'The economy of painting' is a term that Vicky Wright uses frequently when talking about her work. As I consider it, the idea becomes increasingly sprawling and complicated in my mind. What forces, goods and values might be considered in such an economy? I count, starting at the beginning.
First, I think of the basic transformation of raw, pliable material (in Wright's case wet oil paint) into something hard and dry and fixed: a form that the artist, at least, considers to be worth looking at. Low value goods are combined and arranged to create a single item of greater value.
Then, naturally, I think of the economy of the art market - the point at which this object, which a certain consensus agrees to be deserving of public attention, is given a monetary value, so it can be traded within a system of exchange that is modelled on, and shackled to, that other main arterial economy of money and goods on which capitalist society is founded.
That's not the only economy that an art work exists in, however; most of the art that we have relationships with is not owned by us, or ever likely to be. Even if our responses are influenced by our awareness of a work's price or its provenance, the system of exchange that we find ourselves trading in is one of time, not to mention intellectual and imaginative effort. These are the currencies I most often use when engaging with a work of art. I also pay with belief: a non-specific trust in art (and the structures that surround it) that is sometimes rewarded, and sometimes short-changed. It's a gamble, but one that I feel I win often enough (or, occasionally, win big enough) to continue playing.
The appetite that drives this habit shouldn't be underestimated either. From somewhere within myself, I perceive a lack that art can fulfil. In his little regarded book Libidinal Economies (1974), the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard writes of the importance in any economic structure of 'intensities' and 'affect': desires and feelings. This book is hugely important to Wright, who responds to Lyotard's metaphorical image of the 'libidinal band' (a Moebius strip of skin that spins in a frenzy until white hot) which then slows and cools into a signifying 'bar'. She sees this arcane and fantastical process as analogous to the application and drying of paint - revealing that in her 'economy of painting' the artist's desires constitute a demand just as significant as those of the viewer.
On a more prosaic level, what about all the other people involved in producing and disseminating works of art? What does it cost them and what do they gain in return? From one end of the process - the people working in the industries that manufacture an art work's raw materials - to the other - the people who buy and resell existing art - is a wedge of increasing returns, from very little to very great. In between are the artist, the gallerist and the collector, each keeping an eye on their outgoings and incomings, both concrete and immaterial.
All of which is obvious, and troubling, to Vicky Wright. She began to pick at the knotted complications of this system when considering the human cost of 18th-century British portraiture. The subjects and patrons of paintings by artists such as Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough were predominantly the aristocracy, and, over time, the emergent middle classes growing prosperous from the spreading British Empire and the mechanisation of coal-powered industry. Wright became consumed with this buried seam in art history, which acknowledged the legions of working class people whose toil contributed to the appetite for such portraiture. Even oil paint itself involves the harvesting of linseed in order to make oil, the collection of rare minerals and toxic chemicals to make pigments, the weaving of linen or canvas and the construction of wooden stretchers, panels and frames. In the 18th century, as now, this was a rarely considered but fundamental component of 'the economy of painting'. Wright, however, is not offering solutions to this exploitative system, nor is she absolving herself from implication in it. Instead, she internalises this
dark history and uses it as a productive agent in her painting. She considers what it means to live with a guilty secret, with the burden of history. Her recent paintings are most obviously depictions of something buried or concealed, something not normally exposed to light. On one level, this is achieved in a very straightforward way: she paints only on the backs of the panels, and hangs what was intended to be their fronts against the wall. Her paintings are turned inside out. Wright asks us to regard not only her own brushwork, but also the carpentry of the craftsman whom she employs to build the supports for her.
These works are also visualisations of something far less palatable than overlooked and skilful craftsmanship. Her jumbled brush-marks evoke cancers, fungi or crystals: creeping and malignant forms of life that are both enclosed by and contrasted against the thin pale washes that, through their scale and framing, we cannot help but interpret as the silhouettes of human heads. Born in Bolton, England, Wright has observed that resentment is a particularly northern characteristic. Allowing - or encouraging - dissatisfaction to fester, grow and develop its own life and purpose is just one of many ways of living with unfairness or frustration. In Wright's paintings, pairs of antagonistic forces emerge, eyeing each other warily within each painting: the exterior versus the interior, the front and the back, (and, moving into psychoanalytic territory) the expressed and the repressed, the conscious and the unconscious, the id and the ego.
There is another duality that exerts a tension at the core of Wright's work, but is perhaps more deeply buried. While, on the one hand, her concerns are sharply political and analytical, in the paintings themselves she allows intuition and accident to take the lead. She never plans a composition in advance, choosing instead to work swiftly, often with very wet, disobedient paint. Her paintings develop like raw, elemental landscapes, quickly taking on lives of their own, and, even when they contain shapes approximating eyes, stubbornly refuse to look at us. (This last point is to be expected, perhaps, in images supposedly seen from behind).
In effect, Wright is bringing to the surface something that feels like it already existed. It is no surprise, then, that she found in the history of coal mining a perfect metaphor and an acute political frame for her practice. On a visit to the now closed Tower Colliery in the South Wales Valleys, she was allowed to join the miners in their plummeting descent to the coalface 160 metres beneath the surface of the earth. She later remarked that it felt like miles.
Members of Wright's family were coal miners, and she has witnessed at first hand the damage that the dismantling of this industry has effected on working class communities in the north of England and in Wales. Tower Colliery is an interesting case because, remarkably, when the pit was closed in 1994, 239 miners used their redundancy payments to buy back the mine and run it themselves, proving its continuing profitability. It finally closed for good, coincidentally, on the day that Wright visited in 2008. She was one of the last people to bring coal up to the surface from the seam below.
However, while all this is fascinating and important to Wright, she responds most vividly to the poeticism of the coal mine: not simply coal's significance as a raw commodity in its basest form, but its symbolic and associative charge, as ancient, fossilised life-forms trapping energy from the sun. In a dusty, damp and lightless underworld, men extract matter that has not seen the sun for approximately 360 million years. Every cell in the human body is itself made of carbon. As Wright herself says, human beings are 'somewhere between sunlight and coal'. Moving, inexorably, from one to the other. Wright's paintings reveal both where we have come from and where we are going.
Jonathan Griffin
Jonathan Griffin is a critic living in London.