Design And Performance Lab
New ChoreoDesign Project 2006-2007
Suna No Onna
conceptual notes (1)
Francis Bacons's painting is of a very special violence. Bacon, to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters. But these are overly facile detours, detours that the artist himself judges severely and condemns in his work. What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression, For example, a scream rent from us by a foreboding of invisible forces: "to paint the scream more than the horror". In the end, Bacon's figures are not racked bodies at all, but ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of constraint and discomfort. a man ordered to sit still for hours on a narrow stool is bound to assume contorted postures. The violence of a hiccup, of the urge to vomit, but also of a hysterical, involuntary smile. Bacon's bodies, heads, Figures are made of flesh, and what fascinates him are the invisible forces that model flesh and shake it. This is the relationship not of form and matter, but of materials and forces - making these forces visible through their effects on the flesh.
(Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003. From the preface)
(c) dap 2006
Project directors: Johannes Birringer & Michèle Danjoux
Brunel University, West London