Saturday, April 18, 2009

Bacon Bits


I have stolen the title phrase from friend Steve, who sent me a link to a site on Francis Bacon that is so HUGE and brilliant I want to keep it all for myself. I read the following this morning and thought it was terrific. I can't say as to whether it's an excerpt, or a stand alone essay as this was not mentioned. The author is Mark Cousins.

"I can’t remember now whether it was in the catalogue of the current exhibition of Bacon or whether on it was on one of those panels but at some point there was a quotation from Bacon saying “I suppose in the end we’re just meat” and I wanted to try and start off, as it were, some thoughts about both texture and also materiality by considering some of the problems, what we might call the aesthetic problems, of meat especially in that difficult area that we call ugliness or which other people call ugliness, I want to try and suggest this evening this is not how it’s normally portrayed and if properly handled is an extremely powerful and valuable artistic and architectural instrument.
Let me invite you first to engage in a thought experiment. You look at some ones face as we scan some ones face we look, as it were, for signs of expression, in some sense for the way in which the face is thought to be able to represent emotions or states of mind or whatever. As we do it invariably we have a fantasy that this expression does not simply belong to the surface but it has a depth and we frequently actually experience that as a depth but of course it has this peculiarity because the depth is not remotely localised.
If we say he looked sad we don’t say it looked about two centimeters deep in the sadness of it. Now nowhere I think is it more remarkable than if you add in to this picture of a face which you experience partly through the dimension of the depth of its expression then imagine suddenly in some process, the face suddenly manifests a wound and you suddenly see that underneath the infinitesimally thin layer of skin there’s blood and there’s flesh and there’s bone; normally people have a kind of visceral turning away from this experience. Now if you try to follow through this action of turning away, we might wonder: what is it that we’re turning away from?
The appearance of the wound indicates suddenly the collapse – a collapse of what; I mean, I’m going to say representation but I don’t mean it in a representational way. It’s as if I can’t continue having a fantasy about the depth of your sadness or the extent of your pleasure; I can’t do it any longer because, as it were, it is disrupted by the appearance of a wound. Essentially unless you’re medically knowledgeable, what you’re seeing, and I think Bacon was correct to use it in a general sense, is what he calls meat. Let’s kind of make a formula in some sense as saying: what meat is at a kind of level of experience is almost the collapse of representation or of signification…
This collapse of representation is I think part of what we might call the experience of ugliness, the turning away, at which point we might begin to hypothesise that this is not what I think it is, it is what I think people experience it as; an experience of the ugly in that sense is this: it is without signification it is without being a part of the a space of representation, it is stuff, it is meat… People’s experience of the ugly - again I’m not saying that’s what it is - is a defense against this moment - a moment which is too raw and is too, almost, unnerving; we might say that the popular experience of the ugly is: it’s that which is there but at the same time, is perceived as it shouldn’t be there - or sometimes it’s the same but the other way round: it’s that which is not there but should be.
In Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera there’s a wonderful moment when the scene shifter describes to the girls of the corps de ballet that he has seen the ghost in box five; he describes the ghost to the girls and he says, in a way in which logic itself can’t tolerate, but clearly we know exactly what he means, he says: and the ghost has no nose and that no nose is a horrible thing to look at. It’s something that isn’t there but should be… I want to suggest that one dimension of the achievement of Bacon is in a sense to take this problem on board directly and, in a way that it is very difficult to describe in his achievement, but has the achievement of as it were, bringing back meat into our understanding, bringing back meat into a kind of poetics, that which is always, as it were, normally excluded; I was at the exhibition on Sunday and it’s not just a question obviously of meat, it is those strange puddles of existence which you see so clearly in the three triptychs in homage to George Dyer - it is, indeed, a sublime moment…
Now in a sense all I’ve said is an attempt to say that what people describe as being ugly we should consider it a defense and if you can undo this defense, if, like Bacon, you can propel the spectator into the midst of meat and find it not only human but essentially human, then, as it were, you remove some of the defenses which so often kind of disable, I don’t mind putting it bluntly, disable public taste. It is a struggle. Now if something like this is the case, that I’m more than aware that I haven’t said directly anything about architecture and texture, then one of the ways we might consider the issues this evening is to think within the scope of Bacon’s adult career what also happens within architecture to be able to do that: at the level of a certain materiality and at the level of texture, that is to say, to undermine the public defense against the ugly and actually to propel it towards something new and powerful and human not in a humanistic way but human almost in a somewhat unnerving way. "
The sculpture inset is called Blinders. I started this Blog to have another avenue to show my work as well as to occasionally stand on a soapbox or just yap on about whatever I found interesting. I got both birds with this post: mission accomplished...

Friday, April 17, 2009

drama


I suppose I could have gone upstairs and checked to see what Chaplin film it was that I was watching, but the image had me glued to the television. Also, it was time for me to get to work (I have a real job now, none of this artist crap!).

Since the story was set in a cold climate and involved the staking of a gold claim, I assumed that the setting was supposed to be Alaska. Two guys are inside a rustic cabin that is teetering on the very edge of a precipice. The inhabitants are scrambling for balance so that the entire house doesn't go over the edge to doom and destruction, taking them along.

All is filmed in stark black and white.

Great image, so apropos of where I stand (teeter) in life. Dramatic? Maybe, but that teetering feeling is pretty unsettling - it's a daily battle to stay on the edge. Limbo land.

Notice that the image is also tilted...I wish I could tell you that I did that on purpose...

Friday, April 10, 2009

Re: abstraction


I take this excerpt directly from Robert Genn, who sends me a twice-weekly "Letter to Artists".


Abstraction ranges from the meaningless abuse of paint to the most lofty and exciting of surfaces. Each effort can be a creative event--a vehicle for the mysteries of the subconscious mind and an opportunity to flirt with pure forms, symbols and metaphors. It's an art of hiding and disclosing. More than simply playing with the materials, abstraction is a discovery of motifs that happen to be part of a painter's personal legend. Personality counts. Abstraction also holds the promise of dreams, fears, fetishes, fancies, intangibles and wills.The wilful artist marches to his own drummer. As in the composing of music, in pure and practical terms, the resulting work will be the painter's own composition.Perhaps one of the best understandings came from Marc Chagall: "Abstraction is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic as well as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements." Abstract art has the power to show us something we may not have seen before. It implies both thought and no thought. Thriving on unconventional tools and a unique sort of energy, it's also a collaboration of mind and spirit. As a form of wizardry and magic, an abstract may speak both to you and for you. More than anything, abstract art can be a conversation piece."Abstraction is an esoteric language," said Eric Fischl. It is a language unique to the individual artist. In a way, it can be more unique than the similarly legitimate language of realistic work, because no matter how realists pull Nature's reality this way and that, they still have Nature's reality, however nuanced. The more modern idea, however it may be seen by some as flawed, is to be the inventor, creator and patent holder of your own Nature. Painter and art instructor David Leffel regularly asks his students a simple but profound question: "How do abstract artists know when they're getting better?" The answer lies in whether the artist is able to express will. Artists without the ability to express will will never know.


PS: "Abstract art requires something of the viewer. It demands contemplation. Study. Flights of fancy. Feeling." (Svante Rydberg)


What I feel a need to add is that abstraction and I was reading this letter: Looking at abstract work can be like overhearing someone on a cell-phone talking about a recent visit to their shrink. Too much information?
Yes, that is one of my abstract paintings. Should I turn up the volume?

Sunday, April 5, 2009

One Tough Dog

On Saturday, we took my old friend, Delilah, in to the Doctor here in town. After a brief consultation, it was agreed that the best thing would be to put her down. She had not been eating or taking water for 2 days previous and, although she presented little in the way of visible signs of suffering, I had no desire to see her starve to death. She was still doing her best at walking, usually aided by me bracing her by her harness and tail. Getting up and laying back down was no picnic for her-if I wasn't there to ease her down, she would land on her butt with a painful thud.
But the past two days saw a change- she was so much more out of it and taking only the occasional treat-and then only half-heartedly.
She was amazed at the attention being afforded her, with me, my wife and the Doctor all crowded round her. She went very quietly and quickly. She was the best dog in the world.

God be between you and harm in all the empty places where you walk.
(Egyptian prayer)

Thursday, April 2, 2009

How is yer handwriting?

After so many years of being a scrawler, I'm thinking that I might want to go back to school to learn better penmanship.
What has inspired this is my drive to become a literacy tutor-I'm determined to bring English (or at least, better English) to one or more people on this planet. You simply can't scrawl and put it off as calligraphy to someone who is oh so innocently trying to understand this (complicated) language...it is just not fair.
Todays world is all about rush: when I think about writing more clearly, the first thing that pops into mind is that I
n e e d t o s l o w d o w n.
(this past line was supposed to look somewhat retarded and slow, but this program keeps "correcting" me...)

Sure.
This unit did not come with a variable speed feature-I mean, isn't it all or nothing?
Well, maybe not: this very well could be the clue to (re) learning how to write clearly. Slowing down and experiencing the thought that goes into each letter and its sound-teaching yourself how to give style and grace to the movement in your (writing) hand as each leeter is formed. Is this the key?
Sure.
This is really easy to reason out, but the clock keeps on ticking and, after all, who wants to put so much extra time into forming letters?
To teach writing you have to consider your student first. This hypothetical being is seeing the English language the same way many of us see Greek or Sanscrit or-even better-a reverse mirror image of this here text. Could you read this if it were reversed? I tried this on a bit of text and gave up almost IMMEDIATELY...what a great student I would be!
Anyhow, the point being that I need to put on the student "hat" and reverse my role only shortly to realize just why I need to slow down and start making handwriting that looks like that of my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Williams. She took the time to slow down for me.