Why have I been fascinated with Edwardian/Victorian photography?  Because this was at the birth of paintings new conception.  It was a period that involved not just the invention of photography, but, Darwinism and the release of Freuds new theories.  Shaking the foundations of the wests once secure philosophical and theosophical footing.  At the same time challenging paintings representational authority and opening up avenues for different thought. Read the rest of this entry »

A window points to depth

A wall reflects and absorbs flatness

All thats in the frame passes before being reached

 All ascribed to the crumbling surface is soaked up in a dry mouth

Idealism has depth

Realism has flatness

The place is flat

The Journey has depth

Love is depth and desire it flatness Read the rest of this entry »

 I have been browsing through a series of old family photographs recently. Each has a different impact. Here I am with my two elder sisters in America, on a trip to Dsiney Land. i believe I am about five.

 This is one of a few photographs which fills me with a certain melancholy. My instinct is to link this to some simplisitc phycological cause; perhaps the imminant divorce of my parents, the last ties to the nucelar family of my early childhood. In reality this does not feel honest, the sadness is both more poigniant and more ambiguous than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Tragedy is not singular. Each artform has its own form of tragedy, as does life itself. Lifes tragedy is obvious, the inevitability of death as a consequence of birth.

Narrative, literary, tragedy is the closest to this. Moving through time and space it necessitates plot. The tragedy in narrative is always tied up in cause and effect. What will happen is an inevitable consequence of what is happening, the end is defined by the start.

Photographic tragedy is different. The photograph is about a moment in reality which had been. Its static nature only focus our attention on the inevitable death of the moment recorded. It is not held in eternity but killed and embalmed. Photography is never about idealism but the depressing realism, the shadow of reality. Its oppositions are tragic reminders of lifes tragic transcience. Read the rest of this entry »

Everything divides into opposites

It all decomposes into mapable coordinates

Composed artificially for need of idealism

These constructs are ascribed to our particular psyche

The imprint of a repetitive history

Never intrinsic but forcing its way beneath the skin

The vertical is male Read the rest of this entry »

The hero is dead

The hero is the figure of idealism

The tragic hero is the romantics hero and ICarus its king

The fall was the tragic hero’s motif

Tragedy is about inevitability

The fall is the inevitable conclusion of the rise

The desire to fall comes from the unfulfilled desire to rise

Tragic heroism is measured in the total distance travelled

Tragic heroism always ends where it started

Tragic heroism befitsliterautre

it has a linear narrative

upwards and then downwards through space and time

All we have left is the desire for the hero

The desire for heroism has no narrative

The desire for heroism is static

It desire movement through space and time

It desires the rise that necessitates the fall

It remains attached to the base level

Twitching and squirming at best

The hero is dead

Tragedy is dead

only unfulfilled desire is left

Deleuze on Bacon- chapter eight, painting forces.

 We are told paintings task is not to ‘render the visable but to render visable’. Thus we upon up the timeless apology to the attack on painting as a form of representation. It provides a neat repost to critics from Plato to Greenberg.  We are denying painting as merely a mirror to the world or a narricistic reflection of itself. Instead we are arguing that it is a doorway beaneath the surface appearance of things, so giving us a glimpse of known but unseen aspects of reality.

 It all sounds rather mystical, or conveniant at best. I think I am naturally cycnical to this apology. It seems to easy to give painting this magical power to give concrete form to otherwise elusive and unseen being. We are not dreamcatchers. Surely paintings always talk of surface appearances, be they those of paint itself or out shadow image of the tangible world.

Luckily Deleuze tackles the issue with the rigour of a scientist, leaving me slightly more convinced that painting can and does reach beyond the surface.

Deleuze talks of the visulisation Bacon gives to otherwise invisable forces. Bacon is not so much concerned with the figure, but the forces which underly and effect the figure. The figure is seemingly a vessel which allows him to articulate and excavate these forces.

These ellusive forces are identified. Chief among them seems to be the non audible force of time. Below this a list of elementary forces is listed: inertia, gravitation, attraction, weight and pressure. Physical identifable forces which speak of the cause or effect of a force upon a form. Thus the form needs to exist in order to articulate the force which acts upon it. Sound is also mentioned, with particular reference made to Bacon’s fascination with the scream.

An early opposition with Deleuze approach comes with his dismissal of subject matter. The specific nature of the form seems to be deemed unimportant to him. He argues that it is the force from, within or upon the form which matters. This seems blinkered. The complex web like map of a painting renders each part important. To often writters compartmentalise a painting in order to find a more complete and unified outcome from their deconstruction. Deleuze does not totally dismiss subject matter but in his discussion of Millet he certainly relegates it in his clear hierachy. I am not arguing that any one writter should try and take on every aspect of a work. Too much is at stake with any one aspect to render this possible. It is thus only natural that someone should take on style, another subject matter or iconography, another social context and another a search for metaphysical values. But it is the consistent pig headed nature of each writter to aggrandise their own search over another which drives me mad. I have digressed, but I think the criticism is necessary if not overly dogmatic.

Deleuze’s argument, therefore, is that a painter does not paint the object but is actually trying to capture the particular force of, on, from or within that object. That force is the root of a particular sensation, and sensation is the chief aim of painting.  

 We briefly touch upon the root to finding and then capturing such forces. This allows us to see that it is not through some magical alchemy, but the product of formal fasciantions. We arrive at the force through the ‘decomposition and recomposotion’ of certain binary opositions. Historical references are given to the play between flatness and depth through the renaissance, the discussion between movement in Cubism and the deconstruction and recontruction of colour in Impressionism.

Movement seems to be the chief concern of Bacon in this respect, and his debt to Cubism is certainly apparent if not clear. For Bacon the cause of the force and the multitude of effects related to the force is what he is after. The form, normally a figure, is merely a vehicle to allow us to find this force. The normal relationship between form and force is subverted. The form no longer is the chief actor, rather it is relagated to the stage itself, with the forces taking the lead role.

 Thus Bacon tends to take immboliel forms which seem to be subjected to unknown, unseen outside forces. We don’t normally see the cause of the force but the force itself, its effect or impact. The flattening, the stretching, the scrubbing, the disturbing. This patches are not about disturbing and destroying the vision of the form below but discovering and revealing the force itself.

Deleuze calls the area of impact and disruption ’the zone of indiscernability’. I love this phrase but think that in some ways he is actually talking about the zone of discernability. For whislt the form below has been deformed the force has been given form.

This area must remain a zone and not spread like a disease over the whole body, causing total deformation. If this happens than the dialogue between form and force is lost. Once the form is lost then then so is the force, for we are only aware of its particular nature due to its specific impact on the form. Localised deformation of the stage is essential but without the stage the performance cannot exist. (A can feel this analogy stretching to the point of breaking.)

More specifically Bacon search for forces like the scream. The arrognat painter trying to make visable the audible? REgardless, Deleuze eloquantly describes how Bacon searches for the scream not the horror. The mere physical mechanics which cause a scream are irrelevant, they are just the ’spectacle’. It is the forces which make us scream, the unseen convulsion that Bacon searches for. Having not fully got my little head around this it seems like a potential contradiction.

Far clearer is the way Bacon deals with forces such as isolation, deformation and dissipation. All of which are empirically listed by Deleuze. He states that, ‘Bacon likens himself to a pulveriser… he is more like a detective.’ This reminds me of Andy’s assesment of Rothko. What is clear is that often, when dealing with high sensation, the painter must actually be detached, a cool calm customer, not lost in some hedonisitc and self aggrandising lust.

Deleuze finally deals with the force which seems to be the chief ambition of not just Bacon but most painters; time. He talks of two types of time in Bacon. The chanigng time which is articulated at many points in the deforming passages of paint which articulate movement within or on a form. Then the search for eternal time.

This time is our chief and unreachable goal. It is an invisable and undescribable force which is never made concrete in any form. It is not just the pursuit of the visual arts. I would argue that we are infact kidding ourseleves. Painting deals with vision, with what can actually be seen. It cannot make visable this aspect of time. It can, however, attempt to get us to a slightly closer vantage point. From there we feel like we can reach out without touching. The frustration of our attempts is actually what is made visable.

Other entries:

Chapter Seven- hysteria

Chapter Six- painting and sensation

Chapter Four

Chapter Three

Chapter two- study of a dog 1952

Andy’s thoughts - and more thoughts

Francis Bacon- Deleuze chapter 7, Hysteria.  

 Its ‘hysteria’. It’s a ‘galloping schizophrenia’. This, according to Deleuze, is a unique property of painting, particuarly Bacon’s painting. What exactly does he mean by this?

He talks of the ‘body without organs’, which sounds wonderfully greusome but is more than a mere lump of blood drenched skin withered on the floor. To understand the body without organs we need to appreciate what is meant by the body with organs.

It seems the Deleuze sees the individual as one which is trapped by the limits of its forms, or at the least our vision of the body is trapped. The organs are specific forms in specific places, there predetermined organisation is the organism. The organism is our system, it defines, limits and controls our physical prescence. Deleuze beleives we are more than this. Thus the painters job is to reach beyond a mere description of the container and its compartmentalised existence.

For Deleuze we do not just paint the visable prescence but make visable the entire prescence, including sensation which reaches beyond these previously described limits. For him painting has this ability. The colour which breaks from naturalism, the line which needlessly reaches further, the mark which abstracts; all these are factors which begin to offer avenues of escape. For him the body can be realsied by painting from the physcial constraints of concrete, measurable values. Painting is more elastic than tangible reality. The sensation searched for cannot be so empirically measured or recorded.  For Deleuze painting shoudl reach further. Beyond the limits of the flesh and towards a more direct root to the nervous system.

This is not a case of reaching for abstraction. For that journey sees us go to far, to the point where we have become subordinate to a new limiting vision. We are back to being restricted by the body and the organism, but this time the organism is one of painting not a human prescence. It is limiting all the same. Abstraction is not a total escape but a new entrapment.  It is merely another submission.

There is no point looking for the point of total escape, for painting cannot find it. The expression of pure sensation is a gift saved for music. Painting is always locked to the body and when it breaks total free it is merely locked to another body.

What is unique about painting is the frustration. It is always locked to an organism but never totally comfortable in its system nor capable of being set toally free. Rather than lament this limbo painting needs to attempt to articulate the desire, but preordanied failure, to escape. What painting talks of is that failed desire to be set free, the moment of flux, the point at which we reach for sensation but remain attached to flesh. We remain locked at the point of escape, rooted to the material reliaty whilst looking to break beyon dit. Painting is, as such, intrinsically tragic.

 This tragedy is what I think Deleuze is talking about when he uses the word hysteria in regards to Francis Bacon’s work. However inescapable it is we still attempt to break from it. The desire for a point of inevitable failure is surely a resonating frustration which can be lablled as hysteria.

Other entries:

Chapter Eight

Chapter Six- painting and sensation

Chapter Four

Chapter Three

Chapter two- study of a dog 1952

Andy’s thoughts - and more thoughts

Good afternoon Mr. Whalecrow. Mr. Tom de Freston here

I have been adding more paint to ‘Him who wanted to have fallen II’ for a few days now. I thought it was alsmot finsihed before but needed something else. That something else has grown into multiple editions, each one seemingly taking it away from the end point. Not that I really know what that end point is or even really have any idea of the reason for each step i am taking. I am just blindly fumbling about in the dark.

 I think i am becoming over whelemed by the multiple facotrs which make up a painting, and in trying to balance each am creating a mess of a work. Ill add a dash of colour and it will work fantastically in terms of how it sits next to the colour adjascent to it. But then it shifts the mood of the work, unsettles the overall depth and causes a refocusing of our attention. I start to get the picture working in tone and then realise that perhaps it does not matter if the picture is the most tonally perfect image ever made when the motif and content to wqhich this formal qualitiy is applied is so vacuous and pretentious. Ill then have faith in the motif, seeing it as a strong and relevant synmbol but feel that the execution of the formal aspects of the work means that a potentially interesting message is being articulated by the equivalent of white noise. The next moment ill believe in the idea but feel that the composition is flawed, that the sense of space, the position of the main figures is limited and immature. Then suddenly compositionally things will come together but the idea seems like something not worth piecing otgether with this clarity.

It is obvious I am confused and frustrated.

 What becomes clear in times like these is that you are actually mindlessly grappling. I actually have very little genuine comprehension of what painitng, or more importantly my painting, is really about. What set of values underpin it and give it  a foundation to hold together. Even when we construct ideas to try give ourselves something to believe in we realise that we lack the requisite technical expertise and knowledge to build upon these. Either the house comes tumbling down becasue it has no internal structure or it collapses around the structure due to shoody brickwork. At this juncture I feel I lack both the necessary deisng of the architerct or the craft of the builder.

eyond these specifics concerns lie greater ones. What about if I realise how to design and build. This does not solve the problem of why, even if what and how are sorted. It is a building with no purpose, a tower to nowhere other than to reach up in some pursuit of empty egotistical goals. Its some vain attempt to display intellect, skill and talent without any real purpose. It all feels a little pointless at this moment in time.

Bacon is interested in the figure beyond figuration. It is a kind of form which acts directly on our nervous system. The sensation of the flesh, undistracted by thought.

It is the figure removed from the confines of specific narrative. No longer needed extensive labouring over or confined to more praggmatic end points. It has found a certain autonomy.  Itis something more direct, lacking the waffled monolgued. Its the recording of the fact, a true realism, and avoidance of the empty motif.

In this chapter movement is also touched upon. The link between Bacon and Muybridge is mentioned. The later is cited has provided a fertile base for Bacon to draw from in revelling new ‘decompositions’ of movement.

Rhythm is mentioned in regards to Bacon and movement. Figural dynamcis are certainly the most improtant aspect of Bacon’s figures. The squirm, the dissovle, they melt, they fall, the implode, they vomit themsleves out and get pulled in by some inner gravity, they are wiped over and split open. These acrobats are often scarred with blurtred scrubbings, ambiguous passagesof paint which denote a particular movement through space. They also convey more illustrative positionings of limbs, moments paused, figures held in a particular pose and denoting a movement stilled between A and B. It seems like a direct link back to Bacon’s fascination with photography, the slow vs fast shutter speed approach to capturing movement. In amoungst the choas, the lines, the paint and the space, Bacon seems to harness both. He does it without ignoring the principles of his own medium, but instead as a mode in which to follow deconstruct adn understand it. It becomes a dialogue adn battle between painterly organic marks and linear design. I think colour also plays a huge part.

muybridge- ‘the decomposition of movement into seperate parts’ intense and violent movements. the impact of invisable forces.

rhythm-s