This piece of writting considers the notion of perceiving emotion in art. It is a response to the ideas discussed in an essay of the same name by Damien Freeman, whose essay considers, amoungst other things, Wollheim’s writting on the matter.
The unique experience of perceiving emotion in a painting seems to come down to a discussion of four parts. Two of these parts are relevant to the production and the others more directly to consumption. Read the rest of this entry »
I was reading an iteresting catalogue essay on Daniel richter’s painting’s last night. One point in particular stood out.
In talking about the comedy in his work it comments that nothing is funnier than the presentation of the sole of a figures foot.
This seemed a ludicrous statment. Then i was looking at some images I have been making recently, of figures squirming figures on beds. A number of them have twisted and contorted in such a way that the sole of there foot is presented both towards the ceiling and the viewer. They do seem to be the figures who have more wit. Yet i just can’t work out why this would, or perhaps is, funny.
As contemporary image makers I think Crewsdon and Rauch are in the same mode.
They are both products of an approach which seeks to find the unique properties of their medium (be it painting or photography) but which borrows liberally from other art forms in this quest. Filmaking, collage, graphics, advertising are all disciplines which inform their practise.
In both cases they seek a certain kind of narrative. They are fully aware of the limits and tendencies of narrative in still images. They avoid the temptation to play literature at the game of unfolding a story over time. Instead they make the most of the causal ambiguity inherant in the stilled moment.
For both artists the narratives are always of a poetic sort. That is we are but into a situation where the mood, the drama, the sense of tension are palpably present. Yet the specific nature and context of the scene is not completely clear. How a figure relates to its surrounding, how the various parts combine to a coherent whole and what has happened before or will happen after are unclear.
The lack of clairty is played upon to give a heightened sense of tension and unease. Crewsdon’s work, for instance, could come straight form a scene in American Beauty or Magnolia. It like some Hooperesque image but modernised and laced in excess.
In both cases we are left with the sense that this is a point of dramatic tension. That something is on the verge of collapsing, imploding or to be revealed. The moments, in Rauchs particuarly, are constantly left in a state of flux, as if everything could collapse in front of our eyes.
For Rauch’s saturated and unreal colour range read Crewsdon’s move style lighting. They are the formal tools they use to find theatre. It is theatre (in terms of performance, play and a sense of tragedy) which is the central tennant linking their practise.
The relationship between the artist and theory is very different to the one the philosopher, critic or historian has. For the artist there can be a certain elasticity in the understanding of the source. They can manipulate and formulate ideas for it for their own, selfish, and painterly ends. The accuracy of understanding is secondary to the impact, influence and development within the artists own practise.
I don’t want Bacon’s silent scream- its deafeningly noisey and the horror is frighteningly real, its gutteral.
I want my painting’s to have the empty scream. The scream which comes out of the mouth and the anus. The pathetic scream of ego without reason. A scream which speaks of a shallow hollowness and artifiical melodrama. I want a kind of collapsing schizophrenia, a scream of paranoia. I want my painting’s to have a scream without context which crumbles under scrutiny and just becomes a silent whimper.
I want my painting’s to have a scream which we laugh at.
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
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
A poem that was recently brought to my attention…
Muséé des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W.H. Auden
dysphoria
Painting is dysphoria. ‘An impatience under affliction: morbid restlessness: uneasiness: want of feeling of wellbeing.’ (chambers concise dictionary)
Jacques Louis David’s Brutus. 1789
Look at the still life at the centre of this piece; a proto photographic, almost Carravagesue, creation. It is a small but crucial detail. It speaks of the paintings true meaning. The blade pierces the fabrics, a reference to the piercing of the domestic space by the loss of the young men. The still life is a poetic metaphor for the whole painting. This is a picture about domestic grief.
History lies. The perpetual desire to find meaning in a picture through a socio-political recontextualisation is the legacy of T. J. Clarke’s brilliant writing. Such a methodology denies an analysis which places the works visual structure at its basis. David’s Brutus is a case in point, a closer analysis of the picture shows that we should not so readily accept this image as one overflowing with proto revolutionary sentiment.
The accepted analysis of this work is that it anticipates the revolution; a celebration of a republican state, with Brutus as its hero. There is no doubting Brutus is the key celebrity figure of republican ideals. Having swore an oath on the body of Lucretia (who had committed suicide after being raped by Tarquin, the monarch) he led the charge for the overthrow of the monarchy. As head of the republic he had to display myopic stoicism in following his ideals. He sentenced his own sons to death for their plot to restore the Monarchy.
The grounds for this image as a celebration of pro republican feeling are flawed on two levels. Firstly it depicts the domestic grief in response to the sons death. This is the tragic effect of Brutus’ actions, not the best moment to select to aggrandise republican ideals. The Oath of Brutus or the sentencing of the sons would have shed a warmer light on the ideology.
Secondly there is no historical evidence to suggest that in 1789 David, or indeed France, had vehemently Republican ideals. The French revolution, the collapse of the Monarchy and the rise of the republic seems to have happened in an incredibly short period of time. To suggest such ideals would be intrinsic to David’s morals is to ignore the fact that this was a man capable of adjusting his moral compass for personal and artistic gain at any moment. This painting may be a celebration of antiquity, but it is not a call to arms. The ‘Death of Marat’ 1795 is a far more incontestable example of pro republican propaganda.
If such an analysis is bankrupt, or at the least flawed, then we need to return to the image itself. When we do we find an image of surprising compassion and emotional complexity. This is not the cold purely intellectual construction that a label such as Neo-Classical so unhelpfully suggests.
Consciously or not it is the structure of David’s images which initially controls our segmented consumption of the whole. In previous works, such as ‘Oath of the Horatti’, the structure is more explicitly controlled by architecture. Whilst architecture is present, and important in this composition, it is a single object that pivots the image. The empty chair in the central of the painting is the pivot around which the drama unfolds. It is empty. The absence of the presumed figural presence attests to the void left by the death of Brutus’ sons. Its spatial centrality speaks of its narrative importance. The dead bodies are carried through in the background; by it is this foreground absence which strikes a chord. Thus the image becomes about the domestic grief and reaction to an absent other.
The chair echoes the division of the image into engendered realms. On the right we have the female half and on the left the male half. They are positioned as emotional binary oppositions. A dialogue between the halves is opened up, each feeding our reading of the other
The female half is about the presence of grief. The group of figures echo the Niobe group. The borrowing is not just about a knowing nod to antiquity but an awareness of the power of emotions contained in the particular figural mechanics. The mother reaches out in a hopeless grasp, trying to deny her sons passing. At the same time her other arm holds up her daughter who swoons from the gravity of emotion. The double action speaks of her role of a mother, caring for a daughter, which thus heightens the sense of lost contained in her outstretched arm. The other daughter holds her hands up to block the vision; her features contain a moving melancholy. To their right a figure is draped with a cloth. By hiding her features our imagination creates a reaction beyond the realm of vision.
Brutus displays no such outward emotion. His stoic presence recalls Michelangelo’s Issiah. The quotation is not just derivative or an elitist reference but an awareness of Michelangelo’s ability to display emotional feeling through the form of a figure. David creates an emotional contradiction between the top and bottom of Brutus, between the face and the body.
The face looks out blankly, stoically excepting the death. Its eyes look to us but the lack of communication speaks of an emotional blankness. The body, conversely, twists dynamically, the toes curl like those in Titian’s ‘Crowning of thorns.’ The tension in the figure speaks of a burning anguish which is being repressed rather than an emotional bankruptcy. He sits in shadow, his back to the empty chair and his family. Everything about his pose is fraught with unease.
We move between the two realms aware that the female grief attests to the torment which Brutus tries to hide. The cost of his personal loss for the greater good of the state is pictured not as heroic, but tragic.
