FRANCIS BACON: MOVEMENT, MUSCULARITY, MUYBRIDGE

The powerful and brilliant Francis Bacon exhibit at the MET is coming to a close this weekend.  There are many gripping aspects to Bacon's brush work, but the one that draws me the most is his phenomenal riffs off the stop action  photography of Eadweard Muybridge's close studies of human movement.  In a small painting of blue and grey, a nude male figure stands in a diving pose: arms raised above his head- poised to plunge into the depths of a murky beyond.  The painting is breath taking in its clarity of depth and the lure of the beyond.  The body of the diver is ethereal and mortal, sculpted and dreamlike, a figment of a brush stroke, and a rivetting piece of visualization.  One remains in the wake of the diver's momentum about to plunge into the abyss of oblivion.  Bacon used many of Muybridge's photographs to break down the structure and velocity of movement into its fundamental rhythm.  A figure crouches within a field of matrixed lines, another figure explodes out of an orange canvas constrained by a cage of lines.  All signal a deeper preoccupation with the slowing down of time and decay in Bacon's neural investigations into the nature of motion.

WHY FALLING PLANES REMIND ME OF UN CHIEN ANDALOU

I hate air planes, I hate air travel, I hate even more planes flying into buildings, but what I hate the most is planes falling outside my window twice in a year.  There is no poetry in repetition.  Jean Baudrillard wrote a lyrical, searching book on the nature of catastrophe when planes flew into WTC.  Last week's horror is sheer tragedy of errors.  The 2006 hubristic act of a sports star flying a small plane into an Upper East Side building was a lesson on why the rich and famous shouldnt be allowed to inflict stupidity on Manhattan.  The U.S. Airways landing on the Hudson River was a perfect moment- the impossible finale to the many tales of doomed plane stories.  And now, this wretched story of small lives, big hopes and people following their best instincts, only to collide with fate.

The plane crashed near my building- and with the practiced sprint of the disaster tourist, we were glued to the windows staring out in horror and disbelief: again?  Not possible.  Only in badly scripted movies, or real life.  At some fundamental level, if you live in Manhattan, you cannot care too much.  Like the debauched protagonist of Un Chien Andalou who waits to see a woman get hit by a car, watching with disturbing eroticism the crowd that swells around her fallen body, New Yorkers are dullened into the reality of catastrophe.  It is no fun to be on permanent Orange Alert as New York City was during the Bush administration.  And now, even as planes drop out of the sky, no one alerts the city into a panic of false alerts.  The danger here is not from without, it is from within- from the years of Federal Aviation's deregulation to the present scenario of 25,000 helicopter flights a year over New York City without any systematic control of the skies under 1,100 feet.  This is a Red Alert.  Something must be done now, quickly, before something hits my building next.

FRANCIS BACON and BIOMORPHISM

Disemboweled torsos. An inverted crucifiction. A flayed body with organs spilling out. Eyeless heads and screaming mouths.  These are only some of the diabolical imagery haunting the viewer at the Centenary Retrospective on Francis Bacon’s work being exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Bacon’s work is mesmeric, disturbing.  Drawn together into a dense showcase of screaming popes, withdrawn lovers, and crouching human forms, the work acquires an ecological density that is overwhelming. 

Bacon’s figurative work is profoundly investigative.  The animal like characteristics of his human forms are complemented by the anthropomorphic sensations of his animal works.  Bestiality and compassion are conjoined in Bacon’s visual metaphors.  They are anchored by white lined frames from within which the intensification of emotions explode.  The series of screaming Popes that Bacon painted during his career drive the ferocity of his work towards the feline animality of caged beasts.  One is transfixed by the lurid violence, and made complicitous. In other paintings, crouching male figures hold tensile poses against tight white frames.  In a particularly beautiful little painting a naked man stands poised to dive into a pool or abyss.  His delineated back and thighs hold the audience’s gaze.  These kinetic figures spring with taut muscularity.  They explode through the painterly field – raw, naked, unapologetic. Painting after painting reveals an artist profoundly drawn to the biodegradable aspects of human emotions, the vulnerability of human life.  Hence, bleeding flesh, pink colored exposed mouths, bared teeth, accost the viewer, as if in a zoo.  The teeth beckon. The mouth lure. All the splattered blood and flesh, guts and vomit merge, like the thick impasto of Bacon’s brush work, into the detritus of human decay.

Francis Bacon was preoccupied with biological dissolution, aesthetic erosion. His work scales the extremes of the visual towards the paranoid.  Bacon collected images of bull fights, leaping cricketers, war atrocities, scenes of revolution and wrestling, among others.  He was particularly influenced by the stop action photography of  Eadweard Muybridge, and created many close studies based on Muybridges stop action photographs of athletes and wrestlers.  The work of Sergei Eisenstein was also a key influence in Bacon’s work.  In particular, Bacon drew on the nurse from the Battleship Potemkin to create many vulnerable characters whose chief adornment are the broken spectacles of Eisensteing’s nurse.  Broken spectacles capture the optical distortions of Bacon’s lines, as they veer into impossible postures, and enclose figures in tightly wound compositions.  At another level, the metaphor of Eisenstein’s broken spectacles reworks the expendability of visuality as the price of history.