpetual motion of reaching, without the fixity of holding.
In a 2014 essay for Artforum titled ‘Statements of Intent’—which Eleanor sent me—the critic Mark Godrey chronicles four American abstract painters: Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman and Charline von Heyl. He explains how these artists are producing a new kind of abstraction, one that rejects both the older ‘authenticity’ of the expressive male genius brushstrokes, while also rejecting the detached, postmodern, ironic gaze that was levelled at painting in the 1980s and early 90s[1]. Eleanor’s abstraction aligns with this recent lineage—and yet, as Godfrey must surmount, there’s a void in aesthetics and language from which to truly understand this position.
Godfrey partly quotes Owens from a 2013 Artforum interview and Owens’s full answer is so compelling, so relevant to Eleanor, that it feels worth quoting in full. Owens said, “I wanted to emphatically try to inhabit the gesture.” Then, prompted out of nowhere, she expanded:
“I had asked myself, in a depressed mood: Is it even possible for a woman artist to be the one who marks? At the same time, in 2013, does anyone at all have this ability, or is it an antiquated and sentimental idea? Isn’t it interesting that a male orgasm has a DNA imprint that will replicate itself over and over again, reinforcing itself the way language or naming might, but the female orgasm has no use, no mark, no locatability? It can’t even be located in time. There’s no moment when ejaculate comes out, really. I want to think about how that can be the model for a new gesture. What is that gesture in art, or in painting?”[2]
Abstraction is occupied territory, but this also leaves it open to contestation. What might be a new mark not defined by usefulness, expressivity, productivity or virility? Eleanor’s answer, her gestures, partly lie within the ‘feeling right’: her marks revel in the pleasure, whether joyous or abject, of material possibilities and the bodily and affective meaning of those possibilities. It’s akin to a kind of jouissance: a French term with no suitable English counterpart, which theorist Lauren Berlant describes as “the energy of the drives that is in excess to the rational ego, fixed identities, or normative institutions.”[3] When Eleanor speaks of the pleasure of scratching a surface—really scratching it—she’s speaking of a physical pleasure that’s almost overflowing; an excess beyond herself. As a viewer, the feelings derived from Eleanor’s brushstrokes can engineer a reaction that feels in excess: the shiver from a line, the fixation on a square of colour. This is the kind of pleasure that painting taps into—that feeling of reaching beyond known quantities, which is different to transcendence.
Like Owens implies, the mission is not to create a typically productive gesture. Rather, it’s to understand the contradiction that a painting can be both pleasurable and unproductive, while also acknowledging that pleasure (and the excess that gives way to pleasure) is a productive state for both the painter and the viewer.
In losing one kind of painting in order to find another kind, both instinct and technique is at play. Eleanor is not making art for beauty, but neither is she attempting to negate anything. Of this impasse, the painter Amy Sillman has written of searching for a painterly “form that tries to find itself outside of what is already okay. Awkwardness is the name I would give this quality, this thing that is both familiar and unfamiliar.”[4] Awkwardness is something Eleanor mentions in her deep attention to process; a clumsy search, diligently undertaken, oozy, uncomfortable, vulgar, pleasing, embarrassing, scratchy. It’s the “not-knowing” that Eleanor speaks of when starting a painting, the Beckettian ‘fail better’ of her iterative gestures, and the pleasure.
[1] Mark Godfrey, 'Statements of Intent', Artforum, April 2014, p. 302.
[2] Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer talks with Laura Owens, ‘Optical Drive’, Artforum, March 2013, https://www.artforum.com/print/201303/sarah-lehrer-graiwer-talks-with-laura-owens-39401
[3] Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love, 2021, Punctum Books, New York, p. 47.
[4] Amy Sillman, 'Shit happens: Notes on awkwardness', Frieze, 10 Nov 2015, https://www.frieze.com/article/shit-happens