Baconnotations

[Monday 10 November]

More theory? I just went through an excerpt from Daniel W. Smith's excellent introduction to Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Quite a lot of interesting things architecture-wise, so without further ado, here is my super-condensed version (whereas the discussion on Kant is interesting, I don't think it applies to my project, so I've simply cut it out):

The first trajectory concerns the concepts used: not "What does it mean" but "How does it function".

Deleuze frequently returns to the three simplest aspects of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the contour that separates the two—which taken together form a “highly precise system” that serves to isolate the Figure in Bacon’s paintings...

But a first level of complexity immediately intervenes: the fields of color tend to curl around the contour and envelop the Figure, but at the same time the Figure itself tends to strain toward the fields, passing through washbasins, umbrellas, and mirrors, subjected to the forces that contort it, that deform or contract it in a kind of “derisory athleticism,” revealing the intensive “body without organs” beneath the extensive organic body (chapter 3)

A second level of complexity appears in the works in which Bacon paints coupled Figures that nonetheless resonate together in a single “matter of fact” (chapter 9). A third level of complexity emerges in the triptychs, where this “matter of fact” includes not only the distances that separate the distinct panels but also the forced movement or rhythms that constitute the true Figure of the triptychs: the steady or “attendant” rhythm; an active, rising, or diastolic rhythm; and a passive, descending, or systolic rhythm (chapter 10). Deleuze not only identifies these three fundamental rhythms found in Bacon’s triptychs, he also shows that even the simple paintings already function like triptychs, with their complex movements and combinatorial variability. A final level of complexity arises with regard to Bacon’s handling of color (chapter 16), and his construction of a properly “haptic” space, since it is primarily through the use of color (relations of tonality) that he brings about all these effects in his works (isolation, deformation, coupling, rhythm...).

...there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a “sensation” directly: either by moving toward abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural. An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye; by contrast, an abstract expressionism, like that of Pollock, went beyond representation, not by painting abstract forms, but by dissolving all forms in a fluid and chaotic texture of manual lines and colors (chapter 14). Bacon in effect followed a “middle path” between these two extremes, the path of the Figure, which finds its precursor in Cézanne. Whereas “figuration” refers to a form that is related to an object it is supposed to represent, the “Figure” is the form that is connected to a sensation, and that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the nervous system. In Bacon’s paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure: it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation. This is Bacon’s solution to the problem he shares with Cézanne: How to extract the Figure from its figurative, narrative, and illustrational links? How to “paint the sensation” or “record the fact”?

This brings us to the second trajectory, which concerns the nature of the “logic of sensation” that constitutes the object of Deleuze’s analyses in this book.

Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational. This linkage between sensation and rhythm can perhaps best be illustrated by means of a somewhat lengthy detour through Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s theory of perception, which forms a kind of complementary text to The Logic of Sensation.

“Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level. This is a ‘logic of the senses,’ as Cézanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes.” In painting, it was Cézanne and Klee who best exemplified this complex relation between chaos and rhythm. Cézanne said that the painter must look beyond a landscape to its chaos: he spoke of the need to always paint at close range, to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities. This is what Cézanne called the world before humanity, “dawn of ourselves,” “iridescent chaos,” “virginity of the world”—a complete collapse of visual coordinates in a universal variation or interaction. Afterward, in the act of painting, the earth can emerge, with its “stubborn geometry,” its “geological foundations” as “the measure of the world”—but with the perpetual risk that the earth in turn may once again disappear in a second catastrophe, in order for colors to arise, for the earth to rise to the sun. Similarly, Paul Klee, in a famous text in Modern Art, wrote of how rhythm emerges from chaos, and how the “grey point” jumps over itself and organizes a rhythm, “the grey point having the double function of being both chaos and at the same time a rhythm insofar as it dynamically jumps over itself.” Translated into Kantian terms, both Cézanne and Klee mark the movement by which one goes from the synthesis of perception (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) to aesthetic comprehension (rhythm) to the catastrophe (chaos), and back again: the painter passes through a catastrophe (the diagram) and in the process produces a form of a completely different nature (the Figure).

Klee’s famous formula echoes through Deleuze’s writings like a kind of leitmotif: not to render the visible, but to render visible. Sensations are given, but it is force that constitutes the condition of sensation. The artistic question then becomes: How to render sensible forces that are not themselves sensible? How to render the nonvisible visible in painting, or the nonsonorous sonorous in music?

...the third line of concepts in Deleuze’s book, which concerns the way in which painters, and Bacon in particular, produce this “logic of sensation.”

...in Bacon’s work, its summit is found in the sensation of color.

...through a kind of deduction of concepts. The first is the concept of the cliché. Clichés, 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, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which we think and feel, are thought and felt, being ourselves one cliché among others in the world that surrounds us.” If Deleuze’s philosophy is a genetic philosophy, the cliché is precisely what prevents the genesis of an image, just as opinion and convention prevent the genesis of thought. In this sense, one of the fundamental questions of Deleuze’s philosophy is, What are the conditions for the production of the new (an image, a thought...)? Hence the essential role of the catastrophe: the condition for the genesis of the image (or the sensation) is at one and the same time the condition for the destruction of the cliché.

How then does the painter pass through the catastrophe and destroy the cliché? This is the role of what Deleuze calls the diagram or graph (chapter 12), a term he derives from the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce.

Although Deleuze admits his indebtedness to Peirce, he rejects the iconic status that Peirce assigned to the diagram, since it tends to conceive the diagram simply as a “copy” or graphic representation of intelligible relations or coordinates. Deleuze, rather, prefers to assign to the diagram a much more strongly creative or genetic role: “the diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.” As Deleuze explains in chapter 13, the diagram acts as an analogical modulator, a conjunction of matter and function.

Painters, Deleuze argues, have their own type of diagrammatism. What he terms a painterly diagram (an operative set of nonrepresentational and nonsignifying lines and colors) is the means by which painters, in their own way, pass through the experience of catastrophe.

The painter’s diagram undoes the optical organization of the synthesis of perception (clichés), but also functions as the “genetic” element of the pictorial order to come. Every painter, Deleuze suggests, will pass through this process in a different manner. “The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe,” he writes, “but it is also a germ of order or rhythm.” Using Wittgensteinian language, Deleuze says that the diagram constitutes a “possibility of fact,” out of which the Fact itself will emerge.

If the summit of Bacon’s own logic of sensation is found in the “coloring sensation,” it is because it is primarily (though not exclusively) through the use of color that Bacon effects his diagrammatic procedures. In this regard, Deleuze identifies two fundamental uses of color in the history of painting. The first, more traditionally, emphasizes relations of value between colors, that is, the contrast of shadow and light (chiaroscuro).

In chapter 15, however, Deleuze will define Bacon’s novelty in a twofold manner that breaks with these earlier conceptions of color and space. On the one hand, in his use of color, Bacon follows Cézanne and Van Gogh in replacing relations of value with relations of tonality, that is, with pure relations between the colors of the spectrum.

Chapter 16 analyzes how the three formal elements of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the contour, the structure—are all constructed by means of color: the internal variations of intensity in the structure, the “broken tones” of the Figures, the colored line of the contour. Thus, each element of Bacon’s paintings converges in color, and it is modulation (the relation between colors) that explains the unity of the whole, the distribution of each element, and the way each of them acts upon the others. This is why Deleuze says that it is the “coloring sensation” that stands at the summit of Bacon’s logic of sensation.