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December 11, 2003
Bacon & Hot Nihilism
One of Francis Bacon's wonderful sayings: he confesses that intellectually he is 'totally without hope', but that his 'nervous system is optimistic'. A far more powerful and encompassing vision than that of 'cool', disenchanted nihilism, which is always such a pose, an outward-projected vision of an etiolated state of mind.
Bacon's is a conception of a meaningless world in which, nevertheless, as an animal, one is subject to the intensities and sensations of the rhythms of perception, and as a human, is drawn to re-produce these rhythms. This is the only sense Bacon was able to make of his own work. Not representation of outward appearance, but a more or less transformed reproduction of blocks of rhythm which would act directly on the viewers' nervous system.
Contrary to first appearances (he was always saying there was nothing to say), there never was an artist so sure not only in his vision, but in his articulation of what he did, and how he did it, and Bacon's ideas repay interrogation. If we are to take these initial comments seriously, would it not make more sense for Bacon to do exactly what he spent his whole life avoiding like the plague - to take the path into abstraction? Surely nothing could better fulfill the criteria of 'acting directly on the nervous system' than, say, a huge striking canvas of bright red. Wouldn't that fit the bill better than Bacon's still partially-figurative pictures? The figurative element of Bacon's work will always remain baffling unless we give thought to this conception of rhythm.
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.
Posted by robin at 04:08 AM | Comments (5)
Bunker Syndrome (teaser)
I thought I'd upload a rough-cut fragment of this project, the real thing to come later. These are from a visit to a derelict underground bunker near Land's End (original purpose unknown). The visit was occasion for reflections on childhood fascination with these deserted structures, and (not unrelated) growing up in the shadow of certain nuclear apocalypse (this also prompted by the recent showing of the film Threads). I have a text...somewhere...to accompany, and also more images. I haven't really looked at the negs since I took the pictures, but I think I'll do something with them now...
I may be transgressing some blog protocol by adding all of these images. But who cares...
Posted by robin at 02:18 AM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2003
Steam & Scalpels
Boiled and bleached bones. White clouds pumping from secret sources.
Fresh from the darkroom, images of the old Royal London Hospital on Whitechapel Rd. taken during an early-morning visit (along with a tour of east end caffs, a superlative birthday treat). One of the few remaining places in London where - especially in the early-morning quiet - with some effort you can still feel the density of london past. On the few small streets that pass through the hospital grounds, ambiguously coded as to their public or hospital affiliation, you are in the grime-saturated Dickensian metropolis via the hyperfictions of Lean's Dickens films and Lynch's 'Elephant Man'.
Unfortunately the Victorian time-tunnel elevated corridors linking the buildings together above these lanes (one corridor inside, one plein air; walkway above), have been securely decommissioned. Still the complex exemplifies the piranesian traits of space desimplified by the slow contingencies of history. Before the day staff arrive, you can clamber up the fire-escapes and down the stairwells with impunity. Vertiginous half-corroded iron platforms from whose apex you look down on endless gormenghastly towers and courtyards, and peek in through grime-frosted windows at comatose rooms awaiting demolition.
The visit is made in search of Joseph Merrick. Across Whitechapel Road from the hospital's main entrance stands the building, now home to a sari shop below and a taxi firm above, where Dr Frederick Treves first paid to visit a freakshow featuring a sensational new 'exhibit' called The Elephant Man. In a small garden square behind the main entrance a statue of Victoria has on its reverse a relief featuring Treves lurking in the background. A tiny museum houses a perfectly-sewn replica of Merrick's hood, immediately bringing to mind Lynch's slow, deliberate zoom into the single square eyehole, into the nightmares of the Elephant Man, filled with puffing steam-monsters, dark smoggy streets, the curse of monstrosity and the lash of human cruelty.
But as it turns out Merrick is only a monstrous sign, avatar and genius loci; of a psychogeographic papilloma. Walking the perplexing labyrinthine passages, crawlways, roofs and courtyards, the in-between spaces that form a negative architectural image of the Royal London, brings on the confusion and want of architectonic calm proper to a structure haphazardly extended many times to house crazy medical technologies that always stay one step ahead.
Everywhere are relics of paradigms overthrown. Getting rid of the past is a never-ending grind. We find discarded piles of 50s minicomputer hardware tangled with bits of iron bedstead. The arteries of long-obsolesced fuel supplies, studded with taps and switches and stubby outlets, still cling to the walls like dead vines. In many places the powers-that-be have given up in exasperation and simply locked the ghosts in, doors never to be opened again save by wrecking-ball.
In salvageable sections, the past is chased systematically from the inside outwards. Where the building has been updated, it is mostly by way of a currettage that leaves the outer crust oily and crumbling but installs a layer of shiny new material on the inner chambers. The interior is the usual decontaminated functional utopia immediately shabbified by contact with the NHS. You could be anywhere.
We make a visit to the small, immaculate museum which devotes a good proportion of its limited space to the history of Joseph Merrick. The curator tells me he is petitioning the more exclusive medics-only Pathology Museum for the return of Merrick's boiled and bleached skeleton, the plastercast of his body, and the model church he built while housed in the Royal London (a german cardboard-cutout kit hyperbolically elevated by Lynch to a Merrick original, a towering monument of innocent imagination). He also confirms (disappointingly) that our earlier attempt had indeed successfully located Bedstead Square, where Merrick was moved after receiving enough public donations to keep him for his remaining days, and in which he spent those days.
In Lynch's film this is where Michael Elphick, in his imposing role as utter personification of brutal human cruelty, brings his cockney guests (including a young Pauline Quirke) to ogle and molest the resident freak. It's all left to the imagination now - all that remains are a couple of bricked-up rectangles which used to open on a corridor leading to the rooms in which Merrick stayed (the actual rooms were destroyed by bomb damage during the war). Modern-day Bedstead Square is made all the less salubrious by the phalanxes of shocking-yellow wheeliebins full of human blood and body fat, sawed-up bones and syringes, and all the other waste mountains that NHS private contractors like to pour into vans to be parked-up in laybys until the cloacal stench disturbs the locals. (Blood-miles, a parallel measure to the green's bugbear 'food-miles'; in the heyday of the Royal London they would have incinerated all the waste on-site, no doubt adding deliciously to the atmosphere).
Years of underfunding have saved it thus far but, obviously too tough for the heritage treatment, the Royal London (according to the curator) is scheduled to be flattened. web-based Elephant Man devotee (site worth a look if only for the Brasseyesque computer reconstruction of what Merrick would have looked like 'if he had been normal' LOL) has been harassing the museum to blue-plaque Merrick in Bedstead Square, unlikely to happen since this old-world Royal London is soon to be erased. There are already signs that the underfunded steampunk fortress is in inevitable transition from just-managing to just Management. Whilst many doors open onto dead rooms, unworthy even of redeployment, others declare that they nurture within unwholesome assemblies such as 'Risk Management Training Schools', fragments of the future arrived too early, flipcharts and handouts awaiting their human counterparts under bare lightbulbs and flaking lead paint.
In the glow of the red light, I serve up via obsolete, messy, chemical process a few monochrome prints, hoping to catch and intensify the feeling I had that morning. The photographs must be printed coal-black, high contrast, pushing the captured light into dark hyberbole, to catch the fleeting half-miraculated vague essence. The sights, smells and sounds of solid-state capitalism not-yet liquidated. Red brick under the grime of centuries. The low slow-motion screech of langurously-swaying iron chains, the faraway tick-tock of a deep-earth occulted pendulum. Despondent resonances faintly echo Dickens' Coketown, distilled essence of the industrial city, "where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness".
Posted by robin at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)