Janet Boulton Paintings & paper relief works, Recent Texts

As one of the curators of Edinburgh College of Art's renowned classical art cast collection I was particularly keen to witness the impact of Janet Boulton's three pronged Spartan assault would have on one of the Northern Athenians. Many will know that Edinburgh College of Art's Sculpture Court, where Janet Boulton's Remembering Little Sparta took place, was specifically designed to present the casts of the Parthenon sculptures in as authentic manner as possible. I was therefore very interested to see how this cultural clash between the two opposing Greek city-states would be played out. It was however,another dialectic which soon diverted my attention. At the entry of the Sculpture Court the artist had placed the presiding presence of the Medici Venus, a plaster cast monument to Aphrodite herself. Thus unlike Ian Hamilton Finlay's Spartan domain, where Apollo, that fearful force of reason and terror, holds awesome sway, Janet Boulton's Remembering Little Sparta chose to dedicate itself to a very different aspect of the power of the divine presence.

With this seemingly minimal, yet profoundly challenging intervention, Janet Boulton provokes dialectical debate worthy of the Master of Stonypath himself. Now the issue of gender can be the focus for consideration.For instance, we are again reminded that the initial Little Sparta collaborative project was a joint one - between Sue and Ian Hamilton Finlay, where a complex combination of feminine horticulture and masculine culture combined to create one of the great works of our age. Still,one might ask however, what came first - the garden or its contents? The force of nature has been around infinitely longer than our tenuous civilisation, and it was only through the control of its mythic and physical powers that the creation of human history and culture was made possible. Thus in the great scheme of things it is the Garden - Aphrodite's empire of the senses - that creates the setting and possibility for Apollo's world of the mind and Hephaisto's platform for human art and technological endeavour.

Psychology and feminism have revealed to our modern age that gender is not merely a biological phenomenon but much more importantly a socially constructed one. The genderisation of most socio-cultural activities has also had strong influence on the visual arts as witnessed by the Art and Crafts debate,for example.Janet Boulton's long and sustained engagement with Finlay's garden in all its varying character also raises issues of artistic gender relationships. Little Sparta is a masterly twentieth-century reworking of the eighteenth-century landscape garden where the Apollonian power of masculine reason controls and triumphs over the barbarisms of unruly nature. As Pope declares in his gardening manifesto An Epistle to Burlington, "Still follow sense,of every art the soul". Yet sensibility also found its proper place in the lower hierarchies of Enlightment aesthetics; with the practice of watercolour painting for instant; which, until the Romantics like Turner came along, was deemed the prerogative of women and amateur artists. So it is all credit to Ian Hamilton Finlay to realise what an important additional visual contribution Janet Boulton's watercolour practice could make to the many other kinds of views and interpretations of Little Sparta that have been produced over years.

In Remembering Little Sparta Janet Boulton,with sure technical skill and acute sensitivity, uses the so-called feminine medium of watercolour to create a very elusive, yet alluring vision of her absorbing subject. Although she does include Finlay's sculptural and textual poetics throughout Little Sparta, their presence pays a less prominent role in these richly atmospheric and subtly translucent dream-like images which recall Watteau, rather than any of his neo-classical successors. As with the magical paintings of the great rococco master, these delightful works of Janet Boulton with their concentration on sensual involvement and emotional response seem to deflect and defer the immediate need for rational meaning and explanation. This gives added significance to the Proustian aura suggested by the exhibition's title. Mnemosyne, the ancient Greeks goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses, takes us back to before the reign of Apollo and the creation of reason and art, when humankind was imagined to be in immediate contact and complete union with the nature. That previous natural existence persisted in the memory of the Greeks down the civilising generations, as it still continues to haunt our collective unconscious.

The Little Sparta watercolours of Janet Boulton poetically evoke this eternal yearning which we have-for our lost arcadia. Yet in her pictorial world of the imagination,we are closer to Aphrodite's Isle of Cythera where "Et in Arcadia ego" alludes not to the finality of death but rather to the regenerative power of love.