“When I was sitting for him in 1953, part of the time he as looking at me, part of the time at a photograph of a rhino in long grass: he said that he found this photograph suggested ways of rendering certain textures in paint. It has been supposed by one or two writers that the model was idiotically sitting there wasting his time while the artist was depicting the head of a rhino. In fact, he was producing a head of the model, one which is fairly recognisable. However, the following day, working without a model, he dressed up the likeness as one of his Popes after Velázquez. During the next two weeks he painted seven further Popes. Some of their faces resemble that of the Velázquez Pope; none of them resembled mine. The picture I had sat for, and which triggered off a series, was thus a compound of several elements – a sitter, a wild-life photograph, an Old Master painting, plus a colour, violet, for the Pope’s robes which is quite different from their colour in the Old Master painting. This is how a painter like Bacon works, not by reason but by instinct. And in life as well as art Francis put his faith in instinct: the word had an almost magical force for him.”

“When is a leftover not a leftover?—I obviously internally defined a leftover as something which is beyond and outside the category of the category—there’s always a bit leftover—this gap which can never be covered between, on the one hand, subjective identification, and on the other, more objective categories—no one can ever bring out a category which you’re automatically inside because the making of categories always already excludes you—the thought of the remnant and the leftover is an example of what Hegel would call the ruination of everything—now for the object itself—it comes not as speech or writing but as a kind of engraved quotation ”it often seems for non-historical reasons to come from the past; what I mean by that is that is comes from the past but not as a historical process—it comes more like a sort of—the activity of a collector—but for example: notices which even now exalt us: do not fit—cannot but help—it’s not speculation about history—it’s this thing—the object of everyday life—can do—its anonymous—it comes in the form of quotation in some sense—it is not going to say life is x x x—it’s what belongs, however, to this kind of region.”

“What is Bacon doing in these portraits? One answer is that he is searching for the essence of the person, that elusive and constantly changing element that is an individual’s identity. But it is more complicated than that. The way paint is dragged in striations across the faces in certain portraits could also be a way of suggesting physical movement, or it might evoke the idea of a doubly-exposed photograph. And for every brushstroke that builds up form, another seems to shatter it, as though the portrait were the arena in which Bacon can work out his conflicting feelings of affection and hatred for the person he is painting. These heads are painted directly on the canvas without preliminary drawing, so that the image and the technique are inseparable. In Bacon’s own words, ‘the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in’. In his portrait Miss Muriel Belcher he applies paint with a loaded brush to create a surface as richly impastoed as in a Rubens sketch, dipping his brush in more than one colour, then dragging it in short, striated strokes of green mixed with pink. He then stains the background with two tones of thinned green paint to suggest the space in which Belcher exists.”

“Birth is a desperate business, and re-birth even more so. The paint-structure in Bacon’s new paintings is by turns rude and sumptuous, lyrical and abrupt, pulpy and marmoreal. Swerving, pouncing, heaped and spread flat, it produces a multiple imagery which is quite new in Western painting. It is not the multiple faceting of the Cubists, which Bacon regards as merely a decorative annexe to Cézanne, and it is not the schematised imitation of movement with which the Futurists were concerned. It is about the risks which we take, and take gladly, every time we approach another human being; in the bizarre conjunctions of impulse for which Bacon has devised a visual equivalent, those risks now have their monument. Bacon’s paintings are often thought of as pessimistic, and Bacon in life is characterised by a lucid stoicism which admits the likelihood that all adventures will end badly. But his is not, for all that, a disparaging art. What he has to say is that even in the ludicrous postures to which social custom condemns us, or which we ourselves seek out at moments of alienation, something can still remain of the master-qualities which Nietzsche tried to rescue for those who came after him. Tenacity, endurance, concentration, and the will to break through to a new kind of eloquence: all figure abundantly in the new pictures. Above all, in Bacon’s own example, man emerges as a choosing animal: and one who can choose, among other things, not to repeat himself.”

“Bacon’s contrived accidents—squeezing paint into his hand and throwing it at the canvas, the use of sponges, the rubbing in of studio dust and so on—allow him to pursue an alternative practice of painting to that of representation. To understand the force of Bacon’s images we have to understand the way in which they undercut the regime of representation. Now this regime is described by the fact that it ties together my wish to see and what is presented to me, a unity of the scopic field and the spectator. But when the gaze as an object becomes detached from this scene, a dislocation occurs. A gap opens up—the circuit is broken. The illusion of wholeness has been, as it were, castrated. In fact we can treat Bacon’s images as just that—castration erupting within our wish to see, within the scopic field. One no longer has vision, but the eye lives on. The function of vision has been subtracted from the eye. The violence of sensation has squeezed out a literal essence of being, the lamella, a puddle of being. To claim that the lamella appears in Bacon’s work is to claim that he has taken the detachment of the gaze to its limit. The paintings are as far as possible withdrawn from the painting of everyday life, while yet capturing the ‘appearance’ of a human being. The violence of the painting is the correlate of the violence of appearing. What is at stake is not violence but paint. Nothing could be more bland and obtuse than to use Bacon’s work as a narrative about the lamentable violences of the age. The violence which Bacon creates concerns a certain experience of the body and something to do with the horror of a too-close presence. This violence can indeed be usefully treated through the question of the detachment of the gaze. It will be that which enables us to distinguish in Bacon’s paintings between a violence of painting and the painting of violence.”

Parveen Adams, The Violence of Paint; The Body, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, Academy Editions, Ernst & Sohn: 1993

“Francis Bacon bestrides this honourable tradition. Pictures, no paintings. Best of all, English narrative pictures. One must be careful here: he is of course “painterly” picture maker. His legions of admirers say so. Many of his admirers are painters themselves’, some very good painters; though Bacon himself, we keep hearing, was the greatest living artist, the best British artist since Turner. But Bacon’s paint is in the service of pictorial effect. The surface itself should not be scrutinised too carefully. Too often in doesn’t describe what it purports to be describing. Bacon can’t paint a foot or an ear or a hand. Some of the curves he used to describe physical forms are so slack they would have got him fired from a Disney workshop. So Bacon smudged and threw paint and turned forms back in on themselves and disrupted their logic, instinctively hiding his own deficiencies. These smears of paint describing swollen and distended shapes, especially in the portrait, seize attention and distract the eye from what lies between. Which is nothing. Nothing will come of nothing. And Bacon’s nothing isn’t even a black hole, it is a break down in communication. The painting stops dead between the smears of pigment. There is nothing there because it hasn’t been described or constructed or placed. The process, an eruption, sounds unpleasant, and it was; because the secret of Bacon’s successful work was the paint, like a gigantic eructation of pus. The Grand Guignol apparatus of screaming heads, the sides of raw meat, the smeared visages underpinned this visceral sense of horror. Bacon was the last and most extreme of the line of painters who followed van Gogh. But Bacon was self-taught, and unlike Van Gogh, never overcame his technical deficiencies. He borrowed motifs, fair enough, but imposed sketchily realised pictorial devices, like the frame crudely articulated to impose some sense of control over the central images sprawling like something from under a stone.”

Michael McNay, Just a pile of paint and a nightmare of chic thrills, The Guardian Weekend, 2-3 May, 1992

“In Aesthetic Theory Adorno claims that works of modernist art can, in virtue of their characteristic autonomy, successfully capture and impart the shudder. Here the shudder is not just a response to primal amorphousness and undifferentiation; it is the appropriate response to the abstract nature of modern life. The shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of indeterminacy. So far we have seen that the shudder is not just a mimetic reaction to primary, undifferentiated otherness. It is also, and more importantly for our purposes, a spontaneous and somatic response of revulsion at pure identity. But even in this extended sense the shudder is not merely a negative response. The shudder fulfils a positive epistemic function. It is the gateway to the path of truth. It allows what is to disclose itself as radically evil. As such, the shudder is the form which metaphysical experience assumes under social conditions of total identity. Shudder, then, is a response arising from the metaphysical experience of a world without wonder. Shudder is the equivalent in the modern, disenchanted, capitalist world of the classical metaphysical experience of wonder: it is the gateway to the path of truth; but the truth to which it leads is that the world is radically evil. As the correlate of truth the shudder is has a positive epistemic significance for Adorno. Fortunately Adorno thinks that the capacity for shudder has not yet been completely extinguished from human life. One reason why Adorno values modern art so highly is that it manages to preserve the shudder even under social conditions that militate against experiences of the truth. Modern art survives its assimilation to the functional totality — its relegation to mere entertainment — by becoming difficult, introverted, dissonant, shocking. Modern artworks — in a deliciously dialectical irony — fulfil this promise precisely by delaying and withholding the promised satisfaction.”

 James Gordon Finlayson, Metaphysical Experience: Shudder as Inverted Wonder; Adorno: Modern Art, Metaphysics and Radical Evil; Modernism/Modernity, Volume 10, Number 1, 2003

“There is no reason why we ourselves should not some day be absorbed into this looking-glass, and that is the mirror Francis Bacon’s art holds up to us. Its ambiguity—and perhaps its violence, too—is born of the frisson we experience as we confront this brave new world, which fascinated Bacon himself as its prophet. One of the things we will lose in it, as he was well aware, is paint itself. A painter friend of mine, recently returned from Venice, remarked to me about how few paintings the Biennale contained, as opposed to videos and installations. What, look at a cloth canvas daubed with vegetable dyes and hung, immovably, on a wall? Titian is as far from us now as a cave dweller. Bacon, though, insisted upon paint, as he did upon the material core of humanity, distant and difficult though it had become to our perception (the difficulty was precisely his subject). Two paintings from the Met show may illustrate this for us. In one, his lover, George Dyer, is shown, nude and from the back, sitting on a toilet. He is surrounded by white space except for the piping that conducts Dyer’s waste away from him and toward us: a man, in effect, shitting in our faces. In another, Blood on a Pavement, a smear of blood is all that is left of the absent figure, and the background itself is rendered as three Rothko-like panels (another appropriation from the Expressionists, despite Bacon’s expressed disdain for Rothko). The Dyer portrait is, among other things, the ultimate send-up of the papal thrones; here, Bacon suggests, is where we all sit. We don’t see Dyer’s waste, but the image makes us inescapably conscious of it: shit is the one natural reality we can’t escape, however politely removed by modern plumbing, and however antiseptically white our bathroom walls and fixtures. Similarly, blood is also our trace: the one testimony to our existence when the murdered corpse has been removed from the scene of the crime. We live, and therefore shit; we die, and therefore bleed: however virtual our reality may become in between, these signatures reveal us.”

 Robert Zaller, Francis Bacon’s Virtual Reality; Francis Bacon at the Met, Broad Street Review, August 15, 2009

“This is an act without a subject: Bacon’s throwing down of ‘non-rational marks’, those which convey the ‘mystery of fact’, not the mysteries. An expropriation. ‘And you can’t will this non-rationality of a mark.’ The moment of art production as an intentional event, as exteriorisation of representation (Hegel: Vorstellung einer Vorstellung), voluntarism (even technicist voluntarism), mimetic theories, hylomorphism, theological linear theories of art production (and their rational humanist derivations), the art work as intentional, interpretative object ... etc. These fantastic constructions fall with the contingency of the artistic process. The artist is circuited, immanent to the production process — the agent-subject ‘becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges’. But it is in the moment or act of Bacon’s non-rational marks, the moment of the circuiting, that Bataille’s will to chance is given its full pictorial equivalent, the art-work produced in the throw of a dice. The artist is ‘sick’, spilling its transcendence, emptying its site. An opening then, but not discursive, not a mouth, rather a mouth-like aperture, an osculum... For the real critical force is produced by the condition of Bacon’s painting: the act that is sovereign in Bataille’s sense, redundant. It is an act in immanent excess of itself, the figural (substantive) become verbal (impersonal)... Indifference is intoxication: Bataillean sacrifices, a gift. This is the material of Bacon’s pharmacy, giving access onto the sensible — donation itself. Sensation and not Hammer-horror, the sensational; paint spreading the organism on a nervous system, freeing a body becoming sensation. No, the first name given to auto-immune disease is more apt to this painting: horror autotoxicus. Understanding Bacon’s fugitive body incarcerates it, dissimulates it; perhaps Bataille’s experience (non-knowledge) or Michaux’s connaissance par les gouffres is the nearest one can come. At any rate, to adapt Artaud’s hommage to Van Gogh, to understand the body, it is necessary to give your own body to Bacon’s painting.”

Nick Millet, The Fugitive Body: Bacon’s Fistula, The Body, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, Academy Editions, Ernst & Sohn: 1993

“Since the death of Picasso, Francis Bacon has more than any other painter provided the age with an image, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, of its accelerated grimace. The key to his work is its ambition. He has taken on the great masters of the past without their mythological resources or their requirement to record events. At the same time he has turned his back on the abstract artist’s indulgence in decorative introspection: the painting whose principal subject is itself and the fact that someone painted it. Although his subject matter, the visual impulse which triggers his attempts to fashion an image on canvas, derives from his own sensibility and is to that extent egoistic, Bacon is the least narcissistic of artists. He uses some recollection or preoccupation which is at hand, so to speak, as a prompt for an act of painting. But it is the paint alone, and what happens as a result of its being pushed around on the canvas, which can provide an image of great externality and force, influencing the viewer with a life of its own and doing this independently of the artist. Bacon is in some respects closer to being a sculptor than a painter. The background to his paintings, which are applied at the end, act as a kind of plinth for the images poised upon them. It is sad that Bacon’s eminence occasions, as is often the case with major artists, so much photographic reproduction of his work. The physical grandeur, the sensual texture of his paint outweighs the often horrifying imagery it encapsulates. In reproduction it is the imagery that tells. Like Eliot’s early poetry, Bacon’s paintings are documentaries of nervous stress. Given the era in which we find ourselves living, this comes as no surprise. What is surprising is the attempt to endow our diminished psychological circumstances with painting which can achieve the formal grandeur and beauty of texture of the very greatest old masters. These characteristics remain, in his best paintings, long after the initial assault on the system has worn off. When things work, therefore, the quality achieved is joy, which is, as Bacon said it should be, the purpose of art.”

Grey Gowrie, Francis Bacon, Modern Painters, Volume 1 Number 4 Winter 1989/9

“The revelation of this carefully selected, historically self-conscious retrospective of the work of Francis Bacon is the progression over the course of the artist’s career from a loaded, murky painterliness, to a spare, even linear, handling. This evolution toward an evanescent thinness, even when colour is boldly uniform, goes hand and hand with his schematization of format and figures. Here Bacon’s signature tortured subjects progressively reveal themselves as tropes, even clichés, of stylized suffering. Is the late economy of means successful? Certainly it is another way of sustaining the expressionist attitude at a time when its language of direct expression seems to betray it. There is the sense that the dryness of the late works may not be the result of a diminution of anguish—did Bacon become habituated to his own psyche, and thus less overtly mad, more sane?—but simply the exhaustion of artistic means with which to articulate it. Indeed, the late works look redundant, as though Bacon is pedantically driving home the predictably painful lesson life inflicts on those who expect comfort from it. The late works seem less visionary, as though Bacon, having grown accustom to his insanity, now saw it with mundane eyes. The least that can be said is that Bacon seems tired—of himself? Of the habit of making pictures? In contrast to the compulsive early works, in the last paintings he may be taking himself, and art, for granted. There is no sense, however, of a grand summing up in Bacon’s last works, no sense of wisdom—visual or existential—distilled from all the year of labour. At the same time they hardly constitute the whimper that T. S. Eliot thought came with the end. Rather, Bacon has become a mannerist of himself. His late works index his earlier works, but they look like a table of contents to paintings that were never made. That’s the way an artist signals he’s at the end of his tether, has nothing more to say: his works begin to look like an index to themselves, an index easily confused with a table of contents. Why, one wonders, is there no living work to read, and only the denuded text?”

Donald Kuspit, Francis Bacon - Museum of Modern Art; Artforum, Vol. 29, No.3, November, 1990

“The practice of painting could hardly fail to preoccupy any painter, but these works centre upon painting itself in particular and distinctive ways, partly because Bacon used them experimentally, in an attempted change of artistic direction. Bacon’s later paintings often evoke a very common corporeal experience of dissonance, the jarring sensation of arrested motion, when the body’s weight suddenly throws itself against a movement it had been helping to impel. He would frequently paint figures caught in a twisting motion, with out-curving brushstrokes suggesting the motion of flesh, thrown outward against the restraint of hips or spine. In the van Gogh series, however, the body shapes are among the most rigid in Bacon’s work, despite the fluid strokes that define them, and nothing here is thrown out from the containing mass, still less escaping entirely, like excrement or an ejaculation. Through his variations, Bacon experiments with a dialectic essential both to selfhood and to painting in the tradition that concerned him: painting is something done and something seen, selfhood is active and also passive. If I say ‘I am my body’, this entails both that I am ‘in’ my actions and also that I am in a merely passive sense one (physical) body among others. In painting these figures and the flowing paint of the road, wet-in-wet, Bacon realised anew the potential of oil paint to hold in contradictory combination the properties of solidity and liquidity, the inertial and the mobile. The paintings play variations on this dualism. In a different way in each version, the figure stalled against slipping fields of colour acts as a pivot for a reciprocal movement, like that of a tracking camera, tended to the viewer. In versions II and III, the painter’s own passive stillness as a witness before his work casts a shadow across his vehement agency within it. Placing an apparition in the path of painterly action, Bacon slippingly paints the slipping place of selfhood, in its strange otherness. Separating act from appearance, he frames, at the crossing of perspectives, a figure whose maleness is asserted negatively, in a venture of chance.”

Brendan Prendeville, Varying the Self: Bacon’s Versions of van Gogh, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 27, Number 1, Oxford University Press: 2004

“His own ‘teasing question’ about image-making and painterliness touches on the issue: Bacon’s prowess as a poetic inventor – starting with the matchlessly ferocious mutants of his 1944 debut – has long prompted people to will old-masterly greatness on his paintwork. The mastery of fresh skills that recharges Bacon’s art from the early 1960s – his use of contorted human forms as containers for squirming flesh paint, themselves held down within designer-tidy interiors – could possibly have been inspired by the way the young Kitaj composed on the canvas with ripped, projected images; at any rate, his working ethos seems to come into clearer focus from this time onwards. An alternative, more ancestral perspective on the nature of Bacon’s skills might be to call him a northern painter. A painter, that is, of a humanity born clothed; in this case, of a race that presents itself in suits and ties. It’s not exactly that Bacon, as in his own disclaimer, couldn’t draw. No one has had a more forceful structural knowledge of heads, and of the tooth-ringed hollow that runs through them; hence the power of his screams and his metamorphosed portraits. It’s simply that few figurative artists have got through a career with such a radically unstructured notion of what lies beneath the collar. Occasionally, he takes a butcher’s cleaver to his quasi-acephalic nudes and discovers a backbone. But for the most part, his instinct tells him that when you unbutton the tweed and serge encasing the mid-century British male, there lies revealed a rippling, amorphous flood of blubber. Unaided by anatomy, Bacon thrashes about through much of his career to find formulas to convey this judder of flesh. Short, circling swoops of the brush, topped with little blurts from the paint-tube, prove the most productive device: he gets very exquisite when he finesses them with dusted and printed pigments in the later work. He whips paint into fleshliness with this incessant urgency because the operation promises to deliver a kind of transubstantiating miracle. It offers him direct access to ‘life’ – to the essence of things, as that gets defined by a God-disdaining vitalist.”

Julian Bell, Get Out; London Review of Books, Vol. 22, No. 20, 19 October 2000

“While all these devices produce an effect akin to that of a photograph, it is not from photography that Bacon has learned them. It is the late paintings of Rembrandt that have shown him how to use an extremely restricted range of colour, how to dissolve forms into space, and how to destroy the picture-plane. For Bacon’s problem is, finally, very much a painter’s problem. It is to make paint on canvas function in a way analogous to that in which ink functions on news print. From his attempt to do this derives one of the most remarkable and mysterious qualities of his work. Very often, when we look suddenly at a picture in the papers, our first impression is simply one of nebulous, blotchy greys whose meaning is altogether vague. Likewise, looking at some of Bacon’s paintings, we are conscious at first only of the paint, seeing it as some amorphous, ectoplasmic substance floating aimlessly on the canvas. It takes a little time before this stuff that is paint crystallises into an image. But as soon as it does crystallise, the once vague and shifting shapes become volumes modelled with a wonderful sensitivity and situated with extreme precision in space. The certainty with which Bacon creates volumes, volumes that are tangible, is largely due to his uncanny sense of the exact degree of tension along each form. One of his pictures shows the lower half of a human face with the mouth open in a scream which is provoked by the fact that one ear is attached to a cord drawn out taut from the ceiling of the room. What makes this image so overwhelmingly moving–at the level of tragedy, not Grand Guignol–is how vividly we are made to realise the tightness of the cord. The intense grasp of the physical reality of the situation makes us feel it is ourselves who are being tortured. This immediate sense of pain is engendered again by the way in which Bacon, in a painting of the Crucifixion, causes us to sense the tension of the stretched-out armpits and biceps. Likewise, in painting flesh, Bacon conveys the exact variations of its softness and resilience at different places. And when he clothes his figures, the paint explains precisely where and how the fabric clings to the body.”

David Sylvester, The Paintings of Francis Bacon, The Listener, Volume 47, Number 1192, January 3, 1952

“The hand ventures forth and catches hold of its goal with an inevitable share of chance or of mischance, since it can miss its try. The hand is by essence groping and emprise. Groping is not a technically imperfect action, but the condition for all technique. The end is not caught sight of as an end in a disincarnate aspiration, whose destiny it would fix as the cause fixes the destiny of the effect. If the determination of an end cannot be converted into a determination of a cause, this is because the conception of an end is inseparable from its realization; an end does not attract, is not in some measure inevitable, but is caught hold of, and thus presupposes the body qua hand. Only a being endowed with organs can conceive a technical finality, a relation between the end and the tool. The end is a term the hand searches for in the risk of missing it. The body as possibility of a hand — and its whole corporeity can be substituted for the hand — exists in the vertuality of this movement betaking itself toward the tool. Groping, the work of the hand par excellence, and the work adequate to the apeiron of the element, makes possible the whole originality of the final cause. It is said that if the attraction that an end exercises is not entirely reducible to a continuous series of shocks, a continuous propulsion, this is because the idea of the end governs the release of these shocks. But this idea of an end would be an epiphenomenon were it not manifested in the way the first shock is given: a thrust in the void, at random. In reality the “representation” of the end and the movement of the hand that plunges toward it through an unexplored distance, preceded by no searchlight, constitute but one and the same event, and define a being that while being in the midst of a world in which it is implanted, yet comes to this world from the hither side of the world, from a dimension of interiority — a being that inhabits the world, that is, at home with itself in it. Groping reveals the position of the body which at the same time is integrated into being and remains in its interstices, always invited to traverse a distance at random, and maintains itself in this position all by itself. Such is the position of a separated being.”

Emmanuel Levinas, The Dwelling; Totality & Infinity, 1961

“Texture forms part of a wider effort by Bacon to substantiate pain as paint. The carnal surfaces of his paintings are frequently impressed by fabrics which play an important role in the production of Bacon’s ridged and speckled, stippled effects. The results, achieved through using cashmere and cotton, can can be read as reminiscent of the skin’s fleeting memory of having a textile pressed hard against it. It is the handling which is the key. Bacon identified with the paint. The paintings not only evoke the sounds of sexual pleasure but also feel and smell of it. The aim of his paintings, to arouse senses beyond sight, is paralleled in comparable muscle erotica which frequently celebrates the other senses through images. The emphasis on Bacon’s works on desires that privilege senses other than sight invites a queer reading of his practice. Smell is a sense Bacon particularly exploits in his work. The stench of blood often adheres to his to paintings. This is fitting given the quotation from Aeschylus which Bacon so admired: ‘the reek of human blood smiles out at me.’ Blood is literally aromatic. It has a ferrous, metallic scent, one which can be detected in a works such as Blood on Pavement (1988, Private Collection.) The stink of gore is also placed in the foreground in Bacon’s images of meat such as Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey and Figure with Meat. The haunches of flesh in these works opens out to our nostrils calling upon us to queasily inhale them, their scent of animal. They reek of brute bodies, reminding us of the odours that lie above and beneath our own skin. Deleuze writes that in Bacon: ‘each time meat is represented, we touch it, smell it, eat it, weigh it.’ This painting seeks to return to us an appreciation of those senses we usually suppress, senses whose complexity has become curtailed, that are too often overlooked in the everyday. It encourages us to sniff the air like a hunter from a bygone age on the scent of quarry. Bacon’s art is delicious in that it strives to return something of the texture of existence to us, both in pleasant and unpleasant forms, through an encouragement to engage all our senses in the reception of his paintings. The entire body responds to Bacon not just the eye and mind.”

Nicholas Chare, After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint, Routledge: 2012

“Only when a man has seen does he truly see. To see is to have seen. What is seen has arrived and remains for him in sight. A seer has always already seen. Having seen in advance, he sees into the future. What is it that the seer has seen in advance? Obviously, only what becomes present in the lighting that penetrates his sight. What is seen in such a seeing can only be what comes to presence in unconcealment. But what becomes present? The seer stands in sight of what is present, in its unconcealment, which has at the same time cast light on the concealment of what is absent as being absent. The seer sees inasmuch as he has seen everything as present. The seer is the madman. But in what does the essence of madness consist? A madman is beside himself, outside himself: he is away. We ask: away? Where to and where from? Away from the sheer oppression of what lies before us, which is only presently present, and away to what is absent; and at the same time away to what is presently present insofar as this is always only something that arrives in the course of its coming and going. The seer is outside himself in the solitary region of the presencing of everything that in some way becomes present. Therefore he can find his way back from the “away” of this region, and arrive at what has just presented itself, namely, the raging epidemic. All things present and absent are gathered and preserved in one presenting for the seer. The seer speaks from the preserve of what is present. He is the sooth-sayer. The seer is the one who has already seen the whole of what is present in its presencing. In “to have seen” there is always something more in play than the completion of an optical process. In it the connection with what is present subsists behind every kind of sensuous or non-sensuous grasping. On that account, “to have seen” is related to self-illuminating presenting. Seeing is determined, not by the eye, but by the lighting of Being. Presence within the lighting articulates all the human senses. The essence of seeing, as “to have seen,” is to know. Knowledge embraces vision and remains indebted to presenting. Knowledge is remembrance of Being. Knowledge is not science in the modern sense. Knowledge is thoughtful maintenance of Being’s preserve.”

Martin Heidegger, The Anaximander Fragment; Early Greek Thinking, 1975

“The classical artist is preoccupied with realism. Bacon is absolutely for realism, only he would argue that now photography has made reportage redundant you need psychological realism as well, the shadow as well as its fact. He is adamant that he is not an Expressionist painter. He believes in truthfulness rather than effects. The affecting, even upsetting, quality of his work comes partly from what Michel Leiris has called his “exhilarated despair ... the painful but lyrical disturbance felt by all those who, living in these times of horror spangled with enchantment, can contemplate them with lucidity”. It also comes, more prosaically, from what he would see as his failure to win the fight between the raw material of oil paint and the mind’s eye. When Bacon does win his paintings are both awesome and tender, moving in the highest and most humane way. Yet even the violent distortions of his figures are implicit in their own flesh as well as in oil paint and the painter’s need to trap the visual aspects of personality by memorising it. He does not paint from life. He was teaching himself oil paint’s correspondence with the destiny of the observed world; the Courbet road to nature. His brush-strokes are rapid (he does no preliminary drawing) and blur into one another. So originates the suggestion of flesh poised, like that of M Valdemar in Poe’s horrifying tale, on the edge of instant putrefaction. Facial features are blurred in Bacon’s way as if they and the pigment from which they are formed had been pummelled into the final image. (This is often literally the case, since he paints with rags and his hands as well as with brush.) But across the whole width of the face is a superimposed white drip or tache of paint extraneous to the image yet formally devastating in the way it cancels an already pretty terminal environment. Stripped of its associations, the picture has the vibrance—even the prettiness—of colour which early in his career Bacon found in a medical text book about diseases of the mouth. Bacon’s surgeon’s aesthetics and sang-froid take some getting used to. They are worth it because they are bound up with his special lucidity of purpose. Look how close oil paint comes to the stuff of life, he seems to be arguing. You are used to it with clouds and hills in landscape painting. Why not get used to it with the body? And if the painter is lucky, impulses of memory and desire may allow him to manipulate the stuff so as to trap elusive and temporal personalities, and our feelings about them.”

Lord Grey Gowrie, Francis Bacon: Artist of Endgame; The Sunday Times, May 19, 1985

“Bacon works in the tradition of a Renaissance master, and is only a painter — no etchings, lithographs, finished drawings, or designs for the theatre. His subjects are not pretty things for the drawing-room, and the scale of his work suggests that he makes no concessions to the private patron... In more complex structures Bacon may introduce two profiles in a single head, facing in opposite directions, without destroying the integrity of the whole — it is a kind of re-thinking that Renaissance painters allowed themselves in their drawings, when looking for a more effective alternative to a first idea, but with Bacon it is not an alternative but an added dimension. All this might suggest that Bacon is a draughtsman. In the mid-40s there was indeed a drawn quality to his painting, common to Graham Sutherland and a host of English painters of that generation descended from the romantic tradition of Samuel Palmer, but within a decade his handling of the loaded brush had become so assured, and so powerful, that he was no longer dependent on the careful delineation of an element to give it effect. Now it is all pure paint, and the length, breadth, loading and pressure of a single brushstroke contains all the information about the structure, character and movement of the thing painted, as well as its more obvious colour and texture. Bacon has claimed that this painterly skill is often accident — I believe it is as accidental as Alfred Brendel playing a perfect scale. All this is the more remarkable because Bacon is self-taught; he has no academic background, and his only technical training came from his friendship with Australian painter Roy de Maistre, but he has an intuitive and analytical eye that enabled him to learn direct from paintings. Inspired first by Picasso of the late 20s, his work refers openly to Van Gogh, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Grunewald and Giacometti; these were not merely the sources of his powerful imagery, but of his techniques. From them he derived the strength to create some of the most ferocious images of this century, keeping open, as he said, ‘the line to ancestral European painting while producing something that comes across as entirely new’ — when he paints the themes of crucifixion, it is as a commentator on the beastliness of man and not as a believer in Christianity, yet his paintings have all the conviction of passionate Christian belief... But look at the paintings: any man who has handled a brush, or has an empathic response to the action of painting, must find in Bacon’s pictures an astonishing mastery. Among post-Renaissance artists he is a great painter; in the wilderness of post-war art he is the towering giant.”

Brian Sewell, The Loaded Brush, The Listener, 10-16 November, 1984

“Bacon would often squeeze paint onto the door or walls of his studio and then press fabric into the pigment which he would then print the canvas with. Bacon’s varied handling has been recognized for some time yet it is not interpreted in relation to articulations of sexual difference. The fine patterning of colour produced by applying paint by the way of fabric, however, contrasts markedly with the thick strokes of paint that parallel it. The delicate traces of colour left by pigment-soaked textiles connote intimacy whereas the swift smears of thick paint come across as more aloof. The masculinity of the Abstract Expressionist, their painterly aggression, manifested itself by way of a brief yet brutal interaction with the canvas. In the paintings by Bacon that make use of textiles to enhance their tactile effects there seem to be two different registers of handling at work. The touches that involve the use of fabric can be gendered as feminine. The impasto, however, denotes masculinity.

It is noteworthy that Abstract Expressionism is in Bacon’s mind when he discusses paint’s contingent potential. This is because his exploitation of chance leads to aspects of his paintings resembling those of the first generation of the New York School. The chance blobs and spatters of paint appear similar to Pollock’s drips. The thick globs of pigment Bacon threw onto his paintings can be read as an exaggeration of the aggressive techniques of the Abstract Expressionists. The chance throws of paint frequently look like they are the product of ejaculation. This is doubly the case in a work like Triptych (1976, Private Collection). In the left panel of the triptych there are two thick blobs of white paint. The sheer quantity of pigment they are formed of has caused oil to bleed outwards into the light green ground forming dark circles. The effect resembles come as it seeps into a bed-sheet. The contingent chucks of paint that Bacon adds to his painting represent a hyperbolic performance of Abstract Expressionist technique. They form a parodic enactment of its masculinist values paraded as dirty laundry. Bacon’s aligning of Pollock with a lace-maker, a fabricator of textiles, demonstrates that he perceived the mismatch between Pollock’s macho posturing and the delicate outpourings of his drip-paintings. These dainty actions spoke to the London artist louder than the words of the critics. It fits well with Bacon’s other proclivities, the enjoyment he took in being beaten and whipped. Action painting permitted Bacon to actualize his desires through the artistic media he employed. They were wrestling matches. What remains, the dry paint, constitutes a record, a representation of the event.”

Nicholas Chare, After Francis Bacon — Synaesthetics and Sex in Paint, Routledge: 2012

“In the recent Thyssen exhibition there was a 1968 portrait of Bacon’s friend George Dyer — not a pretty thing, with the crumpled sitter resembling a jumble of bones in an over-large demob suit, and most of his face removed to a mirror reflection on the left, leaving only his positively Caroline ear and back of his head like a bristled lavatory brush to occupy the critical point of the composition.

Slung across the plain, pale upper half of the canvas is an echoing line of white paint, applied with such deftness — plump at the edges, thinning like a strand of chewing gum — that it has the character of a single brave stroke of the brush (it cannot be, for it is five feet long, and no brush can be so loaded); it is there to break the plainness and to reinforce the abstraction of the curves below, crucial to the assertion of the picture plane, crucial to the tension of mood and composition, and a powerful device to concentrate attention of the lavatory brush.

The immaculate surface, a delicate fusion of oils and water-based pastels, caressed with the fingerstrips as colour is rubbed into texture, a later-day sfregazza as though in homage to Titian (to whom so often I am tempted to liken him). With so much care, why then the wholly illogical, unrelated, unrelateable splash of white paint stringing across the picture? It is an ejaculation in the face, a vandalism, an assault — disruptive, assertive, violent, irrelevant, futile.

If Bacon is concerned to put violence into the paint rather than the subject, why bother with the subject? Why not join the bucket and slosh brigade? If he fears the danger of the narrative ‘talking louder than the paint’, then he is a poor judge of his own qualities as a painter; and if his patrons wish to see a narrative that is not there, then that is their choice, not his, and he should not seek to control it.

 Titian, Rembrandt and Velasquez might not have cared for Bacons personal pantheon, but they would at once have recognised the astonishing mastery of his paint. Except, of course, for those damned random splashes.”

Brian Sewell, Freudian slops, Analysis, Art, Tatler, May, 1985

“A discussion about how paint operates and behaves is extremely important in locating reasons for its continuing relevance, and for that reason, Bacon’s analyses during his interviews with David Sylvester (2002) remain pertinent. Although Bacon eschews abstraction and is at pains to discuss his figurative intentions he is, at the same time acutely aware of the visceral effect which a material like paint can potentially arouse, and how it can become a potent vehicle for expressing emotion. Through his own appreciation of how emotive the material of paint can be ‘in itself’, Sylvester maintains that ‘the thing that’s difficult to understand is how it is that marks of the brush and the movement of paint on canvas can speak so directly to us’ (Sylvester 2002: 58).

It is the transformative power of paint in the construction of such typical images that continues to make painting so valuable and resonant. Bacon describes the difficulty of this because as any painter knows, it is sometimes problematic to reason out why some passages of painting ‘work’ or are more effective than other passages. Often it is a matter of instinctive feeling rather than a process of logical reasoning. Bacon talks about this being the difference between what he terms as ‘paint which conveys directly (i.e. onto the nervous system) and paint which conveys through illustration (i.e. which is prosaic, dull and meaningless)’ (Sylvester 2002: 18), and that,

‘It is something to do with instinct. It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain. (Sylvester 2002: 18) Here, the acknowledgement of the importance of ‘feel’ for paint and of the instinctive knowledge which derives from familiarity with the material, is seen to take precedent over and above any kind of logical reasoning thought process. The sensory responses for the painter and for the viewer must be activated immediately or else it will not be effective. If one has to rationalize the process or to somehow explain the procedure or ‘story’ to oneself, then the painting has basically failed.

There is a belief here that to be successful, painting must touch the nerve of the body, must engage with the body and that this can only be manifested through the material itself. The notion of embodiment would suggest that the material becomes the body itself, in a process akin to transubstantiation. In order for this to occur in practice there needs to be a conjunction of technical awareness and imagination the feelings towards things and objects of the world which are not only ‘seen’ but ‘felt’ bodily, and so strongly that it can bypass the intellectual, rational side of thinking altogether.

Bacon’s quest for painting might appear to be an existential one, a lament and nostalgia for the passing of time with the realization that, for the painter, the possibility of cheating time and death with the material certain[1]ties of pigment is, at least temporarily, a possibility.”

Michael Jarvis, Francis Bacon and the practice of painting, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Volume 8, Issue 3, 1 December, 2009

“How often do we feel about art what we’re supposed to feel? I can only answer for myself and I would guess that it’s something like two times out of a 100, which may sound a rather depressing strike rate but seems to me a quite bearable ratio – or, at least, a realistic one. And I don’t mean by this that the other 98 encounters are worthless, because they’re not. They can be full of interest or diversion, or even confirm a long-held prejudice, which is always satisfying. What I mean is that they don’t result in that compulsive swoon of pleasure that a lot of writing about art suggests is the natural state of affairs when we get it on with an artwork, and that a lot of enthusiasts for culture like to imply they’re getting on a regular basis. It’s possible, of course, that I’m just culturally anorgasmic, but I don’t think so. I think people quite often fake it, noisily pretending to a climax that they haven’t actually felt.

Still, it’s very reassuring when it happens. You know that the organs of appreciation are still operational, and the very rarity of the event gives it an added thrill. It happened to me last week while walking round the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition of Francis Bacon portraits. This was prime territory, it seemed to me, for the faked orgasm. Bacon is (still) in vogue, and now getting to that stage where it’s clear that vogueishness has nothing to do with his reputation. So, you expect to encounter words such as “wonderful” and “dazzling” and “breathtaking” – with their familiar accompanying anxiety that your breath won’t be taken and you won’t be dazzled. And for one or two rooms, that’s how it was. It’s a fascinating show, thoughtfully laid out and full of arresting paintings, but it wasn’t until I came to Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror that I felt that the art was doing the lifting rather than me.

It’s not an entirely typical Bacon portrait, this one – isolating his lover in what looks like a circle of light and revealing his profile to one side, in a strangely angular mirror. But what caught my eye was a single long arcing brushstroke that Bacon has put above the figure. In spatial terms, it’s ambiguous. Is it a glint of light on a curving transparent screen in front of the figure? Or does it mark the top edge of the concave curve behind him? Or is it simply there to balance the composition (which it does very effectively)? What’s most thrilling about the line, though, is not its teasing indeterminacy (it may not even reproduce in a newspaper picture) but the way that it has been marked out in one swift sweep of the brush – a swing of the arm from one side of the canvas to the other. It was done with such briskness that the paint couldn’t keep up. It has broken and thinned at various points, returning sharply at the edges of the mark –perhaps as Bacon rolled the brush in his hand and squeezed the paint to the edge of the bristles.

There is another striking paint mark on this canvas – an ejaculated gob of white paint that splats across the lower part of the figure, and seems to offer a rather literal example of Bacon’s ambition that his paintings should leave “a trail of the human presence... as the snail leaves its slime”. But, perhaps because of its slightly callow suggestiveness, it isn’t a patch on the controlled curve above it, which is a real human trace, not a simulated one. There was something about it that was very exciting, and, for me at least, it suddenly clarified the rest of the exhibition, as if everything had popped into focus.

The distinct feeling in many Bacon portraits that the image of the person lies somewhere behind the paint – that a resemblance has been worked over (sometimes as a boxer will work over an opponent) – makes more sense if you think of the brushstrokes as physical gestures. They aren’t just the record of a visual impression, or an attempt to replicate it on canvas. They’re a record of Bacon imaginatively touching that face – sometimes tenderly and sometimes aggressively. What fantastic strokes they are, too – sometimes like a whiplash across a cheekbone, sometimes a gentle brush, as of fingertips smoothing out an eyebrow. And if you’re in the mood, as I was, they are genuinely thrilling – an overworked word that, every now and then, is the only one that will do justice to a reaction that’s not just about the brain.”

Thomas Sutcliffe, It’s alright not to be unmoved by art, Voices, The Independent, Friday 26 August, 2005

                                                   The Ontology of The Paint

                                                                                                A wicked white whiplash of thrown paint still fresh and alive from Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, 1966, by Francis Bacon

The Ontology of Paint: The Real

The ontology of paint kindled and fermented, formed and thrown in the abimages of Francis Bacon cannot be understood through either crude ‘common-sense’ nor nuanced ‘critique’ because the paint has its own language as the artist had repeatedly stressed. For Bacon, we simply cannot talk about painting because paint does not talk like we do. For Bacon, the paint of being is also the being of the paint, which has ‘a life of its own’. Paint speaks through its language not through our language. Paint speaks sensations. The aim of paint is to give sensation. The aim of life is to give sensation. The aim of all life is sensation. Sensation is ontological. Paint is ontological. There is no logic of sensation. There is no logic of paint. Ontology is non-logical just as painting is non-logical. Ontology and Painting thus cannot be understood logically and intellectually. Ontology and Paint are necessarily non-intellectual and anti-intellectual. Being is not thinking. Paint is not thinking. Being pulsates. Paint pulsates. In Rembrandt, Velázquez, Fragonard, Van Gogh, Soutine and Bacon in particular the pulsations of the paint become the pulsations of the portrait of the person as thereby the work reaches a primordial plenitude of an attuned and attained absolute-jouissance revealing the Real where we witness the welter wetness of: ‘the Real’.

Bacon does not ‘represent’ being but presents being: the pulsating primordial ‘paint-in-itself’ is thus prior to representation having ‘nothing-in-itself’ to represent. Bacon’s non-narrative-paint is the pure ‘presentation’ of being before being a re-presentation of the ‘human-being’ which are animal beings for Bacon because for Bacon there are no human beings as such. The primordial presentation of the paint in the abimages of Bacon undermines our ‘common-sense’ assumptions about the retarded regime of realist representations revealing just how unreal photorealist painting really is and, indeed, how just how uncannily unreal photographic representation is. By necessity the ‘art critic’ cannot write about Bacon’s paint so resort to dull and dreary descriptive literal (‘narrative’) interpretations that are as absurd as they are meaningless; and often their ‘criticism’ of Bacon unwittingly reveals their right-wing ‘heteronormative’ conservative homophobic ‘moralism’ saying absolutely everything about themselves yet saying nothing about Bacon because nothing can ever be written about Bacon’s paint-for-itself as it is: all wet and all about which is not being: ‘all about something’. Bacon as: ‘having nothing to say’, poses profoundly precarious problems for the ‘art critic’ as: always ‘having something to say’.

Paint’s Being; Bacon & Pang

Paint comes into Being through the Artist. The artist gives being to the paint whose being remains dormant until its is birthed by the artist who brings the paint to the there to be-there as paint-there being-there. However, very few artists can bring oil-paint into being-there as the da-sein of the oil-paint just as few humans have being to-be-there for a body-there is not necessarily a being-there for not all humans are there as beings just as not all paint is there as being as being-there which is why the da-sein of the human and the dasein of the paint are rather rare today. We have witnessed a retreat of the human-being there and just as we have witnessed the retreat of the oil-paint there. The being of the human and the being of the paint are hardly anywhere about today since dasein is diminishing all around the world today with the being of the human and the being of the paint no longer being-around and about as we wearily witness amongst these dasein-dead ‘contemporary painters’ such as: Tony Bevan, George Condo, John Currin, Marlene Dumas, David Hockney, Yoshitomo Nara, Jenny Saville, Richard Prince: unwittingly, these: non-painters present the non-being (there) of the human-being: as an ex-being, as an exited-being, as an extinct-being, as non-painters of non-painting of the ‘ex-human’: ‘post-human condition.’

For Bacon the paint has to be fresh in order to be at all and this freshness is its wetness as being-the-paint-in-itself-for-itself-as-itself as a jettisoned-jouissance. The existential question of paint for Bacon is to be or not to be paint and for the paint to be paint is to paint outside of illustration (which always lacks being: illustration and photography are necessarily non-ontological which is why photography and photorealist painting paradoxically never looks real). Bacon sensationed: ‘What has never been analysed is why this particular way of painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has a life completely of its own. It lives on its own, and therefore transfers the essence of the image more poignantly.’ The ophthalmologist ‘old master’ panoramic-pantomimist painter Ruben Pang’s ‘particular way of painting is more poignant than illustration’ because it: ‘lives on its own’ pang panoptic panful pannikin panontologically pander pantropic pantoffle panacea pandurate panhandle pansy pandit panties pantries panoramically pant pantographic pandurate panegyrically panic panfried panache pancakes panto pantyhose pansophy pantisocratist pantrymans pantograph panjandrum panickiest pantomimist pangenetic pansexual pandemics pandemonium pantaloons panicle pantheistically panleukopenia.

The Utter Unreality of Hyperrealist, Superrealist and Photorealist Painting

The utterly uncanny thing with photorealist painting, with hyperrealist painting, with superrealist painting, is its utter unrealness, is its unpaintedness. With so-called realist ‘painters’ such as: Roberto Bernardi, Robert Bechtle, Luigi Benedicenti, Robert Cottingham, Mike Dargas, Robin Eley, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, Gottfried Helnwein, Joongwon Charles Jeong, Richard McLean, Yigal Ozeri, Denis Peterson, paradoxically nothing ever looks real because the paint is deliberately negated as appearing unpainted and so does not live, let alone, live ‘on its own’ because the paint is non-ontological: the paint is deliberately devoid of painterly dasein; the paint has no beingness, the paint has no thereness; the paint is daseinless and therefore these ‘painters’ are not realist because reality never comes across to us in such a clinical-sterile sharp-focused way at all; after all, no one has ever looked really like a photograph of themselves. Unwittingly, photorealist painting, and like hyperrealist painting, and like superrealist painting always ‘looks’ just so unreal and so one really has to ponder, and to really wonder, why this is so. Yet the realist pastel paintings by Kyohei Sakaguchi look so really real because they are not all pristine and polished like photorealism and hyperrealism and superrealism, but raw and rugged, rough and ready, like: reality. Yet James White is an extraordinary exception to the rule regarding realism as there is something alchemically alluringly abreal at work which is beyond perfectly pristine ‘photorealism’: non-photorealist ‘literal-likeness’ in ‘realist painting’ is really difficult to ‘bring off’, for it is usually done to: ‘look real’ within the ‘commonsense’ sense of it: ‘looking just like a photograph.’

Unlike the far more ‘modern’ and ‘radical’ real realist painter painters such as: Rembrandt, Titian, Velázquez, Fragonard, Constable, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Sargent, Corinth, Nolde, Soutine, Auerbach, Kossoff, Bacon, Pang where the paint of being-a-being is there as being-there alive-there as a radicalised realism which is really real reality in being there ontologically as living paint living there and not as representation; unlike the negated paint of the photorealists, the hyperrealists, the super-realists, who are actually, in fact, highly intricate-illustrators of high-resolution photography where the ‘skill’ is to look just like a photograph: Yet a photograph is not at all realistic. The Juvenile Lead (Self-Portrait), 1907, by Walter Richard Sickert refreshingly looks nothing at all ‘just like a photograph’ and it yet looks so much more real as we really are in reality than any photorealist portrait painting. Some of Sick-fuck-Sickert’s Camden Town non-illustrative ‘done-in’ (finished-off) ‘fuck-faced’ whores or scrubbers make one really realise just how really regressively retarded realism has now become.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1970

Bacon’s Paint: Doing-the-Twist

Bacon’s Paint came into Being in 1950 and throughout the 1950s Bacon’s paint was working toward the negation of illustration where the paint is the form, and not a filler of form; and ended painting proper by 1970. Of course our ‘common-sense’ tells us that Bacon had been painting before 1950 and after 1970 but ‘scarce-sense’ tells us that Bacon actually began Painting as paint branded as his own being his own way being his won style as a becoming of the paint as being Bacon’s Paint as that paint which belonged to Bacon alone as his own; the last painting passage being that white sprinkling semen-spirit slash in Triptych August 1972. That Bacon painted before 1962 and after 1972 is not in doubt but rather that paint was lacking the presence of the paint that was the poignant-pulsation Bacon’s Dasein; and where Bacon was able paint with paint being-paint-for-itself as in itself by painting beings rather than illustrating beings. Anyone can illustrate being; not anyone can paint being; the problem is to paint being outside of illustrating being: this is the real challenge to the painter today of the painter of today for the painter today; but even today, at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, the painter today is still ‘interpellated’ in illustration in illustrating being but not painting being as illustration is easy and lazy: it appears to be true today to sadly state that the vast majority of portraitists have learnt nothing at all from the daringly inventive, ‘non-illustrative’, portraiture of: Sickert, Cézanne, Picasso, Bacon and Auerbach.

Bacon’s perfected painted paintings are: Head of a Boy (1960), Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours (1961), Crouch Nude (1961), Head — Man in Blue (1961), Figure Turning (1962), Study of Portrait of P.L. (1962), Seated Figure (1962), Figure with Two Owls, Study after Velasquez (1963), Study for Portrait on Folding Bed (1963), Turning Figure (1963), Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Red Ground (1964), Study for Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1965), Crucifixion (1965), Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on Blue Couch (1965), Study for a Portrait (1966), Study for Portrait of John Hewitt (1966), Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966), Study for Head of Lucian Freud (1967), Two Figures on a Couch (1967), What distinguishes the Dasein of Bacon’s paintings of the 1960’s are appearances of the ‘animal condition’ and the ‘alien condition’ where there is no ‘human condition’ there. Bacon’s particular Style emerged in 1963 producing the finest works of his chequered career as Bacon was to stop painting entirely by 1980s where the paint has dried up and died up so completely lost its golden Dasein even if old Bacon had not quite lost his being; though some say towards the end that Bacon was not there anymore; most of us die before we die, ontologically speaking, since our Dasein often dries-up and dies-off before we do; we being our body: which is why we see so many bodies-about-here-and-there-without-beings-about-here-and-there as bodies-over-there without beings-over-there as daric Dasein is not ‘what it once was’.

                                                                                                                                                                       Doing-the-Twist: Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1970

Art-Brute Ab-Paint

Bacon’s art-brut ab-paint releases the primal-shudder of the abject-sublime. The primordial-paint activates a shudder-sensation dreaded directly to the nervous system bypassing the intellect. An abjected-abpaint sends a tingling down our spines before our minds know what is happening, before our intimidated intellect analyses its assault and appearance. Yet of course the intellect and that means here usually an intellectual cannot grasp the abting that was always already the before the advent of the intellect operating outside of intellectual initiation and even outside of intellectual-intuition. Bacon frustrates and annoys the ‘intellectual’ (‘art critic’) who hates to be assaulted by the abject that-thus operates outside of intellectual-analysis and intellectual-assassination and just cannot grasp-to-grip paint-in-itself-for-itself-as-itself; and so again resort to inane intellectual ‘narrative’ (descriptive) readings being a foulplay strategy-tactic to avoid the abpaint at all costs. For Bacon’s paint is the abpaint that thus is the abimage that then initiates-instigates the sublime-shudder. The shudder is a mindless experience as a dissonance of dread Dasein, our-bare-being-there, as the naked-nerves, as the musical-muscle: With Bacon, we hear the abpaint with the body before we see the abpaint with our eyes; but we do not see that abpaint with the empirical-eyes but rather with those extra-empirical eyes; as well as the eyes of the body which are the ears and the mouth, which are the penis and the vagina, and, not forgetting: the nostrils, and which always see much more clearly than our eyes that are blind to the abject and the abjected; and thus the abpaint as the abjected abject, touches us and moves us musically, muscularly; Bacon’s ‘abpaint’ is so profoundly: ‘musical’ despite Bacon himself not being: musical, not having a musical ear. The thrown or abjected abpaint assimilates itself with the primal-memory of the wounded-body, that is: the fucked-body: to fuck is to wound and to wound is to abject being ahead of itself where painting or fucking are of that exacting economy of our abjecting-ahead of ourselves outside ourselves outside our bodies becoming an abeing-abimage primordial presentation of our original dripping dasein: In the beginning we were wet. In the beginning we were water. In the beginning we were leaking liquid. In the beginning we were dripping dasein. In the beginning we were paint.

The primal-shudder of the abimaged-abpaint produces the abject-sublime. Bacon’s brave and bravura abpaint has ontological analogies to the real being of classical music making sounds out of silences or silences out of sounds and by both being non-illustrational and figurative because classical music is non-abstract which is why we can ‘identify’ with it in an instant instinctively unlike abstract painting which is necessarily non-identifiable because the human-being and the animal-being and the alien-being are non-abstract: We are not abstract whatever we are aberrating. Bacon’s terrorist-technique disseminates a dasein-dread as well as an abaesthetic desire to return to our originary primordial-being: our reptilian being and our animal-being as we all were well before our initiation (‘interpellation’) into the invention of the ‘being-human’ revealing our being-animal revealing our being-alien: Bacon rightly reveals us to be non-human animals after-all uncannily akin to those animal-beings done by Degas and Picasso who rawly recorded women being wild animals (attuning and attaining to our primordial ‘animal condition’); ‘women’ are attuned to ‘being animal’ (‘being true’); whilst ‘men’ are attuned to ‘being human’ (‘being lie’) which is the evil of being because to be human is to be evil; Bacon being a ‘woman-man’ was: the ‘true-lie’ of the ‘evil-good’. For Bacon, being a ‘woman-man’ was ‘cross-dressing’ the ‘true’ with the ‘lie’, ‘cross-dressing’ the ‘evil’ with the ‘good’; ‘cross-dressing’ the ‘eviling’ Dasein with the ‘goodling’ Dasein; but meeting Bacon: ‘in the flesh’ one was never really aware of Bacon ‘being’ either ‘man’ or ‘woman’; rather: there was definitely something so strangely ‘non-human’ about Bacon but who was able to ‘act as’ at ‘being-a-human’.

                                                                                                                           Detail from centre panel of Francis Bacon’s ‘Triptych’ inspired by TS Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (1967)

Sublime-Shudder of Primordial-Paint

Paint is Being. But very few painters allow paint to be or can make paint be. Most painters negate the being of the paint which is why they are not painters of paint: they wish to hide the actual living being of the paint as if they had painted without paint. Many painters maybe called ‘painters’ but they do not know the paint as being that paints as the being of the paint being the paint-in-itself-for-itself. Paint is presentation. Paint presents. But most painters today make representations through non-painting negating the painterly being of the paint to speak for itself as itself in itself for itself. Bacon began painting in 1960 and ended painting in 1970 and by painting we mean where the paint is image in itself for itself. The ‘abthink’ of Sartre is identical to the ‘abpaint’ of Bacon so understanding of either comes from understand both as being-action in the world where idea and image are actions, where paint and think are actions acted upon as material-manifestations of being where words and paints are always already actions of presentation as a pulsating pure presence. Bacon’s abpaint does not represent reality rather Bacon’ s paint presents reality: is real is the real as paint-being-in-itself-for-itself: as the paint-being is a primary-originary ontology: Titian, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Hals, Turner, Constable, Van Gogh, Corinth, Sargent, Nolde, Soutine, Bacon activated the actual real being of oil-paint as paint-dasein as ontological-paint which is why their paint is always so afresh and alive and looks like it has just been painted: now. To paint means to paint the now to be now means to paint now forever now for what is painted is now as the now of the paint always now just now right now. And the now knows of no time, just as abpaint knows of no time, just as abart knows of no time, just as the artist knows no time. Very few painters know how to make paint now. That is to allow paint to be always already now before and after all other nows whilst being now before the now to come, before the now to go, appearing painted: right now. Sanitary Saville cannot make the paint: survive long enough: to be now, ‘right now’, as: ‘just having been painted’: right now as Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Bacon could.

Bacon’s paint releases the primal-shudder of the abject-sublime. The paint activates a shudder sensation directly to the nervous system bypassing the intellect. The abpaint sends a tingling down our spines before our minds know what is happening, before our intellect analyses and grasps any object. The primordial-shudder is a mindless-sensation as the dread-dissonance of Dasein, being-here, as the music of-as music of muscle: we hear the paint with the body and the abpaint taunts us us musically, muscularly, treats us musically, muscularly, tweaks us musically, muscularly The abpaint assimilates itself with the primal-memory of the wounded-body which was of our being born. Surprisingly, Saville’s paint, in theory, should send a shudder down your spine of dasein; but it does not since Saville’s paint is: too arid, sterile, antiseptic, hygienic, clinical; that is: it is ‘non-ontological’.

Paint presences. Paint presences being. Paint presences being present. Paint presents the presences of being as being-present. Paint does not represent. Paint does not represent anything. Paint does not represent anybeing. To make paint represent is not to paint. Paint is always already paint-being-for-itself as being present as itself as being paint. To paint means to be. To paint means to be present. But most who nominate themselves as painters do never in fact paint per se as such, as the economy of representation is necessarily a negation of the paint as painting-for-itself as itself-is where the representations are the ruination of the being of the abpaint as it is in itself no longer allowed to be itself. Representation and Illustration are the arch-enemies of Art for art as being is that which is always already primordial-presentation originating before the invention of illustration that is the human for what is illustrated is the always ‘human’, as that ‘human’ that says: I am only human; that which in fact doe not exit; which is why your insipid and insidious ‘interpellation’ into your ‘literal-likeness’ is your literal-lie, if you like, or don’t like. Degas, Sickert, Soutine, Picasso and Bacon were utterly unique in knowing we were not: ‘only human’ but: only animal; so presented us in our primordial-profuse: ‘animal condition’.

Painting is always necessarily, and so importantly, a kind of non-intellectualist conception of action because the painter must paint without consciousness in the sense that the painter and sculptor does not know and cannot know consciously what they do; if they do, however, that are no longer painters or sculptors but inane illustrators ‘illustrating’ some conceptual idea which is always alien to painting and sculpting which is not: ‘thinking’. Bacon always worked in a dense fog, a thick cloud of sensations when painting not knowing how to do it or what would happen and that is what is so fresh, so alive, so immediate. The painter always begins and ends without thinking; thinking is solely for contrived conceptual art and conceptual art is far too conscious, too contrived, too thought out. As the Unthought, Painting is a non-intellectualist action initiated in a: ‘smog of sensations’. The economy of painting is so utterly other to the economy of thinking just as the economy of writing is so utterly other to the economy of painting which is why there can be no ‘writing’ on painting, and which is why we cannot have ‘that thing’ of ‘art writing’: Or: as Francis Bacon correctly observed to Jean Clair in August, 1991: “You can’t talk about painting because talking or writing and painting are two different ... it’s another language, isn’t it?”

                                                                                                                                                        A dreadful detail of Figure with Two Owls, Study after Velasquez (1963)

Paint as Mood

Paint is Mood. Paint is moody. Paint has moods. Bacon could be in a bad mood before painting and when painting. Bacon paints moods more than anythingelse more than anybeingelse. Bacon is the painter of moods. Bacon was after all, extremely moody and could change moods in a split second. This makes Bacon Heideggerian to the core. Bacon’s ‘moods’ of painting are those three Heideggerian moods: from boredom, to anxiety, to dread; for through boredom, anxiety and dread Bacon is able to operate outside of himself and outside of conscious awareness which is so lazily and easily ‘interpellated’ into literal illustration. Boredom, anxiety and dread throw us out of ourselves where we are not there anymore abjected ahead of ourselves aiming ahead at the extra-empirical of non-illustrational forms where vision is no longer that of sight but that of sein that of being as the vision of being is not the vision of the empirical eye but the extra empirical unseen by the seen eye of inane illustration that so lazily ‘interpellates’ the They into assuming what appearance is. Profound boredom or radical anxiety initiate-instigate Bacon to take risks to throw chance to do anything other than the illustrational which is necessarily conservative and so antithetical to invention to reinventing realism which was Bacon was after after-all. Boredom and anxiety released Bacon from the constraints of consciousness of being self-conscious into being without conscious control as in boredom or in anxiety we are a non-conscious jettisoned-jouissance abjected ahead of Dasein arriving at the Real in Itself: there is no such thing, or rather, no such being, as: ‘the Unconscious’; rather there is: ‘an Abconscious’ from which an abart is abjected ahead heading over toward you after you.

Bacon paints Paint as paint presencing the being of paint as a pure-presence of immediate-sensation by passing representation and so does not represent but presents paint-being as being-in-itself-for-itself aimed at an other who identifies with that otherness of the paint which is nothing but being paint in itself for itself as other and as other paint is the shudder as the primordial-shudder of being alien to the human which is what when we identify with the thrown-paint we are identifying with the alien-other which is the sight-site of seeing the other than ‘the human’; for the condition of the paint in Bacon is of the alien condition, utterly alien to the human condition which is out of condition for there is no human condition and the alien-abpaint of Bacon reveals that there never was a ‘human condition’; and the throwing of the alien-abpaint reveals the abmeaning of the abpaint in the ablanding of the paint where the paint-semen strikes the canvas-skin revealing streaking-being as blobs of beings steaming being-there. We will identify with these white-wads of whipped double-cream paint without really knowing why for they give us a shudder whilst also wetting our alluring abysmal appetites for desiring dread-dasein which is, after-all, the abject-sublime. Bacon’s brave-bravura art-brut raw-abpaint thrown-there is an actual-real revelation of the Real there: The Real, that is, the There, is that which cannot ever be written about, only thrown about, only being about, because a ‘ripsawed’ writing was always already the: ‘instead of’ the Real.

                                                                                        Francis Bacon, Study for Self-Portrait, 1963                                                                                               Francis Bacon, George Dyer Talking, 1966

Bacon’s paint is originary pleasure.

It is not possible to make ‘preparatory drawings’ for the accident-chance enhanced ‘nonillustrational’ way Bacon handled oil-paints: stabbing, smearing, brushing, throwing; there simply would be no logic in making drawings as preparations or rehearsals for Bacon’s unprepared or unrehearsed paintings. Drawing is largely the pencilled-in-practice of consciously knowing-what-you-are-doing whilst painting for Bacon is the subconsciously not knowing what you are doing. Bacon had such a dreadfully diversely versatile vocabulary of painting performativities that one cannot say that Bacon had a ‘technique’ as such, rather, Bacon had ‘styles’, Bacon had constellations of infinite ways in which to make the paint live as being for itself; Bacon always wanted the paint to have an immediate living freshness about it, a vibration, a pulsation, a sensation, through a Baconian-Heideggerian thrusted throwness: the art of the economy of the throw is ‘the known of the thrown’ in the ordering of the handing of the knowing of the throwing of the flying of the landing as an: ‘ordered accident’.

Bacon’s paint is pleasure. Bacon’s paint is in pleasure. Bacon’s paint as pleasure. As a pure pleasure. But a primal pleasure that has both an ontic-identification and a psychic-identification in us which abstract painting cannot have because in abstract painting there is no identifying point of ontic-identification or psychic-identification because we are not abstract that is we are not decoration and abstract art is decoration on dasein not dasein in itself as itself as it is. Bacon’s paint comes-off as pure-pleasure as being-in-pleasure as paint for paint’s sake as pleasure for pleasure’s sake for the pleasure of the paint for the the paint of the pleasure. Bacon’s paint is a pleasure. As an attaining and as an attuning to absolute-jouissance where the image of pleasure is attained and attuned in an abpaint as pure pleasure, as pure being, as the Real, attained to in the pleasure of paint, as the eternal-return of the coming-off of pure-jouissance where the wet-paint of ejaculated-pleasure is eternally-preserved as the instant-image of eternal-pleasure: Yet what both the Them and the They inanely nominate as horrifying and terrifying, and, as menacing and suffering, in Bacon is simply the abject-sublime abpleasure of the paint as an attained-attuned absolute-jouissance which is the Real-in-itself-for-itself-as-itself as a pure-presentation of abpleasure-abpaint. Bacon presents. Bacon ‘represents’ nothing. There is no: ‘representational painting’ since paint is and only is: ‘primal presentation’, as: ‘paint-painting-itself’ presenting itself as: ‘paint’.

                                                                                                                                                      Jean-Honoré Fragonard, French, 1732 – 1806, Young Girl Reading, c. 1770

Radical Fragonard, Reactionary Saville

Fragonard’s paint is pure pleasure. Fragonard’s paint is pure-jouissance. Always fresh. Always fast. For Fragonard, like for Bacon, the paint has to be fresh and fast like for Sargent the paint has to be fresh and fast like for Corinth and it is this fastness freshness of its nowness that makes the paint so immediate so now and so timeless and thus non-illustration because the now of the timeless operates outside of illustration. Fragonard could paint the ear in a non-illustrational manner and an eye in a non-illustrational manner yet Saville cannot. Thus: Fragonard is far more modern than Saville which makes an absurdity of the so-called ‘history of art’ revealing that ‘art’ has no ‘history’ as such. Fragonard is far more radical than Freud because Freud, like Saville, still remained rigidly ‘interpellated’ in that regressive retardation of illustration. Bacon and Fragonard would exhibit well together just like Bacon and Jawlensky would exhibit well together just like Bacon and Picasso would exhibit well together. But Bacon and Matisse would not exhibit well together; just like Bacon and Giacometti would not exhibit well together as they are so ontologically poles apart thus antithetical to one another. Yet Bacon gets coupled (con)fused with Giacometti; just like Bacon gets coupled (con)fused with Becket due to some sort of supposed-assumed ‘existential’ entrenchment and entwinement; so thus, ontoaesthetically speaking, Alberto Giacometti does not ‘go with’ Bacon so thus, onto aesthetically speaking Bacon does ‘go with’ Umberto Boccioni.

For Bacon the paint has to be fresh in order to be at all. Ergo, the freshness is its being-ness wet-ness whereby the ontological-otherness of the ‘paint-being’ is the paint ‘in-itself-for-itself’ (Sartre). The question of paint for Bacon is to be or not to be paint and to be paint is to paint outside of ‘illustration’, a form that lacks being for Bacon. Bacon’s paint works most when it is fresh most and moist most; Freud’s paint does not have a Dasein because it is far too dry s a result of being far too mannered and too laboured, too heavy, too turgid. Saville’s Paint, Freud’s Paint, Kossoff’s Paint, Auerbach’s Paint tastes far too dry to come into Being and thus cannot come to be lacking-leaking those wet-wound jouisance juices that initiate-instigate paint to-come to-be by being-wet we witness with: Rembrandt, Sargent, Monet, Marquet, Corinth, Soutine, Bacon. Bacon, just like Rembrandt knew very well that the paint has to remain wet with instant-immediacy in order to shine-sein, t0 glint-geist. Rosetta II 2005 by Saville is pure pastiche painting pretending to be painted with its carefully calculated and contained drips and dashes with a sort of static spontaneity where all is contained and controlled within the contours of illustration with eyes and the nose and the mouth illustrated and not painted. Why is Saville so enslaved to illustration? Fragonard was far more radical than Saville yet again showing to us all just how absurdly nonsensical the (mis)conception of ‘art history’ really is; because 18th century portraitists were far more modern than 21st century portraitists, apart from that of poignant Pang. Sick Sickert’s sket ‘scrubbers’ were much more ‘aesthetically advanced’ (radically realised) than sarsenet salami Saville’s ‘photo-shops’ (processed) ‘pork chops’.

                                                                                                                Bacon’s Paint: The Thrown Presence of the Real: A detail from the right-hand panel of Three Figures in a Room 1964

Paint is

Paint is Naked. Paint is non-narrative. Paint is non-linear. Paint is ahistorical. Paint is atemporal. Paint is now. The raw rude nude paint manifests mindfully an essence of appearance as a pure-presence presenting the pulsations of the person outside of illustration where what is presented cannot be read in a literal way but in a primordial way where our body reads the sensations of the paint through its own ‘sensationing’; so thus identifying with the ripe otherness of the paint as a sort of primordial mirror-image of itself before the becoming of our identifying as being-human for Bacon’s primal paint is our being before the human which is why there is no such thing as ‘the human condition’ (whatever that maybe) in Bacon’s paint which is utterly other than being human. The I of the human cannot identify with the eye of the alien condition of abpaint and thus for Bacon there is no ‘human condition’ and yet the ‘art critic’, ‘being human’, cannot see this alien abimagery of Bacon by always assuming that-they them-that are all human; for, after all, before all, after all that, the ‘art critic’ is: only human, after all, after none, before none: for: none have, after all, before all, between all, next to all, ever: ‘come-across’ an: ‘alien art critic’, as it were, as it was, as it is, as such, at the end of the day, at the end of the night.

Paint is Will. Paint wills. Paint leaves its Will. Paint paints its Will. Paint plants its Will. The painter has to Will the Will of the Paint and to Do this the painter has to Will to lose the Will of the painter in order to order and ordain the Will of the Paint to be Will and this Will is its Being as a will-to-power as a will-to-paint as paint-being-in-itself-for-itself whilst recognisable as identifiable yet identified as otherwise than being-human for being-paint is being alien. Bacon wanted to reinvent realism through the being of paint. Bacon wanted ‘to get the essence’ of our being that is alien to the literal-likeness of the being-human (that is what we are not after-all). For Bacon the paint is the Lacanian ‘real’ where the reality of the paint is the very tough, raw roughness of being otherwise to ‘the human’ that had never ever even ever come to being, come into being, come off to being, to begin with, to end with, to start with, to wade with, to wed with, as it wet, as it what, as it when, as it with, as it were, as it was, as it is, as it maybe, as it could be, as it would be, as it will be, as it was be, as it is be, as is it be, as is be.

Bacon paints our primordial ‘reptilian condition’ and not an ahistorical ‘human condition’. Indeed: writers, commentators and critics of Bacon constantly, repetitiously, and inanely use the banal cliché of the ‘human condition’ as being the ‘meaning’ of Bacon’s abimagery; in point of fact, the actual abworks of Bacon, in being-in-and-for-themselves desiccate the classical, pictorial image of ‘the human’ and deracinate us from our foible fuck of futile fuckness: Bacon was a ripe reptile, alien-to-the-human but played-the-human dressing-up to look human, dressing down to look human, where ‘the human art critic’ mistook Bacon for being just: only human.

                                                                                                                         Bacon’s Paint: All the Pulsations of a Person: A detail from the left-hand panel of Three Figures in a Room 1964

Symphonic Sound (bites) heard in Bacon’s Paint

Bacon’s paint has to be heard ‘live’ in concert and not in reproductions to be really felt so understood just as symphonies have to be heard ‘live’ in concert and not in recordings to be really felt so understood: the living presence of the paint akin to the ‘living presence’ of the sound has to be experienced in the flesh to get that raw and visceral intensity and immediacy of which our watered-down and anesthetised reproductions and recordings can never ever achieve. Listening to Vaughan Williams 6th Symphony intensely conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen made one realise just how close the orchestration and composition is to the paint orchestrated and composed by Bacon in the mid 1940 to the mid 1950s. Indeed: Bacon is far closer to composers such as Britten, Walton, and Vaughan Williams than to the contemporary composers so often associated with Bacon. For when we watch documentaries on Francis Bacon they are often accompanied by composers such as Elisabeth Lutyens and Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez. Vaughan Williams 4th Symphony (1935) and Vaughan Williams 6th Symphony (1944) both sound uncannily like Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) in their monstrously menacing moodings of dread dissonances; hear-here Francis Bacon shared this same organismal orchestral pulse palette as Vaughan-Williams. Understanding Bacon comes to us not in words but in sounds as we come far closer to Understanding Bacon by listening to Britten, Walton and Vaughan Williams.

Paint is in Sound. What does Bacon’s paint sound like? Bacon’s paint sounds like no other painter’s paint. Bacon’s paint sounds: grainy, gritty; metallic, mainly percussive, timpani, bass-drum, but also composed of a large string section; throbbing double basses; a carpet of strings; and pointed shrill woodwinds; a full symphony orchestra sounding Wagnerian and Mahlerian, sounding Brucknerian and Straussian, as well as Berg, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. The timpani thwacks and timpani thuds are those Dark Ovid discs we hear nailing the form firmly as those grinding-grounding dreadful-devices that hold-hard; gravitational pulls, sucking you in, holding you down as heard in Study of Portrait of P.L. from Photographs (1963) which was one of Bacon’s greatest paintings but tragically destroyed the artist; for this ‘abimage’ marked Bacon at the pinnacle of his career.

Being is disclosed to us in paint-being-in-itself-for-itself that is at the same time at the same being image-being-in-itself-for-itself where paint and image are one as a unity of a revelation of being-abimage as being-abpaint where the image is the paint and the paint is the image as image-being-paint as paint-being-image and this is the genius of Bacon who was only able to paint-image image-paint in this utterly unique way between1960 and 1970. Of course we know very well that there are some paintings before 1960–such as the Man in Blue series–that have this unification of abimage-paint as abpaint-image; but Bacon’s utterly unique and suave seductive Style had not yet: arrived. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is an ‘abimage’ more than it is an ‘abpainting’; for the ‘abimage’ here is much more interesting than the paint of which it is ‘painted in’ with.

Bacon’s Style emerges in 1963 as it is materially manifest in Study for Portrait of P.L. from photographs (1963) where the black-disc body-blow paint-punctuations produce primordial sounds which are aurally close to the sounds created by Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Pettersson to name the obvious where those dark stabs have the sensation of timpani and percussion where we can hear the primordial sounds of the paint coming through because Bacon was a profoundly musical painter as a composer of paint soundscapes despite himself openly admitting to Michel Archimbaud of not really having a musical ear. Like Study for Portrait of P.L. from photographs (1963), Figure with Two Owls, Study after Velázquez (1963) displays these dark-discs that are actually timpani thwacks nailing the form, nailing the subject, suturing the subject into the sound of timpani and these dark-discs are also black-holes activating a gravitational-pull, as a sucking-in, suturing of self to sound; and so we hear these abpaintings as well as see them. In 1963/64 Bacon was painting at his moist ‘musical’.

Bacon is an orchestral composer of the economy of paint never over-orchestrating the paint like Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff do where the paint is far too congested and claustrophobic and heavy textured thus losing its dasein altogether for the paint cannot come into being because the paint has not been allowed to be for Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff do not know how to let the paint be in itself to breathe for itself as they work on it to death by negating the paint altogether where there is no immediacy of the paint but rather a mannered muddy turgid ploughing of the paint as a sort of a sexual assault on the paint, as a sort of monstrous molestation of the paint.

                                                                                                                                                                                       Dmitri Shostakovich in the Summer of 1923

Bacon’s Punctuated Paint: The Thud of Being

Bacon’s primordially ‘punctuated’ paint can be heard in Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No.4, conducted by Michiyoshi Inoue, Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra (5th April, 2014), and in Josef Suk, Symphony No.2, Asrael, conducted by Jakub Hrůša, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (10th October, 2018). Here you will hear the ‘primordial pulsations’ of the ‘noumenal world’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’ which is not independent of human-sense in an ‘aesthetic-sense’: the ‘noumenal world’ is not the ‘world of things’, or, the ‘world of beings’, outside us, as misconceived, because the ‘noumenal world’ is accessible and available here where we hear that ‘noumenal world’ of the primordial world heard in the four repeated bass-drum ‘thuds’ at the closing of the first movement of the Asrael Symphony; and throughout the Shostakovich 4th Symphony we hear that primordial punctuation of the timpani which ‘present’ the ‘thing-in-itself’ (the ‘being-in-itself’’) of the ‘noumenal world’, as an attuning and as an attaining of a ‘full-presence’, and as an attuning and as an attaining of a ‘full-jouissance’. Shostakovich’s Symphony No.4 and Josef Suk’s, Symphony No.2, Asrael, have the ‘pulse’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’, the ‘throb’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’, the ‘thud’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’ without any ‘nerditistical’ nuanced need for the glazed-garnish of meaningless ‘meanings’. The navigating-nailing ‘dark-discs’ in Bacon’s Figure with Two Owls, Study after Velázquez (1963) sound so similar to those four repugnantly and repellently repeated four ‘thuds’ heard in the closing first movement 0f Josef Suk’s Asrael Symphony: these ‘disc-thuds’ perturb and penetrate us, filling us up with our dread of ‘thing-in-itself’, that is, ‘being-in-itself’, as it is, as is was, as it were, and, as it always will be.

                                                                                                                                                                            Figure with Two Owls, Study after Velasquez (1963)

Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Glenn Brown, Ruben Pang: Painting Outside of Time, Painting Outside of Illustration

When paint becomes illustration it becomes dead and so non-ontological as well as non-psychological as we witness with the inane-illustration of Freud, Saville or Hockney where the paint has no life of its own because it cannot come to live on its own because the abpaint has not come into being in the first place despite pertaining and pretending to-be da-sein there is no abpaint-being-there; so therefore there is no being-there of the paint-there and we tragically witness that paint-not-being-there in Bacon’s late nonpainted paintings where-there is no abpaint-being-there any-more simply because: there is no Bacon being-there anymore; for Bacon actually died in 1972. Bacon’s Study of a Bull (1991) was not his last painting but, rather, his last non-paining as painting at an end, as life at an end: Bacon was already long dead when non-painting last Bull: Study of a Bull is a study for as a rehearsal for the End of Painting that refuses to come to an end; that cannot paint the end of painting that cannot end. Glenn Brown presents to us painting before the end of painting as a painting after the end of painting. Glenn Brown illustrates the wet History of Western Painting without ever illustrating the wet History of Western Painting where the dead painters of the past become the living painters of the present as the history of the past made present made future. Why is it today, especially today, that so-called ‘dead painters’ paintings are so much more ‘alive’ than the paintings of so-called ‘living painters’? Is it because painters today have no Dasein? So why are ‘living’ painters like: Bevan, Doig, Dumas, Hockney, Kiefer, Nara, Ofili, Saville so ‘adead’ whilst ‘deading’ painters like: Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Fragonard, Goya, Van Gogh, Bacon, so: ‘alive’?

Paint cannot be-known only thrown, stabbed, slashed, smeared, streaked saved in a state of pure-being as being-paint and nothing but a being-paint as paint-alone all alone as if it had a life of its own as Bacon stated for paint does have a life of its own owned by the paint alone and as a painted you have to let the paint be just as a sculptor you have to let the clay be and interfere with it as little as possible where the less you do the better which is why the more you work on the paint the more you murder the paint as we witness in wetless Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff where the laboriously-layered paint is a congested-congealed murky, mannered, muddiness, unable to breath unable to pulsate for the paint has no pulse to be. Glenn Brown has a genie-genius to redo-undo this laboriously-layered cowpat-paint propagated by Auerbach in his Auerbach homage-pastiches. Glenn Brown illustrates and illuminates the paint present and past masters without invoking illustration which is rare for our ‘contemporary’ realists; glorious Glenn Brown has a gracious genius of painting the past-time as the present-time and yet all-the-time-not-in-time. Therefore, in the future, Glenn Brown should be auctioned in Sotheby’s, and Christie’s, ‘Old Master’ auctions, and not in their: ‘Contemporary Art’ auctions, because Glenn Brown is not a ‘conemporary artist’. Sotheby’s British Art: The Jubilee Auction (London: 29th June, 2022) was a remarkably refreshing rethink with: Turner, Constable, Gainsborough, being auctioned alongside: Burra, Bacon, Bansky.

To paint is the was of the always already been painted, had been done, had been painted always already yet as already always afresh as abfresh as the that just having-been-painted-there-just-then and then just now then at any moment now just now just then just where the was became the is which is why painting ontologically speaking is already always timeless already always wet where aborigin of abpainting has happened as the primordial eternal return of that paint coming back all over again that has always already come to be done, already always the done, just done now, done to come, just come-into-being-paint, just coming-into-painting-being just the painting of the coming of being-painted just being-paint-there. Glenn Brown, unlike Jenny Saville, paints outside of illustration whilst paradoxically illustrating paint with out illustrating the paint thus we have a living-deading ontology of paint utterly unique in portraiture. Gleaming Glenn Brown clearly-ambiguously comes both just before Frank Auerbach then and just after Frank Auerbach then being both before-being and after-being yet not being nothing at all then. Glenn Brown plays Freud’s fort-da game in order to pull-apart the myth of ‘art history’ by throwing-retrieving-the-time-past-to-the-time-present throwing-the-time-back-retrieving-time-past. Glenn Brown concentrates time, consolidates time, where ‘the past’ is always already contemporary, radically realising that the past is never done with, never past with, but, already always, present with being in the now.

 In Head of J.Y.M. II, 1984-85, Frank Auerbach operates outside of illustration, operates outside of time, akin to Bacon and Brown, where the past and the present as the future are rawly recorded ‘welded’ within the ever-lasting eternal-now such is the presence of their paint; even more remarkable in Brown who invokes illustration initiations without ever falling into illustration, as we witness with the dryness of Saville, who has no time for paint having no time now to paint since there is no presence in Saville because there is no wetness of presenceness there in Saville; yet with Bacon, Brown and Auerbach we witness the wetness of the paint even if brocade Brown paradoxically comes across as looking like dry paint it is ontologically wet with time now since the now is always the wet which never dries out whilst with Freud the paint is never wet but dried out died out as congested as congealed collapsed time. The genuine genius of Glenn Brown is exquisitely executed within the economy of juxtaposition where Brown can be exhibited alongside Velázquez, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Auerbach and Bacon feeling utterly at home with each one of them. Burnished Brown remains well welded wet within time so thus never dries up over time always being wet in time with other artists whilst at the same time, being out of time all the time by not being in ‘on time’. Velázquez, Rembrandt, Turner are the only (ontologically) ‘living painters’ to always actually be ‘contemporary’; for there are not any other ‘contemporary painters’ living today.

                                                                                                                                                                      Glenn Brown, ‘The Real Thing’, 2000

Bacon goes Rococo

David Sylvester and Michael Peppiatt could never ever see Francis Bacon as a ‘Painter of the Rococo’: they were too internalised, too ‘interpellated’, into all that nauseating nonsense about Francis Bacon ‘the Existentialist’ absurdly associating Bacon with Beckett, Bacon with Camus, Bacon with Giacometti, Bacon with Sartre, Bacon with Existentialism, when, where, of course, there was absolutely nothing existentialist about Bacon whose work had absolutely nothing to do with that over-determined, over-acted high-camp high-drama of ‘existential angst’ (whatever that means); Bacon had absolutely nothing in common with Beckett, Bacon had absolutely nothing in common with Camus, Bacon had absolutely nothing in common with Sartre, Bacon had absolutely nothing in common with Giacometti, yet lazy art critics, lazy art historians, lazy auction catalogue essayists, just cut-and-paste the endlessly repeated Bacon-related ‘existentialist’ sound-bites, and key words, and tired tropes, and crass clichés by arbitrarily adding: ‘Beckett’ (Not I), ‘Camus’ (L’Étranger), ‘Sartre’ (Huis Clos), ‘Giacometti’ (The Nose), ‘existence’, ‘angst’, ‘despair’, ‘dread’, ‘nausea’, ‘unease’, ‘decay’, ‘death’, ‘devastation’, ‘alienation’, ‘isolation’, ‘loneliness’, ‘confinement’, ‘the scream’, ‘the holocaust’, ‘the death camps’, and, ‘the human condition’.

Thus, with apparent ease, the Existential ‘nausea-narrative’ playbook is instantly inserted-interpreted ‘in’ the imagery and ‘in’ the artist; but not ‘in’ the paint; although they would, no doubt, argue that ‘the paint-in-itself’ was Existentialist in that ‘it lives on its own’, and is ‘its own creation’, and ‘does its own thing’. For sure, Bacon ‘acted’ existentially but did not ‘behave’ existentially; and here is the critical distinction; for Bacon was never ‘responsible’ for his ‘actions; for Bacon never ‘acted responsibly’ for his ‘actions.’ Bacon was far more of a debauched decadent dauntless Dandy than an extracellular exteroceptive exteriorizing exhibitionistic Existentialist. There is no ‘existential angst’ or ‘exhilarated despair’ anywhere to be seen or to be sensed in Bacon’s in the portraits and figures; what is to be seen and to be sensed in Bacons portraits and figures is a sedate and serene sequacious ‘sensationing’. Thus there is nothing at all ‘existentialist’ about Bacon’s brushwork; there is something eighteenth-century about Bacon’s brushwork, as Bacon’s bravura brushwork is Rococo; by just one cursory glance at Fragonard, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Tiepolo, one can see Bacon’s Rococo hand-at-work. The Rococo is without Decay. The Rococo is without Dread. The Rococo is without Despair. The Rococo is without Death.

For Bacon was a painter of the 18th century; Bacon was not a painter of the 20th century; but, of course, arrogate ‘art historians’ would find that utterly absurd, as it does not align itself to their narrow ‘linear’ time-frame of ‘art history’; yet ‘aesthetic time’ is not ‘linear’ like ‘historic time’, and so Bacon’s Rococo painting does not ‘fit in’ to the ‘time-table’ of aesthetically-arrested ‘art history’. For, obviously, an ‘art historian’ will not ‘be allowed’ to ‘place’ Bacon in the eighteenth-century, or, be allowed to ‘place’ Bacon in ancient Egypt; or, even be allowed to ‘place’ Bacon as an ancient-Egyptian eighteenth-centaury painter; one cannot imagine ‘art critics’ ever doing all that either as they do have an imagination to begin with to do that, they just lazily go along with the expropriated ‘existentialist world view’ about Bacon because it is the ‘done thing to do’ and because everyone else just ‘goes along’ with it becoming set in stone exacerbating that excruciating ‘existentialist template’ for writing risible rubbish about Bacon in over-expensive thick-glossy art auction house catalogues to hard sell existential angst. 

                                                                                            Close-up of the culinary-cuisine Rococo bravura-brushwork of Seated Figure, 1962, Francis Bacon  ©  The Estate of Francis Bacon

The Economy of Juxtaposition

Yet as a rule, on the whole, artworks, being abartworks, are abject, are abjected, all-alone-in-the-world-out-the-world-out-of-the-world, not being at home in this world preferring to be left alone out of this world being left all alone on their own. Artworks, being antisocial and autistic, are not people persons as an artwork is not a people person. Artworks despise and detest people. So artworks do not like being exhibited alongside other artworks as artworks have nothing to say to one another as artworks have nothing in common with one another. So very rarely do artworks work being hung together when juxtaposed together, exhibited together which is why the Royal Academy Summer Show does such sadistic-violence to art-works by cramming them all-in-together, all-bunged-up on top of each other; tightly-herded-in for the hard-sell, as once reviewed by Waldemar Januszczak:

“Edvard Munch, the notorious painter of The Scream, said something very true when he grumbled: “The things that destroy modem art are large exhibitions and huge art emporiums.” I wonder if he had the Royal Academy’s summer show in mind? Or an event just like it? Either way, he was right. This year’s event is the academy’s 242nd attempt to destroy art by attempting to pass off its annual farrago as a good thing.

I’m sure you know the specious arguments employed recurrently in its defence. It’s fun. It’s anti-elitist. It’s an opportunity for the man on the street to show his work alongside the finest artists in the land. All of which is bunkum. The uncomfortable truth is that the summer show is a money-making exercise for the academy, in which the poor amateur is treated with total disdain, perhaps even cruelty. While the academicians themselves divvy up the best spaces, everyone else is crammed into overcrowded enclosures that make the enjoyment of art impossible.

This isn’t an hour in the sun, it’s an hour in a sardine tin. The general standard is, in any case, pitiful. And the annual attempt to jazz it all up by adding Tracey Emin to the mix, is, frankly, desperate. In the tiny Small Weston Room, into which the most unfortunate of the amateurs have been most brutally herded, I failed to spot a single picture that could be said to have stood out in the melee. It was like trying to identify a tadpole. Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap is a workable strategy when selling socks from Taiwan, but as a way of displaying art, it is positively barbaric and all can see what a cattle market it is.”

Waldemar Januszczak, This ugly old beast wants putting down, Art, The Sunday Times, June 13, 2010.

Whilst Michael Peppiatt was, arguably, an excellent curator certain artists just do not go together, just do not work together, just do not belong together; such as Francis Bacon with Alberto Giacometti, such as Frank Auerbach with Tony Bevan. Here the economy of juxtaposition uncannily exposes the awkward alienation at work here since Bacon and Giacometti are so utterly at odds with each other ontologically, temporarily and aesthetically just as Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan are so utterly at odds with each other ontologically, temporarily, and aesthetically. Such ‘juxtapositioning’ in exhibitions unwittingly exposes the bland-weak aesthetic poverty of and Bevan and Giacometti: just juxtapose Giacometti with Rodin, just juxtapose Giacometti with Daumier, just juxtapose Giacometti with Gaudier-Brezska, just juxtapose Giacometti with Boccioni, just juxtapose Giacometti with Arp, just juxtapose Giacometti with Brancusi, just juxtapose Giacometti with Hepworth, just juxtapose Giacometti with Moore and we will all ‘immediately’ see just how so dreadfully atrocious Giacometti really was as a sculptor. Strangely, but maybe not so strange at all, is that the sulphurous sculptures of Giacometti only work, come alive, when they are exhibited on-their-own, all alone, in intimate: ‘solitary confinement.’

Bacon does not get on with Giacometti, just as Auerbach does not get on with Bevan. And Bacon does not get on with Moore and yet Bacon does get on with Sutherland because Sutherland, like Velázquez and Bacon, operates on the tightrope edge between illustration and the real which is rather rare. Exhibiting Bacon juxtaposed with Sutherland makes perfect sense ontologically and aesthetically despite their differences in dealing with their realisms; and, surprisingly still, Bacon would hang-well with the unfashionable Bernard Buffet, Bacon would hang-well with the unfashionable Edward Burra, Bacon would hang-well with the unfashionable Wyndham Lewis, Bacon would hang-well with the unfashionable Alexej von Jawlensky; of whom: Alloway, Berger, Fuller, Foster, Danto, Gowing, Greenberg, Krauss, Peppiatt, Rosenberg, Sontag, Sylvester, all astonishingly: avoided.

But Bevan is an awfully bad illustrator; an appallingly bad illustrator of art who illustrates heads and faces in an extremely crude cartoonish way and so one wonders why Bevan is even accepted as an artist today; one is simply dumbfounded why a total non-entity like bland Bevan could even be exhibited juxtaposed with Auerbach who is arguably our greatest living painter. Bacon and Auerbach can be exhibited juxtaposed together because they are economically-ontologically belonging together just as Bacon and Jawlensky are economically-ontologically belonging together. And the unusual and unpredictable economy of juxtaposition operates in a non-logical (or a non-historical) way because Bacon could be juxtaposed with Vermeer if carefully curated; just as Bacon could be juxtaposed with Fragonard if carefully curated: but curators today do not have the insight or imagination to do this largely because they do not have any instinct about art like David Sylvester (whose sycophantic eulogising obituaries were far longer than artists’ obituaries — which says so much about our veneration of the art critic ‘above’ the artist. Sylvester stating: “Newman, Pollock, de Kooning, Johns, and Twombly were greater painters than Bacon” was simply so stupid; and unwittingly revealing an ‘autistic-aesthetic’ retardation.

Another painter who would work well being juxtaposed alongside Bacon is Edward Hopper yet in theory this may seem absurd, may sound absurd my seen absurd, yet on a spatial-temporal ontological-level they are akin and so would actually pair well together. Yet another painter who would work well juxtaposed with Bacon is Vermeer, who is also similar to Hopper on a spatial-temporal economic-dynamic, as it were, as it was, as it is: now; as Bacon, Hopper and Vermeer are trenchantly timeless ontologically speaking, ontologically sensing, and so Bacon, Hopper or Vermeer do not obligatory obey the ‘ontic time’ of ‘art history’ let alone ‘art theory’; the cliché about artworks as being timeless is a true cliché because the cliché is the origin of the true. To speak in clichés is to speak in truths and artworks are the clichés of the true that speak truths to the lies and insidious illusions of our ‘being human’. The art of juxtaposition, immediately without question, ‘deconstructs’, dismantles: ‘the time of art to the no time at all’ revealing the absolute impossibility of ‘art history’, as revealed by William Feaver:

TO PUT Van Gogh’s ‘Yellow Chair with Pipe’ next to Michelangelo’s ‘The Entombment’ would be bad housekeeping, in National Gallery terms, but Francis Bacon doing so, it is a brilliant exercise of The Artist’s Eye.

Putting Masaccio’s Madonna and Child, once the centre panel of an altarpiece in the Carmelite Church in Pisa, between Van Gogh’s ‘Chair’ and Seurat’s ‘Baignade’ is equally audacious. Who would have anticipated such illuminating harmonies among such disparate paintings Not even Bacon, apparently, for these new triptychs, so to speak, only came together on the last day of the installation.

It’s easy enough to spot symbolic and formal affinities by shuffling National Gallery postcards. Regrouping the originals outside their usual Schools and eras, is a different matter. Disparities of scale and handling, as well as subject-matter, make for difficulties. The chance to juxtapose paintings normally kept apart has been given to few so far and Bacon is the first to let the paintings speak for themselves without even an example of his own work introduced to speak for him. The National Gallery has done its best to restore the element of artistic personality cult by posting blown up photographs of Bacon in the foyer. These can be ignored.

On one wall the suppleness of the Rokeby Venus (studying herself, Beauty incarnate, askew in the mirror) adjoins the weightiness of Degas’s ‘Woman Drying Herself’. That bared back mediates between the worldly and the severity of the Michelangelo. ‘The Entombment’, being incomplete and damaged too — one mourner a blank and various limbs and drapes unrealised — is sustained (much as the two figures support the dead Christ) by the Degas and the Van Gogh on either side. It is echoed, on the wall opposite, by the fragments of Manet’s ‘Execution of Maximilian’, reassembled for Howard Hodgkin’s ‘Artist’s Eye’ six years ago. Plush Mme Moitessier, so perfectly intact, is placed in the position of being the butt of the firing squad in the mutilated Manet.

Bacon’s ‘Artist’s Eye’ gives great paintings (there are also two Rembrandts, another Velazquez and a Goya) a chance to shine in exalted company. ‘Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed’ is the only picture that, in these circumstances, looks expendable.” William Feaver, Bacon hangs his favourites, Art, The Observer, November, 24, 1985

                                           Bowness on Brancusi

                                                                                                                                                  Constantin Brancusi, Mademoiselle Pogany II, 1920

“I can’t think of any great sculptor who offers quite the problems of interpretation and evaluation that Brancusi does. Something of a cult figure among sculptors today, he gets an uncritical adulation at the moment that can’t  possibly last. For the minute that one begins to probe his achievement awkward questions arise. Perhaps this is the reason why serious studies of Brancusi are rare. Isn’t the central problem in Brancusi the relationship of the so-called pedestals and decorative works to the so-called sculptures? For the distinction begins to break down, yet Brancusi can’t resolve it. (Perhaps this was a cause of his later inactivity.) I’m not trying to knock Brancusi but what we badly need is a more critical, more questioning appraisal of Brancusi’s achievement. Like Duchamp, Brancusi seems to have spent almost half his life cultivating his public image, and in both cases a bit of demythologising is overdue. Brancusi was hostile to criticism, and asked ‘What use is understanding? I am, I exist, and therefore I must search for beauty, and there is nothing else’. It’s alright for Brancusi to take this line, but not for us: yet how is one to interpret his work? He assumes a certain mystic significance for it that is hard to accept at face value: we need to investigate.”

Alan Bowness, Wily old bird, Supplement: new and recent art books, Studio International, Volume 176, Number 905, Autumn 1968

                                                                                                                                                                                                Willem de Kooning, Head Three, 1973

Arse About Face: Alberto Giacometti & Willem de Kooning

Alberto Giacometti was an excellent draughtsman but was a dreadfully awful sculptor. Willem de Kooning was an excellent sculptor but was a dreadfully awful painter. So why did arcane art historians and art critics get it all: arse about face? For de Kooning is considered primarily as a painter and Giacometti is considered primarily as a sculptor: what has gone so topsy-turvy here? For it is palatably, incontestably, obvious that Giacometti could not sculpt. For it is palatably, incontestably, obvious that de Kooning could not paint. Willem de Kooning was an incredibly inventive sculptor. Giacometti was an incredibly incisive draughtsman: yet both are still largely known for what they are so incredibly bad at; and this is largely the fault of those arsehole art critics (and curators) who don’t know shit and always get things arse about face; or, is it, more arsely, arse about faeces? For Willem de Kooning could not paint: de Kooning could not manipulate paint: and it always shows. For de Kooning was alien to paint. Alberto Giacometti could not sculpt. Giacometti could not manipulate clay: and it always shows. For Giacometti was alien to clay. But, of course, privately, the art critic knows only too well that Alberto Giacometti cannot sculpt. But, of course, privately, the art critic knows only too well that Willem de Kooning cannot paint. You must now all turn face about arse and begin to recognise Alberto Giacometti as a draughtsman, and entirely as a draughtsman. You must now all turn face about arse and begin to recognise Willem de Kooning as: a sculptor, and, entirely, just as: a sculptor. So you must now all repeat after me the following: Willem de Kooning was not a painter, Willem de Kooning was not a painter, Willem de Kooning was not a painter.

                                                                                                                                                                                              Alberto Giacometti, Self-Portrait, pencil on paper, 1935

Juxtaposition with Justice

There would be jubilate justice in juxtaposing Rachel Whiteread with Francis Bacon because both broach the trace of the ghost as the haunting of the human and the hunting of the human in a ruined condition as being in ruins as being as ruins as the trace of the ruin at the aftermath of the unhousing of the human where there is no one at home at the human; Whiteread and Bacon are not concerned with the human condition; that is, the condition that the human is in but rather the condition that the human is out: the human-out-of-condition. One can only bear witness Whiteread in the flesh and not in reproduction; likewise, one can only bear witness to Francis Bacon in the felsh and not in reproduction: The texturized-traumatized non-textual tangy-textures of Bacon and of Whiteread rightly refuse to be read with the eye in reproductions; even when: reproduced with permission. Rather: You have to go there where they are at and only then can you be invited and initiated into their habitats of the hunted human and the haunted human: Internal Objects at the Gagosian tracks traces of Francis Bacon fermented and furloughed in Rachel Whiteread: Untitled (Crinkle Crackle) 2018, and Untitled (Snow) 2019, are after the Pope has left the Throne where the left curtains become the traces left; the remainder and the reminder of beings past: reproductions of Untitled (Crinkle Crackle) 2018 and Untitled (Snow) 2019 do not do justice to their traumatised textures; thus the textures of the traumas in Doppelgänger, 2020–2021 have to be witnessed whitewashed whitenessed and for Whiteread and Bacon, ‘the human’: was out-of-condition, out-of-order, out-of-use; all-used-up, finished-off, polished-off; done-over, done-in; done-for-good, done-for-god.

                                                                                                                                               Alexander Verney-Elliott, Self-Portrait After Emil Nolde,  2001

Juxtaposition without Justice

There is no aesthetic justice today: Tracey Emin juxtaposed with Edvard Munch, Tracey Emin juxtaposed with Egon Schiele and our uncritical critics went welcomingly along with this injustice by justifying the juxtapositions yet those that are not trained as art critics will automatically attune to the abysmal-absurdity of placing-pairing Emin with Munch or abysmal-absurdity of placing-pairing Emin with Schiele yet such a high-risk strategy-tactic of this placing-pairing uncannily-unwittingly exposes the bland banality of Emin who cannot draw to save her life; and she knows she cannot draw and the art critics know she cannot draw as they all witnessed with her: Ruined (2007), Because You Left (2016) and You Keep It Coming (2019): this is regressive-retardation; this is ‘work-in-regress’; the work of arrested development; but no ‘art critic’ will dare be honest enough to state this ‘brutality of fact’. That Emin had the gall, that Emin had the temerity, to think that she was justified in being ‘juxtaposed’ with Munch, and Schiele, simply staggers belief, and is beyond belief (and exemplifying the ‘dumbing-down’ of draughtsmanship today). Emin can’t draw. Cunt. Emin cun’t draw. Emin can’t draw. Emin can’t draw cunt. When wet Emin was juxtaposed with dry Bacon at the Tate, the uncouth ‘autist’ not only chose two of Bacon’s worst paintings but couldn’t even be bothered to tidy up all of the delinquent detritus left around her My Bed (1998). And ‘cuntrary’ to the Tate’s claims, Tracey Emin and Francis Bacon are not: ‘Perfect bedfellows’ (Tate, Etc, 30 March, 2015) because Bacon hated fucking cunt; but Bacon loved having his fucking cunt fucked hard being a botty boy, being a bum boy, being a cunt boy, who loved having his pussy fucked in doggy bent over the fucking bed and fucked hard for fucking hours and fucked hours on end in the end without end in the end, without coming off in the end, without coming off-on the end in the end without coming off the ends.

If juxtaposing Emin with Bacon isn’t embracing enough, and totally insane, then juxtaposing Emin with Turner becomes beyond embarrassment and beyond total insanity: that is beyond rational discourse: it is actually worth quoting at length an article on Emin/Turner juxtaposition exhibit with the following review-interview that epitomises the ‘intellectual disability’ (aka ‘mental retardation’) of ‘conceptual art’ (and: ‘art criticism’): “The effect is breathtaking, and oddly cathartic. The clouds over Turner’s Rough Sea (c.1840-5) are uncannily echoed in the tangle of sheets over Emin’s bed, and the browns and yellows of the landscape are mirrored in the stained mattress, offering an extraordinary connection between the two distinct works.” Speaking to Artnet News, Emin emits: “What I love about this installation is the Turner behind it. If you didn’t know, you’d think that I made the bed as a project: Here’s a Turner, now make a bed out of it. It’s uncanny. The pale blue knickers, that cloud, the sand banks with the sea, everything is just so similar.” (Naomi Rea, ‘Turner Was a Really Raunchy Man’: Tracey Emin on Why Her Infamous ‘My Bed’ Is Really Like a J.M.W. Turner Painting, Artnet News, October 13, 2017). Cretin critics, such as Naomi Rea (and Jonathan Jones) emulate Emin with their ‘dumbed-down’ delinquent discourse: the moronic-mindlessness of: “Here’s a Turner, now make a bed out of it.” is that kak-kind of kindergarten baby-talk blabbered-out by Jonathan Jones when dementedly defending Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst: for: “It’s uncanny”. It’s uncunty. It’s uncocky. It’s undoggy. It’s unpussy. It’s unpissy. It’s unbenty. It’s unstraighty. It’s unhorny. It’s unhardy. It’s unfucky. It’s unspunky. It’s unshitty. It’s undirty. It’s unflirty.

Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst aptly amplify the ‘Democratisation of Art’ with that stupid slogan: ‘anyone can be an artist’ which is still disturbingly disseminated, and propagated, through The Turner Prize and The Institute of Contemporary Art; indeed: The Turner Prize and The Institute of Contemporary Art are political programmes solely for expunging and exorcising the historical-crimes of white-privilege (so they: act-out-of-guilt-in-good-faith if that makes sense); Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were cynically sold as ‘anyone-can-be-an-artist’ rough-trade by Jay Jopling and Charles Saatchi aided and abetted by uncritical art-critics of The Guardian and The Independent. Damien Hirst is on the record as stupidly saying: “Anyone can be like Rembrandt. I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It’s about freedom and guts. It’s about looking. It can be learnt. That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice you can make great paintings.” (Damien Hirst says anyone can be like Rembrandt. But does art world agree?, Culture, The Guardian, November 14, 2009). So with practice why hasn’t Hirst made great paintings? Yet The Turner Prize and The Institute of Contemporary Art promote the idiocy of anybody can do it (whilst, of course, privately knowing, only too well, that hardly anybody, if anyone at all, can do it today; the truth is that absolutely nobody can really ‘do it’ today like Rembrandt or Leonardo, or Titan, or Caravaggio, or Velázquez, or Vermeer, or Fragonard, or Turner, or Monet, or Van Gogh, or Picasso, or Bacon, could: the fucking cunt Critics know very well that cunt Emin cunt fucking draw just as the fucking cunt Critics know very well that cunt Hirst cunt fucking paint; and cunt Emin gets cuntly paid for making cuntoy; just as cunt Hirst gets cuntly paid for making cuntoy; as a cunting Emin knows she can get away with fucking with the cunts; just as a cunting Hirst knows he can get away with fucking with the cunts.

So Hirst stated: “It’s about looking.” Yet looking at Hirst’s Bacon pastiche paintings it is clear for Hirst that it is certainly is not about looking because Hirst cannot perceive a lemon so Hirst cannot paint a lemon and Hirst cannot perceive a skull so Hirst cannot paint a skull. Hirst stated: “It’s about freedom and guts.” Yet Hirst’s Bacon pastiche paintings are not only gutless but also spineless so completely lacking in freedom. Even Hockney is not nearly as effete as Hirst. Skull with Astray, Lemon and Cigarettes (2006) by Hirst is the work of an uncouth six year old; or rather, the work of retarded development; akin to the retarded development of Emin: aesthetic retardation rules: dreary dull ‘dullard’ David Hockney has regressed to his ‘second childhood’ (or; is it now his: ‘third childhood’?) ‘excreting’ an embarrassing ‘retard-realism’ (aka: ‘82 Portraits and 1 Still Life’ at the RA).

Whilst Damien Hirst cannot paint to save his life, whilst Damien Hirst cannot paint to save his death, Ruben Pang can paint to save his live, Ruben Pang can paint to save his death. Whilst Ruben Pang saved the death of painting; so thus, at a price, Ruben Pang could give painting classes to Damien Hirst, at a price, Ruben Pang could give painting classes to Jenny Saville, at a price, Ruben Pang could give painting classes to Richard Prince.

                                                                                                                                                           Ruben Pang painting The Solid Hoof of Phantom Politics in 2018

‘Art Speak’ or Saturant Satire?

The Yavus Gallery wrote of Ruben Pang in what is now trending as ‘Art Speak’ or what inanely (intellectually) is known as ‘Art Writing’; or: was such ‘art writing’ actually: accentuating a cynical-cytolysis of a saturant-satire?

Ruben Pang’s (b. 1990, Singapore) work focuses on automatism, the neurosis and drama of the human condition. Beginning with painting, Pang’s practice has also led him to explore the dynamism and spontaneous response of sculpture and the sensitivities and collaborative spirit of music production and performance.

Often, Pang resists binaries in genres such as ‘abstraction’ and ‘figuration’ and simultaneously enjoys the stability of established formats such as the finitude of the edges of a painting and a perfectly varnished surface. Working without a preconceived image of the final composition, his approach allows the imagery to surface spontaneously; a “visual syncopation, like searching for a melody in white noise”. Pang insists on the creative process being an adventure, with a narrative arc and conflict. He believes that the residual object distilled from a creative journey, is more than a memory, in the sense that it is a record that can inspire new experiences.

Pantheon pantomiming Pang patina panged: “If you ask me what is a successful painting, I cannot give you a proper definition. But, to me, a successful painting is part man, part bear, part pig. I like this idea, where you describe a painting to be part impressive, part accidental, and part I-don’t-know-what-is-going-on. Sometimes, I feel like gagging when I look at some of my works. I associate it with this closed, stuck, dark feeling which is very different from egotistically feeling like I have improved and therefore I distance myself from the art piece.” Ruben Pang © Singapore Art Book Fair, 2022.

“I am more in the tradition of Bacon, his tender, vulnerable, sincerity, and I ask where did he have faith? He comes across as a person who is very dismissive about anything spiritual. Because, and I think I understand, from my own perspective, like he would say, put so much into one stroke, the sacred touch, that you put life into that touch; there are no amendments; that’s a rule he had for himself; perhaps it is also is expressed in his masochism, his gambling, his desperate quirks. Don’t we all have elements of this, we all have quirks, we all need a means of catharsis.” Ruben Pang © Tony Robert Cochran, 2018

                                                                                                                                                                          Ruben Pang, The Solid Hoof of Phantom Politics, 2018

Hirst cunt paint. Emin cunt draw.

Hirst can’t paint. The cunt can’t paint. Emin can’t draw. The cunt can’t draw. What the cunt is cunting on when the cunt can’t cunt when that is what the cunts are cunted to cunt but can’t as now to be a cunt is to be a can’t; to can’t is to cunt. Hirst knows he’s a cunt. Emin knows she’s a cunt. Hirst cunts on being a cunt. Emin cunts on being a cunt. Critic cunts know Hirst is a prize cunt to be praised for being a cunt. Critic cunts know Emin is a prize cunt to be praised for being a cunt. Cunt Saatchi knows Hirst is a cunt so counts on Hirst cunting. Cunt Joppling knows Emin is a cunt so counts on Emin cunting. Cunt Saatchi knows Hirst cunt paint. Cunt Joppling knows Emin cunt draw; and at heart, at cunt, cunt Emin knows that she is a ‘cunt’; yet: knowing that art dealers are: ‘cunts’; and at heart, at cunt, cunt Hirst knows that he is a ‘cunt’; yet: knowing that art dealers are: ‘cunts’.

The Turner Prize: Spastic Retards at the Funny Farm

The Turner Prize is now known as The Tourettes Prize, (Benny and the Jets), The Spastics Prize (Rubber and Plastic), The Cripples Prize (Raspberry Ripple), The Amputees Prize (Wasps and Bees), The Multiple Sclerosis Prize (Tulips and Roses), The Dwarfs Prize (Canary Wharf), The Blind Prize (Bacon Rind), The Deaf Prize (Mutt and Jeff), The Retards Prize, (A Tard), The Down Syndrome Prize (A Mongo), because The Turner Prize ‘prizes itself’ on being ‘deeply offensive’ when, in actual fact, The Tuner Prize is: average, adequate, banal, bland, boring, mundane, monotonous, regular, routine, standard, sufficient, passable, trite, tedious, drudging, uninspiring, uninteresting, unremarkable, unexceptional; because the The Turner Prize jurors want what is: average, adequate, banal, bland, boring, mundane, monotonous, regular, routine, standard, sufficient, passable, trite, tedious, drudging, uninspiring, uninteresting, unremarkable, unexceptional; whilst also: staunchly and vehemently, castigating and lambasting: what is amazing, what is alluring, what is astonishing, what is enthralling, what is exceptional, what is phenomenal, what is remarkable, what is incredible, what is marvellous, what is miraculous, what is magnificent, what is outstanding, what is compelling, what is captivating, what is intriguing, what is fascinating, what is extraordinary, what is stunning, what is staggering. Having a malicious ‘petit-bourgeois’ mentality, The Turner Prize jurors are insidiously infected with Nietzsche’s ‘Ressentiment’ and Sartre’s ‘Bad Faith’ masochistically selecting those very shortlisted Turner Prize nominees that they most deeply detest and most deedily despise, which, unwittingly, reveals the weakness of their subservient ‘slave morality’ obedience to such a charlatans charade as the interminable Turner Prize that now desperately needs to be terminated and put out of its misery for its own good with a magnificently meretricious mercy beheading of all the junketeering jurors for ‘art for art’s’ sake as well as ‘for fuck’s sake’ of the Turner Prize nominee ‘no ones’ of ‘the they’ that these of ‘the them’ privately despise and priggishly detest for being one of ‘the they’ and not for being one of ‘the them’.

“Is this then not the “masses” — raised to “personality” — and the condition — scarcely thought and grasped — posited as the uncondi tioned? Is everything not all too easy, because it has selected for it self an inferior opponent? Does it not border on doom, because it is in part “meant” well and in the best possible way? But can it be avoided as long we persist on the edge of a-historicality?”

Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-XI, 1938-1939

“Must everything that is called ‘refinement’, ‘spirit,’ ‘culture,’ now be given over to a rescue of the core power of the people? But who is ‘the people’? Those who used to be called the lower and unrefined classes? Do these, simply because they are unrefined, already guarantee the core power—or is the giving over of all that only a further clarification of the prevailing deterioration as a whole—the coming to light of the impotence. The blind and busy! They believe the ‘they’ of ‘Dasein’ is now replaced by the people—or could be at any time; ‘the people’ merely provides a hardening, which means a greater veiling. What does it signify that the human masses are worth so little they could be annihilated in one stroke; is there a stricter proof of the abandonment by being?”

Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI, 1931-1938

“Everything ‘revolutionary’ (as mere inversion) is necessarily still overly ‘conservative’ (caught up in the past and in the preservation of things already verified) to ever offer an open path into the oldest origin. The will to an origin nevertheless always retains — in its salient unfolding — an inclination toward what is ‘revolutionary” and at the same time toward what is ‘conservative.’ But the originary, issuing from the essential occurrence of beyng, in truth never has a foothold in verified things, because verification has already in advance posited a standard the originary can no longer recognize as essential. Only the originary, that which belongs to the necessity of beyng and is superior to all needs of beings, recognizes immediately that what is ‘revolutionary’ brandishes the mere semblance of originariness and even can do so only as long as it maintains a positive appraisal of it self through a negative appraisal of what it has inverted. Revolutions are never radical.”

Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-XI, 1938-1939

“The ‘they’ maintains itself factically in the ‘averageness’ of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this ‘averageness’ with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything ‘exceptional’ that thrusts itself to the fore. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the ‘levelling down’ of all possibilities of Being. Distantiality, averageness, and levelling down, as ways of Being for the ‘they’, constitute what we know as ‘publicness’. Publicness proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right because it is insensitive to every difference of level and of genuineness. By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone. Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. It ‘was’ always the ‘they’ who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been ‘no one’. The ‘they’ is the ‘nobody’...”

Martin Heidegger, Being & Time, 1927

“Barenboim is a complex figure, which also explains the furore over what he did. All societies are made up of  a majority of average citizens who follow all the established patterns and a tiny number by virtue of their talent and their independent inclinations are not at all average, and in many ways are a challenge and even an affront to the usually docile majority. The problems occur when the perspective of the docile majority tries to reduce, simplify, and codify the complex and unroutine people who are a tiny minority. This clash inevitably occurs — large numbers of people cannot easily tolerate someone who is noticeably different, more talented, more original, than they are — and inevitably causes rage and irrationality in the majority. Look what Athens did to Socrates, because he was a genius who taught young people how to think independently and sceptically: he was sentenced to death. The Amsterdam Jews excommunicated Spinoza because his ideas were too much for them. Galileo was punished by the Church. Al-Hallaj was crucified for his insights. And so it has gone on for centuries.”

Edward Said, Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo, Al-Hayat, August 15, 2001     

“I prefer to understand the rare human beings of an age as suddenly appearing, late ghosts of past cultures and their powers: as atavisms of a people and its mores — that way one can really understand something about them! They now seem strange, rare, extraordinary; and whoever feels these powers in himself must nurse, defend, honour, and cultivate them against another world that resists them: and so he becomes either a great human being or a mad and eccentric one, unless he perishes too soon. The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: time and again they rekindled the dozing passions, What is new, however, is under all circumstances evil, being that which wants to conquer, to overthrow the old boundary stones and pieties; and only what is old is good! In every age the good men are those who bury the old thoughts deeply and make them bear fruit — the farmers of the spirit. Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is put on the scale again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places — into his sunshine.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

“While enjoying to the full his class privileges, the bourgeois readily develops a transferred inferiority complex. His ‘guilt feelings’ (resulting from a psychological impulse inherent to consciousness that risks calling into question his personal right to trample down the unfortunate) are skilfully shifted to the bourgeoisie in its entirety. Thus displaced, the guilty conscience expresses itself with a disgusting idealistic verbal outpouring that gives free rein to a craving for cheap utopian blindness. We should not be surprised to see such a general human contradiction as that between things low and things elevated represented here in the form of very particular psychological representations.

It is evident that a man like Nietzsche, wanting to assert the human splendour of people who really had exercised domination — a splendour determined by social forms that had disappeared — could only become aware, in the first place, of his ineptitude for current social forms, and, in the last, of the excessively derisive and even imbecilic character of this mental activity — brilliant or not.

Obviously if the man of genius admired by the mob is at bottom, as he admits, — only a ludicrous and wretched creature, — one has only to see things as they are: he only carries a splendid and intellectual nightmare to the sublime the better to offer his liver to the beak of simpletons and louts who lay down the law in contemporary society. And so he becomes the torn and at the same time insulting victim of unprecedented stupidity. More precisely, since surrealism is immediately distinguishable by it the addition of low values (the unconscious, sexuality, filthy language, etc.), invests these values with an elevated character by associating them with the most immaterial values. Others instinctively know how blocked impulses are to be taken into account.”

Georges Bataille, The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme, 1929-1930

“The severely dysfunctional Turner prize keeps finding new ways not to do what it was set up to do — choose the best new British art — preferring instead to appal and exhaust us with increasingly cranky gimmicks. This year’s shortlist of five “collectives’”— self-selected mixed groups of artistic types — is so transparently fixed that it reads like something out of Animal Farm.

The Array Collective is “a group of Belfast-based artists who create collaborative actions in response to issues affecting Northern Ireland”. The Black Obsidian Sound System (BOSS) “challenges the dominant norms of sound-system culture across the African diaspora”. Cooking Section is “a London-based duo examining the systems that organise the world through food”. Gentle/Radical and Project Art Works are the others. You get the picture.

Collectives are currently the “in” thing in art. The prestigious Kassel Documenta, whose next German edition is due in 2022, has chosen a collective from Indonesia to direct its proceedings. The Indonesian collective has duly asked lots of other collectives to attend the jamboree and challenge the iniquitous hold of the individual on art. Any three-year old kid reading this article who might foolishly have reached across for a coloured pencil with which to draw something: beware. Your days of egotistical individualism are numbered.

The worst thing here, however, isn’t the lack of artistic sensitivity or knowledge that is being so flagrantly peacocked. This is the Turner prize. When did artistic sensitivity ever come into it? Worse than the ambitions of Cooking Sections to pass off food issues as art is the stink of manipulation emanating from the Turner prize jury room.

Having spent last year looking at whatever art was briefly available — because that’s my job — nowhere did I encounter anything by any of these “collectives”. If they did appear somewhere, it cannot have been an outstanding appearance. The chances of five collectives simultaneously making the most significant contribution to British art in 2020 are a gazillion to one. It didn’t happen. So what did?

Well, back in 2005, the writer Lynn Barber, sometimes of this parish, was asked to join the Turner prize jury. In those days there was always a token outsider on the panel, a non-curatorial presence who kept the whole thing honest. Unfortunately, Barber was so disappointed by the experience, and the lack of fairness and democracy she witnessed, that she published her memories in a scathing report. Since then, outsiders have been banned from the jury.

Instead, what we get is art world talking to art world in a grim joke of a selection process. This is not a jury that scours the country looking for the best art of the year. It’s a jury of interwoven curators who hop from international biennale to international biennale, learning the trends, drifting ever further away from the realities of art. Someone please close down the farm.”

Waldemar Januszczak, Thought the Turner prize couldn’t get any dafter? It just did, Monday, May 17, 2021

The Institute of Contemporary Arts: The Fascistization of Aesthetics

The Institute of Contemporary Arts desperately wants to ‘appear’ to be ‘politically-correct’ by showing ‘politically-correct art-works’ which is an oxymoron; since how can ‘art-works’ be ‘politically-correct’ when ‘art-works’ are, by their ‘ab-nature’, non-political? How can ‘art-works’ have a sense of ‘social responsibility’ when ‘art-works’ are ‘anti-social’ by their ‘ab-nature’? An ‘art-work’ is all-alone-in-the-world so wants-to-be-left-all-alone. That is why there can be no such thing as ‘public-sculpture’ because there-is-no-public-there-being-there for the ‘public-they’ are ‘these-they-not-being-there’ so ‘public sculpture’ is an oxidant-oxymoron; as sculpture, by its ab-nature, is ‘anti-social’ and so would never ever even be seen ‘in public’ because sculpture is incredibly shy and coy and antidromically anti-social and prismatically-private thus sculpture does not like being exhibited in public galleries. Paralytically, The Institute of Contemporary Arts detests and despises the ‘public-they’ even entering their prestigious premises and would far rather the ‘public they’ would just stay far away despite the I.C.A. being publically funded. The bourgeois I.C.A is instrumentally identical to the petit-bourgeois Royal Academy of Arts as they deride and despise ‘the masses’ whist depending upon them for their own slovenly survival. The ‘Artivism’ of the I.C.A., through its ‘fetishization of politics’ as an ‘aestheticization of politics’, is a pure Fascism (structurally, ideologically), and therefore far more elitist, exclusionary, and reactionary than even the R.A.

 Today, The Institute of Contemporary Arts is a hyper-politically correct ‘equal opportunities’ political platform to ‘perform’ political propaganda. Today, The Institute of Contemporary Arts has absolutely nothing to do with aesthetics which it finds abhorrent. Back in 1947, the I.C.A’s 1947 Memorandum of Association stated: “The objects for which the Company is established are to promote the education of the community by encouraging the understanding, appreciation and development of the arts generally.” Today it is quite evident the I.C.A. has no interest whatsoever in ‘encouraging the understanding, appreciation and development of the arts generally.’

“Ever since the beginning of my involvement with the ICA, I have harboured a vivid, romantic image of the institute as it was — a hotbed of 70s radicalism.  But the irony is, now that ‘shock’ has become the ‘new establishment’, that the ICA has morphed into a pillar of the shock establishment — cultivated by the Brit pack. The protesters were there to complain that they’re no longer shocked — they’re bored... Like me, they’ve all sat and watched a naked woman fire a peach from her vagina knowing full well that it won’t make the local paper (as intended). They’ve also smelt endless faeces, been titillated by pornography and scared by a chamber of horrors paraded as ‘art’, and yawned with the rest of us. They want substance, they want elevation, they want... ‘craft’. Figurative painting and sculpture have been dismissed as ‘merely craft’ by some, as ‘dead forms’ by others. Artists boast that they can’t draw. Again and again I have heard artists complaining that they have been told they have to toe the line with what’s happening on the gallery scene if they want to make it. The denigration and shock tactics used by conceptual artists have had their moment, but now it’s time to move on. Is it time for the philosophical underpinnings of conceptual art to be challenged? It is built on a nihilistic philosophical foundation. Kant’s theory of the ‘sublime’ elevates the ‘formless’ and ‘shocking’. Personally, I’m about ready now for some form and substance. But having described the arts establishment as totalitarian in their stoical, silent defence of conceptual art, what better way for them to demonstrate it than by sacking me. ICA, one; Ivan Massow, nil. But the final irony is that they didn’t seem to see that they had inadvertently validated my comments.”

           Ivan Massow, Why I had to resign from the ICA, The Guardian, Wednesday, 6 February, 2002

“Totalitarian states have an official art, a chosen aesthetic that is authorised and promoted at the cost of other, competing styles. In the Soviet Union, the official art was socialist realism. Working in any other mode was considered – and treated as – an act of subversion. In Britain, too, we have an official art – concept art – and it performs an equally valuable service. It is endorsed by Downing Street, sponsored by big business and selected and exhibited by cultural tsars such as the Tate’s Nicholas Serota who dominate the arts scene from their crystal Kremlins. Together, they conspire both to protect their mutual investments and to defend the intellectual currency they’ve invested in this art. The arts elite (and that includes the critics) who witnessed the conceptual revolution have invested so much of their reputation in defence of this kind of art that they find themselves unable to criticise it. Moreover, it is supported in so many ways and so thoroughly by the likes of Nicholas Serota and Charles Saatchi, as well as other, less high-profile investors, that those who speak out against it are derided as ‘past it’. Concept art is so firmly ‘established’, it is no longer promoted through reference to any criteria of aesthetics, originality or intellectual challenge, but through spin and the clever exploitation of the fear of ‘missing out’. Frequently boasting ‘craftlessness’ and “thinness” in terms of talent (the criteria of traditional artistic skill and excellence being replaced by philosophical or linguistic musings, the expression of psychological trauma, or sociological comment). As for the artists themselves, they must be ‘glossy’ – or risk being replaced by those who understand the celebrity game better. Anyone who has met Emin knows that she couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag.”

           Ivan Massow, Why I hate our official art, The New Statesman, Monday, 21 January, 2002

 
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The late Nicholas Serota and the late Charles Saatchi celebrated and coroneted Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin explicating-exemplifying ‘the thick’ constituting ‘the cretinisation of culture’ where the moronic displaced the aesthetic, where the spastic displaced the aesthetic: where retards rule: Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin were ‘rough trade’ for the bourgeois are critic to masturbate over looking down on them whilst looking up to them.

The retard realist, David Shrigley, exemplifies and epitomises our ‘contemporary credo’ of ‘the cretin condition’, as a ‘the cretinisation of culture’, where what is ‘cretinous’ is ‘creative’, where what is ‘cretinous’ is ‘cleaver’, where what is ‘cretinous’ is ‘comedic’, where what is ‘cretinous’ is ‘compelling’, where what is ‘cretinous’ is ‘captivating’, where what is ‘cretinous’ is a ‘critical commentary’ on our credulous ‘cretin credentials’ creticism.

The I.C.A. has to be ‘shown’ to be ‘inclusive’ in ‘doing the right thing’ (that is, ‘doing the left thing’) where everything is ‘democratised’ (‘dumbed-down’) and ‘politicised’ (‘propagandised’) where the I.C.A. ended up being a ‘political platform’ for ‘art activism’ (political propaganda) where the ‘politicization’ of the arts is the ‘deaestheticization’ of the arts ‘for propaganda’s sake’ as a steadfast stand against ‘great art’. Like the Turner Prize, the I.C.A. has perpetuated-propagated the ‘cretinisation’ of the arts where any old idiot can ‘do it’ and so it does not matter one iota if you do not have a ‘craft’, ‘skill’, or any ‘talent’, so long as you do have a ‘slogan’ like the banality of Banksy who, along with Emin and Hirst, compounds the idiotic idea that ‘anyone can be an artist’; whilst ‘genius’, ‘excellence’, ‘brilliance,’ ‘originality’, and ‘great art’ are ridiculed and rejected by the I.C.A. and the Turner Prize as retrograde and reactionary ‘historic constructs’ and thus derogatively denounced and dismissed as ‘elitist’ and ‘exclusive’. Yet what could be more elitist and more exclusive than the I.C.A. and the Turner Prize? 

Banksy propagates the fashionable ‘bourgeois Marxist ideology’ of the elitist I.C.A. and the elitist Tuner Prize as a ‘peoples propagandist’. Banksy as a ‘propagandist of the people’, Banksy as a ‘propagandist for the people’, paradoxically, the very ‘common people’ that the bourgeoisie of the I.C.A. and the bourgeoisie of the Turner Prize absolutely abhor and absolutely are not. Banksy is a petit-bourgeois trying to be ‘one of the people’ whilst also aspiring to the ‘bourgeois condition’ yet unable to become a member of the bourgeoisie who privately detest and despise Banksy yet publicly pretending to ‘identify’ with Banksy in order to appear to be ‘politically correct’ as Banksy is by far the most politically correct bourgeois Marxist propagandist alive today existing solely to exorcise and expunge the guilty conscience of the white privileged bourgeoisie to free them from their white guilt.

Banksy — Anonymity as Equity: an affective anonymity equated with equity acts as a sleight of hand in a Masterclass of Machiavellian art-market alchemy stealing the grit of graffiti street art and transforming it into sterile stencilled blue-chip bullion. By cynically contriving a staged subterfuge, the ‘stencilist’ empowers a clandestine high-priest gatekeeper to perform the tawdry transubstantiation of faux-political slogans into commodified rebellion within a bespoke dark-pool market. This strategic ‘anonymity’ serves as the ultimate shadow liquidity for a tacky and meretricious brand that performs a calculated flourish: it allows the elevated elite to ‘own’ the rebellion without inheriting any of its punitive and subversive risks: these mundane murals mimic ‘a pantomime of protests’ against the state while the merchandising machinery behind them is ruthlessly-anchored in the iron-clad pillars of corporate capitalism—weaponised trademarking, ruthless intellectual property litigation and artificial supply control: such kitsch graffiti graphics are not the ostensible khaki-camouflage of an out-law but a proprietary vault where the iconography of the ill-possessed is subjected to art market money-laundering to be converted into the dividends and derivatives of the ridiculous rich to become ridiculously richer: by weaponising intellectual property law from behind a mask of anonymity the ‘stencilist’ ensures that only the ‘official’ manufactured-mythos has a market-value as any of the ‘street-stencilled’ stuff salvaged by the proletarian is automatically rendered ‘worthless’ by a refusal to authenticate it: a financial apartheid, as a monopoly of the vault, that mendaciously maintains a mortmain monopoly for the filthy rich over and against the dirty poor.

The Anonymity of the Name: ‘Banksy’ was ‘identified’ as ‘Robin Cunningham’ and yet to name someone was always already to leave them left nameless and anonymous as a name is anonymous for the act of naming one was the act of concealing one for to name someone was always already to conceal someone: to be named was to remain without a name: to be named is to remain unknown: we are anonymous for our names are never our own for we have no name of our own to name our own as our own as names are not owned but given as to be named as a name is to be concealed within a name that has no name to name one: naming is remaining anonymous.

The I.C.A. Bulletin epitomises exactly the profoundly pretentious and clichéd cultural studies ‘discursivity’ of the I.C.A. ‘bourgeois Marxist ideology’ with its trite and tired ‘terms and conditions’ of their dated ‘discourse’:

The idea of a curatorial remit operating above and beyond the interests of the artist, or the notion of the discrete art work, opened up a space of critical contestation – one which, ironically, reflected how artists were increasingly concerning themselves with mediation and the language of mediation, as they turned towards conceptual strategies – and began to address the curated exhibition as a cohesive cultural text.

The argument we propose is that curatorial discourse has acted as an engine of emergence for a set of contemporary practices, ones that do not simply rehearse the marketing of inconsequential novelty. Curatorial discourse has done so by providing a diverse rhetoric of agency, which overcomes the flawed creator-genius machismo and heroic individualism of avant-gardism, while re-instating a sense of individual and collective agency through a range of animating metaphors and theoretical positions: from DIY culture to DJ culture; postproduction to informal networking; dialogical aesthetics to discursive practice. While the extensive and seemingly unending arguments of curatorial discourse have at times seemed tediously self-regarding, it is very important to reassert the potency of this speech in re-establishing, or at least bolstering, a coherent sense of agency in contemporary art practice; and in fostering frameworks for greater interaction with other disciplines and cultural practices.

Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, Curatorial discourse and the contested trope of emergence, Emergence, I.C.A. Bulletin, 4th December 2008

Recognition of the specific character of criticism does not imply a division of labour between artist, critic, and curator or art historian. In fact, art criticism can be practised by anyone in the absence of any privileged positions. (Art criticism, like art practice or politics, should be grounded on the assumption of the equal intelligence of all those looking at art, as well as those reading the text.)

The crisis that art criticism is compelled to respond to is always concrete, as are artworks themselves. The response to the artwork and the situation of crisis around it, must avoid universalisations, instead always accounting for that specificity. Criticism should not be an exercise in reporting, archiving or advocating either the old or new, but a productive contribution that constructs the subject of its discourse and aims to produce change. As an activity criticism is continuous with that of the artist who makes it, the curator or gallerist who exhibits it, the institution that hosts it and audience that looks at it.

And like each of these positions it produces a new version of the artwork, modifying its status and reach possibly in disagreement with the versions produced by the others. As the principle of equality implies, this change always already relates the art that is written about to its surroundings. Perhaps one of the key features of art, as defined by the tendency identified above, is that it constitutes a privileged place for showing how things can be different. Sometimes it can even do so by effecting change itself.

Pablo Lafuente, Notes on Art Criticism as a Practice, I.C.A. Bulletin, 4th December 2008

The perverse paradox about the above is that ‘Marxist Aesthetics’ is ‘bourgeois ideology’, and not the ‘critique’ of ‘bourgeois ideology’. Having said that, there is, in fact, no such thing, in ‘practice’, as ‘Marxist Aesthetics’. Aesthetics operates outside of ‘ideology’ just as aesthetics operates outside of ‘the mode of production’ in the ‘aesthetic sense’ since aesthetics has no ‘mode of production’ as the aim of aesthetics is to destroy all ‘meanings’. It is high-time that the ‘Institute of Contemporary Art’ be renamed as the ‘Institute of Contemporary Propaganda’, as that would be much more honest and make much more sense since the Institute of Contemporary Art ‘signifies’ the Institute of Contemporary Propaganda; aesthetics does not operate under ‘the order of signification’. And yet the Institute of Contemporary Art is an immensely nineteenth-century establishment propagating an antiquated nineteenth-century bourgeois Marxist ideology and so it would be entirely appropriate for them to rename the ‘Institute of Contemporary Art’ as the Institute of Nineteenth Century Marxist Propaganda.

As pursuivant purulent-purveyors and prodigal provincialist-propagators of proletarian-propaganda, The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists detest, despise, deride, and denounce: ‘style’, ‘charm’, ‘grace’, ‘elegance’, ‘finesse’, ‘taste’, ‘refinement’, ‘sophistication’. The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘style’, and they have no sense of what ‘style’ is; The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘grace’, and they have no sense of what ‘grace’ is; The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘charm’, and they have no sense of what ‘charm’, is: The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘finesse’, and they have no sense of what ‘finesse’ is; The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘elegance’, and they have no sense of what ‘elegance’ is; The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘taste’, and they have no sense of what ‘taste’ is; The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘refinement’, and they have no sense of what ‘refinement’ is; The Institute of Contemporary Art bourgeois Marxists have no ‘sophistication’, and they have no sense of what ‘sophistication’ is: ‘style’ cannot be taught, you either have ‘style’, or you do not; ‘charm’ cannot be taught, you either have ‘charm’, or you do not; ‘grace’ cannot be taught, you either have ‘grace’, or you do not; ‘elegance’ cannot be taught, you either have ‘elegance’, or you do not; ‘finesse’cannot be taught, you either have ‘finesse’, or you do not; ‘taste’ cannot be taught, you either have ‘taste’, or you do not; ‘refinement’ cannot be taught, you either have ‘refinement’, or you do not; ‘sophistication’ cannot be taught, you either have ‘sophistication’, or you do not.

The paralytic and paranoid paradox was that, whilst The Institute of Contemporary Art ‘bourgeois Marxists’ detested, despised, derided, and denounced ‘style’, ‘charm’, ‘grace’, ‘elegance’, ‘finesse’, ‘taste’, ‘refinement’, and ‘sophistication’, they had absolutely no idea what ‘style’, ‘charm’, ‘grace’, ‘elegance’, ‘finesse’, ‘taste’, ‘refinement’ and ‘sophistication’ actually were; all they knew was that they had a dumb duty to hate them at all costs.

Why is ‘The Institute of Contemporary Art’ still titled ‘The Institute of Contemporary Art’ when ‘art’ is that which is not ‘contemporary’ and cannot be ‘contemporary’? Art has no time. Art has no concept of time. Art is not in time. Art is out of time all the time not in time. The unwitting paradox always being is that what we denote as ‘contemporary art’ always looks dated and out of date back in time and never contemporary: our definition of art is that which defies time as art does not have the time on it knowing nothing of: what the time is. Art is not made presently in the present. Art is presence, and not present. The trite cliché that ‘art is timeless’ is true.

               “You see, you’re surrounded by cretins.”  (1944) Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) to Graham Sutherland (24 August 1903 – 17 February 1980) about Kenneth Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983).