Mouthing Off, Shaking It Out

I guess I owe my (three or four) readers an apology. It's been a goal for my interim year to increase my aptitude for cultural analysis, both by pushing the limits of what I can force you to read get away with writing and by expanding this farce very serious writerly enterprise into unknown cultural waters. (A twofer for passive-aggressive strikethroughs!) I imagine this tiny slice of the blogosphere has become sort of tedious to wade through as of late, and for that I apologize. Look forward to much more banal (and therefore infinitely more interesting) posts as the holidays approach. Having now apologized, I will obviously continue in the exact same vein as before, which I suspect is exactly the sort of underhanded bullshit you've come to expect from me as a blogger. Sorry? I'm hoping you'll be mildly less furious if I begin the post with a really hilarious/accurate list. Did it work? Did it?

I discovered last spring that I am totally missing the language to write effectively about visual rhetoric. As part of the project to expand my critical arsenal, I've been doing a little reading around in the visual arts, most recently Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Join me, won't you, as I mouth off about something I know nothing about. Admittedly, Francis Bacon is an artist that I've only come to recently, but I find myself sort of entranced. It strikes me as a little useless to talk about liking/disliking his painting, since Bacon concerns himself most often with bodies, embodiment, and horror (in his introduction, Deleuze calls Bacon's painting "of a very special violence"). I will say instead that I am equal parts fascinated and repulsed by a lot of Bacon's work and that I find this tension extremely intellectually useful.

As compelled as I am by most of Deleuze's arguments surrounding Bacon, I get a little hung up on the way he discusses bodies in Bacon's painting. Primarily citing Figure at a Washbasin (1976, pictured above) and Lying Figure with a Hypodermic Syringe (1963), Deleuze reads Bacon's bodies as trying to evacuate themselves of materiality (Deleuze uses the word "meat"). He reads these bodies as inhabiting a specific vanishing point (the washbasin, for example), through which they are trying to empty themselves, "to dismantle the face." This argument leaves me wondering, though, how we can be totally positive that evacuation is what we are witnessing. Painting, as an atemporal medium (a complicated and vaguely problematic statement), leaves us wondering about the direction of this evacuation. Said another way: Since we experience a painting as a static image, if a painting shows us half a body, who's to say whether the body is falling apart or coming together.  Rather than evacuation, I wonder what it would mean to establish consumption as the vantage point from which to read Bacon's bodies (understanding, of course, that a consumptive/consuming body is every bit as grotesque as a body emptying itself). Along this axis, Lying Figure with a Hypodermic Syringe is less about a body/figure pulling itself apart than one assembling itself.

I don't necessarily want to contradict Deleuze's reading, so much as diverge from it. What would it mean to read Bacon's figures as taking in material, as making too much of themselves? To a certain extent, these consumptive bodies become resistant figures. They resist Bacon's figural aspirations and attempts to narrativize. Such hungry and ever-expanding flesh would slightly relocate the distinction between flesh and figure. Where in his first chapter, Deleuze reads Bacon's "round areas" as attempts to contain the body and "isolate the figure," these bodies would be incapable of isolation insofar as their hunger always keeps them in contact with the rest of the painting's environment.

I'll close with some quick thoughts: What do we make of painted bodies that resist the efforts of the painter/viewer? What happens when we think about consumption as a mode of resistance? How do consumptive bodies recalibrate Bacon's meditation on the powers of horror? How might self-assembling bodies mediate the thread of general attachment between painter/viewer and painting? More fundamentally, what would it mean to think about Bacon (or any painter) as a thinker, rather than an artist? (I'm really growing to hate the word artist) Why are you still reading this post when it has clearly lost its train of thought (if it ever had one)?