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December 23, 2004
Tactics for Fleeing the Face (Unfinished Visual Essay)
Tactics for fleeing the face. not one, but many.
The face is the body, the face facialises the body, the face exists before the face, before any face.
Picasso - Deux Baigneuses, 1920
The heads are shrunken and shifted aside and back into the shadows; the expressivity of body-as-face. On peyote, two of Don Juan's acolytes saw themselves naked in the mirror and realised that their bodies were alien faces.
Caroline Hausheer - Drawing, 2003
Caroline Hausheer - Drawing, 2003
Haptic Space: I photographed these drawings at an end-of-year show of 1st year fine art students at Falmouth. In the midst of a mixture of neo-expressionism and YBA duchamp-repetition they stood out: She drew them with a blindfold on, touching her face rather than seeing it.
Wedge-shaped or elongated alien heads with blank, huge eye sockets -" it-™s like looking into a world stripped of familiar appearances but nonetheless real, solid and consistent.
Interpenetration of sensation and expression. The baroque immanence of Leibniz and Spinoza, libidinal ballistics: everything percieves, everything expresses. The mind of paint, the mind of a pencil. Everything conditions/is conditioned : no face, but continuous chains of interfaces in every direction, traits which can be made into faces but which are not reducible to them.
The cinematographic synthesis/production of the face.
The interesting thing about them is their consistency : not only their self-consistency but the way they remind one of the powerful, characteristic traits of other master draftsmen ie Schiele.
A consistency between the perceived world and the act of representation, motoricity of the act of creation (nevertheless there is still something utterly artificial, of great sophistication, in the translation of haptic space to two dimensional line - no 'mainlining of sensation', instead it's a way to avoid 'expression' ).
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Francis Bacon - Head (Abandoned Painting), 1949
The brutality of photographic fact. Heads not faces. Meatheads.
Francis Giacobetti - Portrait (of Francis Bacon) with Lightbulb, 1991
Giacobetti after Bacon : Make a mechanical mockery of the face
Robin Mackay - Demonographies / 3 Heads, 2003
Henri Michaux : (-˜Signes-™, Paris: Xxe Siècle, Jan 1954)
They were gestures, interior gestures, the ones with which we don-™t have limbs but desires for limbs, stretching, impulsive movements and all this with living ligaments that are never thick, never big with flesh nor enclosed in skin-¦What an experience it will be when the time is ripe at last and, having got into the habit of thinking in signs, we are able to exchange secrets with a few natural strokes like a handful of twigs.
Henri Michaux - Gestures
Think with the knee
Joseph Beuys : "Brain as the material substrate of thought: an organ of reflection, hard and shiny as a mirror. Once you realize that this is a mirror organ, it also becomes clear that thought finds its consummation only in death, and that thought faces something higher; its resurrection in the freedom that death gives, a new life for thought. And that in the future this can happen in a completely different way; that it is conceivable that in some future age one will be able to think with the knee. And I maintain that one already can."
Henri Michaux : -˜En pensant au phénomene de la peinture-™ -" 1946 in Passages (Paris:Gallimard, 1963)
Draw without anything particular in mind, scribble mechanically: almost always, faces will appear on the paper.
Since we lead an excessively facial life, we are in a perpetual fever of faces.
As soon as I pick up a pencil or brush, ten, fifteen, twenty of them surge up to me on the paper one after the other. And most of them wild.
Are all those faces me? Are they other people? From what depths?
Couldn-™t they simply be the consciousness of my own thinking head? (Grimaces of a second face: just as, out of shame, the suffering adult has stopped crying when he-™s unhappy, only to grimace still more inwardly.) Behind the face with its motionless features, deserted, now no more than a mask, another superiorly mobile face contracts, seethes, simmers in an unbearable paroxysm. Behind the set features, desperately seeking a way out, expressions like a pack of howling dogs-¦
There they are, somehow flowing from the brush in black blotches: they are breaking free.
You-™re surprised, the first few times.
Lost, sometimes criminal faces, unfamiliar yet not absolutely unknown to you (a strange, distant correspondence!)-¦Faces of sacrificed personalities, -˜I-™s stifled, killed, by life, willpower, ambition, by a propensity for rectitude and consistency. Faces that will keep appearing to the very end (it is so hard to stifle, to drown anything out definitively).
Faces of childhood, of childhood fears whose structure and object have been lost more than their memory, faces that don-™t think everything has been settled by the transition to adulthood, faces still afraid of some horrible return.
Faces of the will, perhaps, which is always ahead of us and tends to shape everything in advance: faces, too, of seeking and desire.
Or a kind of epiphenomenon of thought (one of the many that the thinking will can-™t help provoking, even though it is perfectly useless for intellection -" but it can-™t be stopped any more than you can stop yourself from making vain gestures on the telephone)-¦as if one were constantly shaping a fluid face in oneself, ideally plastic and malleable, forming and unforming from ideas and impressions, automatically sculpted into an instantaneous synthesis, all day long and in a sense cinematographically.
An infinite crowd: our clan
-˜I-™m alive, the man with the second face-™
Turning the head inside out.
Escaping the face by pursuing the logic of internality to its limits. The face projects inwards, grimaces at viscera.
Parallel to the dichotomy between a phenomenology that talks about a pristine inner sense, and a materialism that seeks to abstract matter from the perception of matter: here, everything is at once perception and expression.
Inner sense no longer comes from an ineffable point of absolute internality, but is rather a reflection, an echo, a refraction whose rhythm owes both to incoming information and to the composition of the -˜receiver-™ itself:
Internal faces which are no less faces : because the inside is but a perception of its shell (which in turn is a perception of its environment)
Anonymous - A sequence of paintings by a man suffering from the progressive mental debilitation of Alzheimer's disease.
This extraordinarily poignant series, in which perception and the machinery of perception itself are both progressively transformed. (-˜depersonalization is marked by a feeling of being unreal, disembodied and floating or like a puppet or robot-™ - Faceless?)
Posted by robin at December 23, 2004 02:22 PM