Rembrandt, ‘A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?)‘, 1654.

 ONe of the most stunning virtuoso displays of paintings I have ever seen. By all accounts an elaborate ode to a love one. What amazes me about Rembrandt is his ability to transform paint into a wide range of mimetic ends without ever loosing the autonomous suculence of the paint itself. It always reads as stick, sexy oil paint as well as its representational counterpart.

 That counterpart is never subordinate though. It is not like Rembrnadt sees a hierachy in the role of the medium. He sees the process of representation as a way to celebrate different properties of his medium, the two are always symbiotic, never at war.

 Look at the thumb on the dress. The dress itself. The light which flickers across wat, through skin and on the dress. The manner in which the leg breaks thorugh the water and the reflection of the legs across the riplling surface. Always with such loosness, with such seeming ease.

 When put into words we reduce the acheivement down to something simplisitc. It is in essence. It is nothing more than what many a painter has aspired to before and after Rembrandt. The difference is that only the smallest of handfuls of painters can acheive it with such sophisitication.

This eulogy is necessary. I wish to assert a believe in a hierachy. Some painters are better than others. It is without doubt true that the rules we judge painting by have been radically altered and are constantly evolving. Yet there are eternal truths and certain goals to aspire to. Within this framework there is certainly remit to gauge one painters success over another.

History may lie. Canons might be artifical constructions. But the deconstruction of such idealistic tower building should not mean we dismiss all aspects of the vantage point. When we sift back through the shattered lense which nows looks back, certain gems still emerge as strong as ever, even if the structure in which they were raised is crumbling.

 Rembrandt’s , ‘A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?)‘, 1654 is one of these gems.
 

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.

The photographer is far more democratic in his approach than the painter. By its nature his practise allows him to point and click with less consideration over the minutie of his creation. He considers tone, composition, scale and all the other equivalent formal elements that a painter concerns himself with. The difference is that his is a selective process, not an onnipotent one. Whilst he frames he chosen material other detritus are free to present themselves in any way that the occasion and time and space allow. The painter, however, tends to select every element of his imagery.

This results in passages of genuine naturalness in a photograph. We may frame a beach scene to capture the sunset and the image of two children playing bat and ball. In the left hand corner, however, we may accidentally have happened upon the edge of a man walking a dog half way through leaving the scene.

 Its the kind of dramatic positioning which has begun to filter into painterly image making through the influence of photography. These chance moments can now be lifted, directly or indirectly, from photographic discovery to painterly construction.

 It seems, Andy, that your continued fascination with the wandering dogs and man walking dogs is a direct result of such chance glances. I remember you chowed me a while ago a photograph you found that had someone walking a dog half cropped at its edge. i commented at the time how its the kind of framing a painter would never choose; not without the infleucne of phtogoraphy.

This seems to put painting, in this instance, in a subordinate role to photography in some visual hierachy. The reality is that in its borrowing painting transforms that moment.

The cut of figure almost dissovles into nothingness in a phtograph. The viewer is aware that it is an unconsider extra, an accident of the process. Their deconstruction of the pictorial dynamics remains attached to the central figures of the image.

The viewer of the painting cannot so easily show such selective vision. The moment we look at a painitng we are aware, or believe, that we are looking at something whose every motif has been selected. The cut of man walking the dog, therefore, can no longer be dismissed. Instead he must take on some anrrative, dramatic or visual role. He becomes an attendant figure, a supported, a protagonist perhaps. A figure leave the stage and opening up a potential dialogue with the rest of the image. He points to both a world outside of the frame and complkicates the selected world within.

When we conflate the visual referents of the photographic and painted worlds we always find that the collaberation of the two creates a shifted visual code which is perhaps not previously present in either.

History simplifies. It reduces the past down to clearly distinguishable groups which are derived from but almost totally divorced from reality. In terms of painting it reduces the past into patterns, tendencies and styles. In truth paintings past  nothing like as linear in progression or clear in categorisation as we would like to think.

That said, there is no doubt that we now live in a time where the painterly (and wider)landscape is more diverse, fragmented and confused than ever. The lack of unifying concepts, clear agendas or singular centres has made sure of that.

Painting is most certainly alive, fererently so. But amoungst the chaos of its current existence what unites it. more importantly, for me, what ermege as common grounds from which a young practitioner can find some kind of pathway? 

 What is clear is that any pathway that mereges is tailor made ofr each practiioner. The potential streams of influence are so vast that we can hand pick the aspects which we choose to relate to, be informed by and take influence from.

 Amoungst contemporary uniqueness there are tendenceis which are continuous within paintings histories. As shifting permanents it is perpahs important to locate these first.

Style. Style has always been a central fascet of the painters fascination. The formal minutiae of the practise are inherantly important to any person who picks up a fl uid liqud intending to place it across a flat surface to create a ‘painting’. Style transcends subject matter, in that it concerns are regardlessof the what and why of our approach. This is not to say it is not directly related to this, just that it also has a certain autonomy. 

Every paintiner is to some extent look to continue, develop and find an appropriate ’style’. I use the word loosley. I don’t mean stlye in tersm of stylised. I just mean the consideration of space, the application of the medium, the use of colour, the formation of line and the combination of these parts to create a whole. We are always looking to consider these to find something of our time, of ourself, different to the past and which stretches the language of painting to artiuclate a variation of past messages. The particular details of this observation are not too important at this moment in time.

Beyond such a general trend there are more specific tendencies which seem to underpin much contemporary practise.

Multiplicity. It becomes very hard to locate yourself when there are so many different avenus being taken by painters. Many still continue directly from the 20th Century obsession with abstraction. From process painting, pure abstraction and continuations of expressionism. Others have full immersed themselves in the rebirth of image making, but this is then broken done into infinate subcategories. A list of stylistic labels would do us no favours as they general blind rather than describe. For me this very multiplicity of approachs is not a denial of a tendency but is a tendency in itself.

The return of the image after its death. The image seems to have been attacked and killed off from enough angles to make its return complicated. If the image, due to its over exposire, is dead and if iconography is now empty of meaning; then what use does it have in this new pictorial painterly landscape? A point Andy made the other day seems to ring true. That we have emptied images of meaning and thus using them seems to become about this emptienss is many ways. I am a little confused as to exactly what I mean here, I shall have to give it some thought.

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 

“For both Bacon and Kafka the spinal colum is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner” 

Deleuze describes the seperation in Bacon’s figures of bone and flesh. The subbordinate nature of the skeletal structure and flesh coating in reality and the drawn linear structure and painterly covering in art is challenged.

Bacon’s figures are not boneless, but the bones seem to become malleable and to lose total control ove rthe figural exterior. The flesh becomes primary and the hierachy is inverted. Is the product of an individual who sees both the spiritual improtance of flesh and who favours the fluid nature of paint over the rigid contorl of line.

The relaitonship is no longer one of a cage in which the flesh is controleded and trapped but a stage upon which the flesh can perform. Deleuze describes these ‘acrobatics’ perfectly.

 Some of the most pertinant examples of Bacon’s approach are seen in his dealing with heads. He ‘dismantles’ the face in order to rediscover the head. The rubbing and brushing provide visual interuptions, creating ambiuguous areas of ‘indiscernability’. The face is no longer a portrait of an individual but a vessel to describe something more universal about man in general. The figure always seem to keep some attachment to the specific of the sitters identity, to ensure empathy and pity. Yet they are shifted far enough beyond to become a metaphor of makind in general. Bacon manages to combine the emotive power of dealing with specific individuals and sesnations with the broad impact of a universal message. This is no emotionally detached intellectual allegory. It is far more direct, piercing through us and channeling into our nervous system.

Particular feature of the face take on importance for Bacon. There are what Deleuze calls ‘eyes without sockets’ which he connects back to Rembrandt. This structural loosness creates a floating hole of depth and uncertainty.  

Most distrubing, but accurate, is his description of the scream in Bacon. He talks about the mouth as a vessel through whihc the entire body, the mass of flesh, can pass. The lack of an audible scream is replaced by a visceral ingestion and excreation of self as flesh. There is a gravitational pull of the form through this hole, as if it is the central force through which the action and emotion takes place.

the mouth and its importance- no longer an organ, a hole through which the entire body escapes, sense of pressure and itnensity. and which the flesh descends.the pity of the scream, not audible, but visceral, a scream as a physcial ingestion and vomit at the same time.

I suppose this is, in a way, a follow up to your post the other day. More directly it is a response to an image I have just starting working on.

Many of my paintings sourcfe found imagery, staged photographic images and other photographic sources. Normally, however, the image is a fragment of a new synthetic construction. It is analysed and detached from cotnext and given a new location in a woder field.

So it is interesting when the odd image strikes me and inspires a failry direct translation from found image to final image. This was the case with an image I found two days ago of a young british 10m diver in the daily sports pages.

I knew almost straight away I wanted to use the whole iamge. Not to break it up, dissovle chunks or introduce it too a new set of surroundings.

 Initially I did two small drawings and then today I started working on a canvas, 40inch x30inch.

Fisrtly the enlarging of the image is going to give a new sense of heroism to the subject, but this is old, tired and obvious ground to go over.

What interests me is the chocies I deem necessary to make in the recreation of the image. No painter ever copies truthly, even if they want to. They are always forgetting, remering in a new way, fiddlings, shifting and moving the image towards a new altered end point.

Look at Manet’s work, in this instance his ‘Balcony’ painting of 1870. Look how geometric the coposition is, the rigid retangular nature (a direct descendant of David) in its organisation and linear composition. He reorganises what he saw(either in life or in a photographic image) sytemmatically giving it a new sense of order and structure. Its almost a form of purification.

I realised I was attempting to do something similar today, without even being consciously aware of it. Firstly I divided the canvas up, not as the orignal image was, but in a slightly altered structure. I made the height in which both the pool and the crowd sat in identical. Both were 15 inches high, making the two of them create a square (as the canvas is 3o inches wide). This then left 10inches, and a quarter of the height, for the space in which the diving board and diver would sit. Before I had even added in the specific infomration I had divided the space into a mathematical and balacned format, altering the less rigid structure of the photograph. It was intuative, which is what I find fascinating.

Its as if we have a conversation with the photograph and the blank canvas. On the one hand we are looking to fulfill the mimetic function of recapturing the image. On the other we are aware of the abstract formal qualities of the painted surface. We desire to have harmony, to have balance. Its as if the dialogue between painted space and photographic images ensures we are honest to both truths.

 Since then the crowd has been drawn in and the diving board and diver. I now have a layout which will allow me to find a certain amount of autonomy in surface and colouration. Alloowing me to shift away from the specifics of the origianl source to capture what it is I think I saw in the original image. A sense of dramatic tension, a odd interest in the activity as a spectacle, of the audience inside and outside the cnavas interracting. I don’t wan’t to say too much more about this as I want to try carry working on this image without too much preconceived baggage or agenda. Mydesire to paint it has seen me skip a few ofthe normal stages of construction. I have no idea at this point if this enriches or empoverishes the potential outcome.

Francesca Woodman

In my first year teaching no artist has been referenced or spoken about by students more than Francesca Woodman.  She is neither as famous or as in your face noticeable as many other artists, yet something about her draws numerous people to her work. 

Woodman died at the tragically young age of twenty two, having only produced 800 prints. It would be wrong to assume that her fame or interest in her work is the by product of her youthful passing. Of course, as with Cobain/Keats and many others, it adds and projects a certain amount of meaning onto the work. yet the exists an autonomous power to her images that makes the worth discussing.

Woodman’s photographs explore many of the tricks of the trade familiar to student photographers. Double exposure, slow shutter speeds and low lights.  Technically her images are perhaps no more sophisticated than many a young photographer. But how she harnesses these devices to create her images is what stands her out. 

She becomes an actress in empty and eeeire interiors. The architecture becomes a stage which she does not just play on but through. Moving around so that she dissolves and fades into the worn walls.  What remains of her presence in the final image is no more important than what has been lost. Image a figurative response to Whiteread’s work. 

Francesca Woodman’s images seem to be about a struggle or attempt to disappear, to fade away. The architecture is both what traps and what provides a vehchile for some kind of escape. Slippery transient moments are paused. Figures, which seem to be metaphors of wider conditions, seem to resonate with our inherant concerns with the human condition. Rather than her young death being a tragedy which we project onto the images; is it not a case that her images articulate a particular understanding and struggle with the tragic which lead her to suicide. Either way, they are deeply moving image which, in my tired state, I have not been able to deconstruct effectively.