BACK TO BACON

I went back to the Francis Bacon Five Decades in its last week. Noticeably, my emotional response was muted now the startle reflex had faded, and I found the early work the more interesting.

The first painting you see, on its own in a small entry room, is the 1933 Crucifixion. It quite overwhelmed me on first viewing, and I actually got a bit teary. The guide (we were on a early entry tour and were the only two) noticed, I think, and I was half embarrassed to be so unsophisticated yet half proud that at least I had some feelings left.

I had been overcome by the transparency, the evanescence of existence, the fading of animus, and the horribleness of the exaggerated suspension, but it was when I fixed on the three ribs that I became so visibly affected. Ribs invariably define the carcass. Perhaps it is just that they are so recognisable or more likely they outline a precious cavity and it is they themselves, the ribs, which are the machinary of the most elemental of the life forces - inhalation of exhalation. Little wonder the breath is the focus of much meditative technique.

Then there's the religious connotation of course, to crucifixion I mean. But Bacon's focus was on the incredible cruelty of man to man rather than sacrificial lamb.

On the other side of the entry wall the Odessa Steps Massacre - Battleship Potemkin - was screening high on one wall so we could all see again, and again, the nurse's scream that so affected Bacon (Head series), and later Whiteley.





The young Whitely spent time with Bacon as Wendy Whiteley recalls below (25 minutes admittedly, although quite interesting ones I think, covering much of what Bacon was about, technically and personally)




"Bacon didn't change what he did all that much ... "



Head I (1947-1948) shows a head with both human and animal features, the boundaries blurring.

From the catalogue: "For the philosopher Gilles Deleuze this slippage between animal and human in Bacon's work cannot be resolved: "This is not an arrangement of man and beast, nor a resemblance; it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility ... the man who suffers is a beast, the beast who suffers is a man."" This was the one painting which stirred me most this visit.

And then there was the dog - Study for a running dog, 1954.

The blurred head and feet, suggest more than movement (and maybe he wasn't very good at heads, and feet, and hands, and genitals, never seen). What initially felt like menace, a slinking dog in the gutter, became, the longer I looked, a sad and lonely outcast creature in the sewers and drains of the gutters of life. Self Portrait I ?

Blurring movement interests me, along with changing the (extremely limited) time frame in which we operate (as say in Koyaanisqatsi) in its capacity to change perception and perspective, unmasking the unseen, changing emphasis, and refocusing interest.

I've tried catching my dog at different speeds. Here are two. The first photo was shot using a slow shutter speed with the camera above and following the dog walking. The effect is of a dog walking along its own time tunnel in space, the past behind and its future beyond.

The second is because I like it.