On Going to See Francis Bacon's Man & Beast with S/Z

The Weaving of Voices

The menacing, never tiring presence of my body. And that, although nobody believes in god any more, everybody believes more and more in man. When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. If it encounters the animal, if it becomes animalized, it is not by outlining a form, but on the contrary by imposing, through its clarity and non-organic precision, a zone where forms become indiscernible. Originally titled Gorilla with Microphones, 1945-1946, revised as Study for Man with Microphones, 1947-1948; Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, 1947-1948, recorded in the studios of French Radio between 22 and November 29, 1947, to be broadcast 2 February 1948, banned on 2 February 1948. No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modelled, constructed, or invented anything, except in order to extricate himself from hell. The Figure is the body without organs (dismantle the organism in favour of the body, the face in favour of the head); the body without organs is flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the forces acting on the body, an “affective athleticism,” a scream-breath. When sensation is linked to the body in this way, it ceases to be representative and becomes real; and cruelty will be linked less and less to the representation of something horrible, and will become nothing other than the action of forces upon the body, or sensation (the opposite of the sensational). As opposed to a miserabiliste painter who paints parts of organs, Bacon has not ceased to paint bodies without organs, the intensive fact of the body.

Sequence of Actions

The scrubbed and brushed parts of the canvas are, in Bacon, parts of a neutralized organism, restored to their state of zones or levels: “the human visage has not yet found its face.” Theatre of Cruelty. Theatre of Brutality. Canvas as stage. Here too intervenes (besides the auditory language of sounds) the visual language of objects, movements, attitudes, and gestures, but on condition that their meanings, their physiognomies, their combinations be carried to the point of becoming signs, making a kind of alphabet out of these signs. Once aware of this language in space, language of sounds, cries, lights, onomatopoeia, the theatre must organize it into veritable hieroglyphs, with the help of characters and objects, and make use of their symbolism and interconnections in relation to all organs and on all levels. Sated with blood and the obscene sight of these two bodies—stripped naked, ravaged and exposing all their organs. Screaming body. In Artaud’s work, the scream is made a visual, physical substance in space. In the first icons of the figure of Christ being crucified, the mouth opens in torment or ecstasy. The pre-eminent images of the scream, for contemporary art, are those painted by Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1895, and by Francis Bacon in the late 1940s. Figure Study II, 1945-1946; Head VI, 1949; Study for a Portrait, 1949.

A Note on S/Z

Waiting outside Claridge’s on a spring day, S/Z is late—as always, then she appears, immaculately dressed—as always, today in her Gilmore Girls-esque school uniform, long black pigtails swinging in rhythm to her stride. The variety of these terms (their inventive range) attests to the considerable labour the discourse must accomplish if it hopes to arrest the enigma, to keep it open. Expectation thus becomes the basic condition for truth: truth, these narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation. This design brings narrative very close to the rite of initiation (a long path marked with pitfalls, obscurities, stops, suddenly comes out into the light); it implies a return to order, for expectation is a disorder: disorder is supplementary, it is what is forever added on without solving anything, without finishing anything; order is complementary, it completes, fills up, saturates, and dismisses everything that risks adding on: truth is what completes, what closes. “Sorry, I’m late,” she says, not meaning it. “That’s OK,” I say, likewise. “But we need to go, we have a timed ticket.” We walk down Bond Street. “Everyone is staring at us,” S/Z says. “Well, you look like a Jewish schoolgirl and I look like an English football thug, so they probably think I am kidnapping you to sell you, human traffic you, white-slave trade you.”

Very Natural Actions

S/Z “needs” a coffee—as usual. We go to the Coach & Horses and I have a swift pint—as usual—while S/Z gets her caffeine kick. We finish our drinks, walk to the Royal Academy and enter. The walls are painted with various dark shades—grey, maroon, green, blue. The first thing that catches my attention is the herringbone coat in Bacon’s Figure Study II, 1945-46. That old poof COULD paint. I have been to at least fifteen major Bacon exhibitions over the years, but this is something special. I enjoy looking at art with S/Z, we separate, come together, discuss, take the piss. The emphasis on the beast in Bacon is important. Replication of bodies: drawing: hallucinated. The model is subjected “freely” (that is, in conformity with a code: hallucination) to the manipulations of desire (“every capricious notion,” “in every pose”). In fact, the preceding drawings are already hallucinatory: to copy a pose of Velázquez’s, to imagine an unusual gesture, is to indulge in controlled doodling, to manipulate the desired body according to “fantasy” (hallucination). Following the realist notion of art, all painting can be defined as an enormous gallery of hallucinatory manipulation—wherein one does with bodies as one wants, so that gradually they fill every compartment of desire (which is what happens bluntly, that is, exemplarily, in Sade's tableaux vivants).

Transformation As Game

I stand there in the photograph and cup my hands in front of my mouth I vomit into my palms I vomit and then the sick leaks between my knuckles and that’s the image—that is the image—that is the image of George Dyer just before he died, the day before Bacon’s first major retrospective  at the Grand Palais in Paris fifty years earlier. And S/Z manifests this in her writing, the deterritorialization of desire, of bodies, of violence—even of history, even of literature—and their reterritorialization in a textual alterity of erotics and surrealism. The entire series of spasms in Bacon is of this type: scenes of love, of vomiting and excreting in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs in order to re-join the field or material structure. Bacon often said that, in the domain of Figures, the shadow has as much presence as the body; but the shadow acquires this presence only because it escapes from the body; the shadow is the body that has escaped from itself through some localized point in the contour. And the scream, Bacon's scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth. All the pressures of the body.

The Disturbed Replication

And then there are the correspondences that I never really noticed at first and that are pure coincidences of minds, conjunctions of genius, edging the Real, rimming the postmodern for all its worth: He took me gently by the elbow and pushed me along the hallway—don’t you want me to take off my shoes? I exclaimed—into an empty room with a single wooden chair lying on the floor, like it had been kicked onto its side. The windows were all boarded over with sheets of stained plywood. There was a single naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling, its dim light illuminating the patterned beige wallpaper which was torn in places and peeling off the walls. The place reeked of something unpleasant, I didn’t know what, but it smelled of bleach and the meat market—dead animal flesh—and I could see mould growing in the corners. By the time we got to Bacon’s last painting, Study of a Bull, 1991, oil, aerosol paint and dust on canvas, we were both experiencing sensory overload. We stepped into the courtyard, I rummaged in my bag to extract my phone and make cursory notes of my thoughts. I turned to look at S/Z uncharacteristically quiet. Like the screams of the popes taken from the image of the nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, her mouth formed a perfect O—but this wasn’t fear or pain, this was astonishment. The very existence of difference which generates life and meaning; the ultimate honour is not death but that the classification of death and life should be broken off. Both Bacon and S/Z transgress classification. For both, this object is the human body, the recounting of topological transgressions of this body. The antithesis of inner and outer: abolished. The underneath: empty. The chain of copies: interrupted. The contract of desire: falsified, unfulfilled, deterritorialized.