london belongs to me

We must look at the concept of rhythm as a sense underlying all perception - an idea with a philosophical, cultural and more recently scientific pedigree. As expressed by Michel Chion:

"[...W]hen a rhythmic phenomenon reaches us via a given sensory path - this path, eye or ear, is perhaps nothing more than the channel through which rhythm; reaches us. Once it has entered the ear or eye, the phenomenon strikes us in some region of the brain connected to the motor functions, and it is solely at this level that it is decoded as rhythm"

There is a channelling of rhythms, rhythms which are traits of bodies, of situations (the rooms and cages Bacons figures find themselves in), of states of becoming, and of internal and external tensions within bodies - howls, retches, screams ('I wanted to paint the scream, more than the horror'). Thus, 'Man with Dog'(1953) is making us feel like - better, become; in the D&Gian sense, the animal. And only secondarily to reflect upon the experience. The strokes themselves have a caninity that is not reducible to that which they depict. The act of painting is a becoming-man-dog-painting in which, if the work is successful, the viewer can partake.

This is a very specific way of understanding rhythm. One can sometimes sense it, noting a comparison between ones own movements or bodily state, and a memory of seeing; some other body in similar states or movements. For example, you scratch your head in a certain way, and you realise that is exactly what your father did, or it was a habit, a transmitted tic you picked up from a lover. Now, it would be ridiculously convoluted to say that you had noticed a representational identity between a remembered visual image, and an imaginary external observer's visual image of yourself performing the action. It would very probably not even be true to say that you compared the memory with your own visual image of yourself performing the action. More economical and appealing to say that the identity of the two is an identity of rhythm - and furthermore this similarity is not an external one (for it got from there; to here; by the most esoteric route). It is a fortuitous sign of a plane where our bodies are immense sounding-boards; traversed by vibrations, sometimes singly and onimously, sometimes in groups, and recognizable. Some are fleeting, some move in to stay, all are infectious to some degree.

Insofar as the paintings are apparatuses for channelling these rhythms through the medium of paint, the figuration in Bacon is totally contingent and accidental;. However, insofar as they are necessarily concerned with human feeling, with the human body, the link between a perception of the rhythms of inhabiting the body and its visual representation is a natural one, but is only one element contributing towards the image.

The added appeal of this way of thinking, as well as making sense of Bacon's figuration, is that it reconnects visual art to the body, to the human psyche as shaped by embodiment. The opposite movement from abstract art, which sought to purify it into a sort of mental gymnastics. Bacon railed against this throughout his life.

Two connected questions now suggest themselves: why are Bacon's figurations more successful than those of any naively realist hobby painter, in this 'channelling'; and by what means was it achieved?

It must be Bacon's method of working that makes this channelling possible: becoming possessed by the rhythms he wishes to convey, the painter allows chance to take over. Some voodoo alchemy, allowing him to effect this profound sympathy. What is chance?

By throwing paint at the canvas and desperately trying to 'make something of it', he moves away from an original mental conception of the depiction, through a wilderness of despair. He makes of the body a type of transducer, a assemblage of meat through which vibrate the songs of animal history, the earth, and the trauma of civilizations. There is nothing here of the humanist rhetoric of expression, self-expression. Bacon hated all of that with a vengeance. Equally, there is nothing random;. It is all coaxed, with skill, with dedication. Bacon dedicated his life (and not just in his work) to courting and navigating despair, uselessness and hopelessness, because it was the route to activate chance. In the casino, Bacon heard voices telling him what numbers were going to come up; he left with tens of thousands, and blew it all, he didn't know or care how - it was the process of activating chance that mattered.

Chance is not at all randomness, it is the unfolding of the memories and rhythms of the body, and through it the cosmos, according to an unknown plan(e). Randomness is an irrelevant construct of Reason, immeasurably stupider and less important than chance.

How are these states of 'channelling' achievable? One thinks of Freud's experiments with psychoanalysis, depriving himself of sleep so as to accidentally, through an involuntary automatism, stumble on the secrets of the unconscious. Bacon like to work heavily hungover, allowing things to happen before they made sense.

Here we pause to take a backward glance at cool nihilism, the indifferentists and their conception of art as reflecting something intrinsic about our disaffected age and our place within it - their affected pose of being 'chance observers' of 'random phenomena'. Understanding what chance is, we will not hesitate to denounce them as stylists and poseurs; for what could be further from the unfolding of the body, skilfully coaxed, than this uptight mannered indifference of these pieces, each of which is carefully selected to exude cool untainted air?

Fittingly, I'm too tired to know whether this makes sense any more. As Francis would have said: Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends. Cheerio.