I want my figures to be like puppets, but with no strings or pupeteer.

 I want them subjected to external forces. Their limbs pulled upwards, sideways and all over. A kind of uncontrollable squirming which looks to hoist them upwards and deny and contradict the gravitational downwards pulls. The weight of meat againt the lightness of the spirit and idealism force from above them.

 The life and movement is thus searching for something artificial. A motionless form which is being moved about by something outside. Ultimately the meat and weight will win out. Ultimately however alive they seem the stilness and deadness will be revealed.

We reamina trapped in the flux of the movment, attempting a performace within a little stage set but in reality collpasing and falling apart and stuck in the moment.

Drawing works, for me anyway, when it has a variety of pace. It  needs the line which evokes, with speed and economy, only just liaterally holding onto the barest mimetic framework. It also needs to detailed line, the slow burning line which with care and precision denotes the specifics, pedantic tennants of the objective eye.

These various lines work like instruments in an orchestra. The musical analogy is overplyes i know. They create both varying rhythms and melodies. The rhythm is in the pace of the line and the melody in the intrinsic formal qualites created by the pace. in the case of drawing melody is the sub product of the rhythm. The melody is the thickness, the thiness, the harshness or the delicacy. The rhythm is the actual physical and visual movment which reminds of the hand and pulls the eye dancing across the page.

 We can only find resoance, and harmony, when these rhythms coexist. Without this dialogue we are left with a monolgoue. its either the pedantic bore of the myopic detail or the nonsensical move to abstraction of the evocation.

Everything collapses

Everything falls

Every structure constructed will eventually come under the impact of some equivalent to gravity.

The combination of intrinsic flaws of idealism and the exterior dependance of change ensure that the rise is followed by the fall

In all cases, whether outside or existence or central to it, we just stand by and watch the beauty of the spectacle

The tragic inevitability of the collapse is the one constant drama we can rely on

New Era?

I can’t help feel that this American bail out is necessary, in some form, but actually heralds a end to a particular type of capitalist mentality. I’m not suggesting some kind of ideological shift but an altering of the mechanics. This crumbling of the financial structure is inherently connected to intrinsic flaws in the way the system we, the west, have run. It seems to perpetuate itself on a variety of levels from that of the individual, through the financial sector, institutions and then whole governments.

Options 

The hypocrisy of Brown really fucking grates me. To argue he is the man to steady the ship! This being the man who believes that investing huge amounts in national institutions amounts to measurable improvements. When the sun was shinning he did not mend the roof, but rather employed overly priced tradesman to fuck about with the foundations.

Now is a time for an experienced hand? Do wereally want a hand which is experienced at bleeding an overflowing pot dry just to pour the contents into spreadsheets and stat graphs without overly improving anything? I’m not claiming that the last ten years have been a total disaster, but that Brown has certainly been behind some horrific irresponsibility with the tax payers money. I can’t say the idea of the Tories being in charge fills me with much more joy. We are kind of optionless at a time when we need real quality.

This is an article I wrote for ‘varsity’, Cambridge Universities independant student paper. http://www.varsity.co.uk/archive/677.pdf

Vomiting, screaming, sexual spasms, paralytic disembowelment, disappearing through the anus and exploding as if cut open from within. Welcome to the theatre of Francis Bacon.

Bacon stages the performances through the use of space, creating clear geometric or circular arenas to house the drama. Space takes on a psychological role with Bacon. It is always instable, full of tension and on the verge of collapse. It resonates with the wider condition of the central characters.

One of Bacon’s great characters is the central figure in his 1965 ‘Crucifixion’. His trademark intense orange pulls us in. It becomes one of many devises which ensure he reaches beyond illustration, tapping directly and violently into our nervous system.

The central figure appears in each canvas, squirming, falling and imploding. The vomit themselves out through a hole and are pulled in through an internal gravity. The forces are described by scrubbing and splattering, what Deleuze called areas of indiscernibly.

The new decompositions of movement are a result of a fascination with the photographs of Muybridge. Bacon translates his borrowings into acrobvatic figures with elastic bones. A spine becomes a sword which opens up the form, presenting a pole around which flesh and organs dance. The skeletal structure is no longer a cage in which flesh is contained, but a stage around which it performs. The hierarchy has been inverted.

Within the figures is a play between controlled linear design and painterly excess; an equivalent of a slow and fast shutter speed within one frame. Bacon described himself as a pulveriser, but Deleuze correctly describes him as a detective. From the mess of his butchering he searches for a harmony. Within this dialogue a tension is found when balance is violently excavated from a system not predisposed to order.

In the Crucifixion the force found is that of gravity, describing the sheer weight of flesh descending across the verticality of the surface. In his atheist reworking there is no potential for transcendence from the corporeal to the ethereal. We remain stuck in the meatiness of the moment.

Supporting the central figure are attendants in the left and right panel. On the left is a female figure leaving the stage and looking back with a disturbing disinterest. The mechanics of the figure, the twist of the hips in particular, are described with elegance. The two men in the right panel look outside of the frame, mundane spectators seemingly oblivious to the dramatic spectacle. This support cast heighten the sense of intense isolation in the main character.

The work is typical of bacon in its articulation of hysteria, what Deleuze called ‘galloping schizophrenia’. It speaks of the inherent frustration which is at the centre of tragedy in painting.

Bacon’s oeuvre should not be mistaken as a violent monologue. There exists a dichotomy in his work which attests to a more in-depth appreciation of the human condition. For the violent melodrama scream of the Crucifixion triptych exists the eloquent melancholic exhale present in a number of his George Dyer works. These works follow the suicide of Bacon’s lover. ‘Triptych, May-June 1973’ sees Dyer sat on the toilet, disturbed and vomiting. It is described, however, with a pathos and serenity not often attributed to Bacon. Even the violence of the ejaculatory white mark has a sense of poetry.

His diversity is also present in the wit of his numerous cricketer paintings. Characters such as David Gower appear on a glowing orange ground, naked except pads and wildly swishing at thin air.

This variety attests to a theatre verging on Shakespearian in its depth. Bacon is not singular, he is more than the horror of the silent scream.

 Some other Whalecrow blogs on bacon:

Deleuze on Bacon Chapter Eight

Deleuze on Bacon: Chapter Seven- hysteria

Deleuze on Bacon: Chapter Six- painting and sensation

Deleuze on Bacon: Chapter Four

Deleuze on Bacon: Chapter Three

Deleuze on Bacon: Chapter two- study of a dog 1952

Andy’s thoughts - and more thoughts