The document discusses Francis Bacon's paintings and Gilles Deleuze's analysis of them. [1] Deleuze argues that Bacon aims to render visible invisible forces that deform the human body through distortions in posture and expression. [2] Bacon uses color and "free marks" made through chance to break from cliches and representation, instead creating a "logic of sensation". [3] Deleuze believes Bacon's work establishes a "diagram" that articulates a virtual reality from which actual experience emerges in a non-representational way through sensation.
The document discusses Francis Bacon's paintings and Gilles Deleuze's analysis of them. [1] Deleuze argues that Bacon aims to render visible invisible forces that deform the human body through distortions in posture and expression. [2] Bacon uses color and "free marks" made through chance to break from cliches and representation, instead creating a "logic of sensation". [3] Deleuze believes Bacon's work establishes a "diagram" that articulates a virtual reality from which actual experience emerges in a non-representational way through sensation.
The document discusses Francis Bacon's paintings and Gilles Deleuze's analysis of them. [1] Deleuze argues that Bacon aims to render visible invisible forces that deform the human body through distortions in posture and expression. [2] Bacon uses color and "free marks" made through chance to break from cliches and representation, instead creating a "logic of sensation". [3] Deleuze believes Bacon's work establishes a "diagram" that articulates a virtual reality from which actual experience emerges in a non-representational way through sensation.
-Shrankhla Narya The task of art is to capture forces. Deleuze says that force is what ultimately makes art abstract. In painting this means "rendering visible forces that are not themselves visible". Deleuze does this through the investigation of the deformations in Bacon's paintings, which are the result of the forces exerted on the immobile Figure. This force lends itself neither to a transformation of form, nor to a decomposition of elements, it reorganizes the body's posture. Deformation is always bodily, static, subordinating movement to forces which give another meaning/understanding to the structure of Bacon's paintings. As an example - as the scream in Bacon's paintings is produced by an invisible force that lies even beyond pain or feeling (and not by an external spectacle/horror), a relation is established between the visibility of the scream and the invisible force. Bacon also renders visibility to forces through his usage of color - each color indicates a force exercised on the corresponding zone of body, thus immediately making it visible. The aim is to paint the violence of sensation, not representation, to paint the scream more than the horror. He paints people in postures of ordinary discomfort and constraint. It is not a taste for horror, but pity that captivates Bacon. Deleuze relates Bacon back to the Egyptians, with his use of the single plane of a close, haptic vision, the contour connecting the form and the ground. But it moves on from there, introducing a catastrophe into this Egyptian image. The form is no longer essence but an accident, maybe as a metaphor to humankind. The haptic unity is broken. Classical conception of painting was that of a framed widow. But what Deleuze calls the 'logic of sensation' works with uncoded 'diagramatic traits', which serve to create pictorial space in bodily terms. Deleuze declares that the painter does not paint on a virgin canvas, instead the canvas is already covered over with pre-existing, pre-established clichs. Clichs, Deleuze writes elsewhere, are anonymous and floating images which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each of us and constitute our internal world. The painter needs to empty the canvas of all these "givens" that are present in it. Even reacting against clichs creates clichs. They work through photographs via the narration of magazines and newspapers. But Bacon doesnt like aesthetic photographs, photos for beauty: he wants photos of function, like x-rays or pictures from photo- booths. He does not think photographs are figurative, they are something, and in this way they compete with paintings, but photos can only maul the image (transform the clich). A photo always remains figurative as a perceived thing. A photo has certitude, but a painting has equal and unequal possibilities on the canvas. Deleuze also talks about free marks that free the painting from figuration: this is the improbable itself. These marks are accidental but chance here is not probability but a type of choice without probability. They are non-representative precisely because they rely on the act of chance (manipulated chance). They are not concerned with the visual image, but the hand of the painter. There is no chance except manipulated chance, no accident except a utilized accident. Thus the painter must "get out of the canvas" (and so out of the cliche), he must encounter all the figurative and probabilistic "givens" the canvas is full of, and battle against them. The painter knows what he wants to do but he doesnt know how to get there: he cannot escape representation or resemblance, but Bacon has a formula: create resemblance, but through accidental and non-resembling means. When making these accidental marks, a brush with a sponge or a rag opens a space, or as Bacon calls it a graph or diagram. It is the emergence of another world. For these marks, these traits, are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random. They are non-representative, non-illustrative, non- narrative. They are no longer either significant or signifiers: they are asignifying traits. What echoes in Deleuzes insistence is that understanding and thinking demand that we go beyond the seeming order and sameness of things to the chaotic and active becoming which is the very pulse of life. The diagram could be seen as a way of articulating the hidden virtual reality out of which the actually experienced reality emerges. And so emerges another world - non-representative, non-illustrative, non-narrative, with only the asignifying traits of sensation. The visual whole ceases to be an optical organization. Within its chaos it carries the seed of the rhythm, the new order of the painting. How a painter embraces this chaos and how he emerges from it defines the path he takes, his tendency and its realization. The abstract painting replaced the diagram with a code. With the abstract expressionism the diagram expresses the entire painting at once, it is directed towards itself, taking the diagram for the analogical flux itself. Bacon walks a middle way, avoiding both the code and its scrambling, not allowing the catastrophe to take over and thus making the Figure emerge from it. Bacon's middle way uses the diagram to constitute an analogical language. It is an analogy (resemblance) that is produced by non-resembling means, through sensation, thus being neither figurative nor codified. To my understanding Bacon uses the diagram as a virtual realm of pure difference, a problematic field in which solutions do not overcome problems but simply actualize them under specific conditions. The diagram, through its chaotic catastrophe, liberates the 3 dimensions of painting (plane, color, body). And then, avoiding the perpetuation of the catastrophe, by intertwining a sensation and a frame, something else can emerge. The possibility of fact becomes the Fact, the diagram becomes the painting. The diagram, if so, acts as a modulator. It is used to break all the figurative coordinates, defining possibilities of fact. The geometry and colors, having been liberated, can then constitute the Figure/Fact, the new resemblance. This way the diagram realized within a visual whole.
References Rajchman John, "The Deleuze Connections", MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000. May Todd, "Gille Deleuze, An Introduction", Cambridge University Press, 2005. Smith Daniel W., "Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation", Translator's Preface in Gilles Deleuze, "Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation", University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Published on net athttp://www.upress.umn.edu/excerpts/Deleuze.html
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