After the End of Art: Lecture by Alenka Zupančič at Yale

this lecture is part of a program of intense in critical theory which through a grand fund at Yale University the critical theory collective can bring theorists for multiple seminars on their current work we've had the look over the past few days to think with Alan katsu Pankaj to think through several logics that seem to me the more I listen to her vital for us yesterday the logic of the real and the double today the logic of sexual difference as she has developed it and tomorrow the logic of apocalyptic thinking I want to thank her for coming and sharing so patiently and openly her most meticulous most expansive and most rigorous dialectic alinka coupon church is a researcher at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and arts a member of the Ljubljana School for psychoanalysis and a lecturer at the European Graduate School she describes herself in a really singular way as a Lakhani and philosopher and social theorist the general nouns philosopher and theorist singular eyes by adjectives Lacan Ian and social but just as importantly I think the adjectives are radically expanded by the nouns into a daring proposition if flick-on ian psychoanalysis could be a mode of philosophizing it would become a theory of the social this is I think the wager of professor to poncho cheese writing which has crystallized into several important and well-known books I will give the titles of the English translations although so appeared in Slovenian and many had been translated into other languages as well starting in about 2000 we received like gifts the ethics of the real content lock on the shortest shadow Nietzsche's philosophy of the to why psychoanalysis three interventions the odd one in on comedy and most recently what is sex which sounds like a joke but isn't some elements of which were under heavy discussion in the seminar today the titles of her books should give you a sense of the risk that philosophy and psychoanalysis are thrown into in her work maybe no other Lakhani and writes about Nietzsche I heard her say this offhand yesterday but you learn in reading her Nietzsche book that Nietzsche might be needed to make some of lakhan's insights human subjectivity into ontological claims this is directly I think her project to take psychoanalysis beyond where it is sometimes comfortable in the consultation room the theory book or the classroom that is in the realm of self-knowledge as a tool for potentially better self-knowledge she takes it with help from Nietzsche at one moment now through sex also not so long ago through comedy to a principle of the way things are an ontology our problem is not that we can only know ourselves through a glass darkly so to speak but that we are this glass and everything we do is riven by its two sides as is the social field this thought is tremendously powerful too for taking account of one experience in particular what professor Suppan church calls ontological ambiguity the sense that although you are called this and that you do not identify completely with this or that indeed you cannot because your being what you are is split doubled and non coincident with itself you might say how can I live this way this is a joke and yes soup on Church is a fervent proponent of jokes and she's also a great connoisseur you'll probably hear some tonight the books are full of them and they seem to be a form of speech that is in solidarity with this split state one terrific joke in the sex book goes I don't know where it's from she quoted it in seminar quote there are no cannibals here we ate the last one yesterday clearly the cannibals are opaque to themselves they don't know themselves well enough to see that their full bellies are exactly the sign of their can ability that's not a word DuPont which uses this joke to illustrate something else a very complex negation system in Lakhani and logic but it also illustrates or embodies the strange ontological given she's been working on for many years that being accountable is precisely what you feel this loss of identity and anxiety over your place in the delay between having eaten your friend yesterday and maybe perhaps eating the one tomorrow that might be why they or we need to eat another in the first place this may not be the moment to invite you to the reception after the talk but I do and there will be one if I've given you the smallest hint of the complexity and charm of these systematic and funny philosophical books I will be glad for more I encourage those of you who haven't read them to read them tonight professor - Pankaj will give a lecture entitled after the end of art Hegel with Francis Bacon let's welcome her thank you very much Paul thank you all for coming and I really would like to stress how sincerely honored and happy I am to be able to be here this week - to kind of share my theory as you put it with with the group in the seminar as well as here today it is evening and to emphasize that I really think how extraordinary important the thing that you are doing with this critical theory initiative is I think it's really one of the extremely important also if you bought political act in the times that we live in and it has bearings I think much beyond the the simple limits of the academic discussion so really thank you very much so ok my talk today will be me mostly on Francis Bacon not so much full of jokes actually some pictures will be replacing them I will talk on bacon I'm not as you've also said I'm philosopher whatever Lacanian philosopher obviously I'm not art theorist I don't pretend to approach this in this way I will approach it bacon in my own particular way and a very important part of this way will be looking at the bacons theory or if you want philosophy namely a dis famous interviews that David Sylvester made with him over to more than two or three destinies from 62 to 86 which were published for the first time in 75 and then there were subsequent edition with a couple always setting couple of new interviews added and for me this this really was a kind of discovery a kind of extremely fascinating thing to read and I think it's it is of great importance also it has a great philosophical interest they have the interviews it's not simply explaining his art he thinks the way he thinks art and thinks about what he is doing it's extremely precise and articulated in ways that for me resonate that in and this is a kind of a surprising resonance probably with certain things from Hegel and this will be my starting point so kind of showing this or why do I think so in a mostly focusing on bacon of course okay so let me introduce this Hegelian aspect as you know of course in his lectures on on aesthetics Hegel famously concluded that art has reached its end or most more precisely debt it is for us a thing of the past this is the exact quote he doesn't use the word end and it is most interesting and perhaps also surprising to see to what extent Higa's account of what this actually means what he means by this rhymes with Bacon's view of the situation in which according to him modern artists find themselves and I will read to you a quote from the interviews this is bacon now he says I think we are in a very curious position today because when there is no tradition there were two extreme ends there is direct reporting like something that's very near to a police report and then there is only the attempt to make great art and what is called the in-between art really in the time like ours does not exist end of quote now which for me was quite surprising and impressive is that Hegel uses almost the same terms when he describes how at the end of a romantic art which he also considers to be the culminating point of the movement in which art kind of frees itself from all prescriptions in regard to artistic content in form that is prescriptions springing from different traditions precisely so art finally becomes free of all these prescriptions related to tradition but at that precise moment Hegel says art kind of falls apart or disintegrates into two extremes so now a brief quote from Hegel he says in the course of romantic art disposition developed up to the point at which we had to arrive at an exclusive interest either in contingent contingent externality or an equally contingent subjectivity now what does this mean Hegel relates the former that that is this objective extreme in art so to say today as he puts it imitation of external objectivity in all its contingent shapes that is too meticulous kind of naturalist reproduction or recording and reporting to use Bacon's vocabulary from the previous quote of what is let say out there and he Higa relates the other extreme this liberation of subjectivity in accordance to its inner contingency to what he calls humor but one has to point out that humor delayed and does not refer for Higa simply to something like hilarious jokes but simply to the fact that what is primarily on display in this kind of art that he associates with humor in late romanticism is not this or that object but the witness that the dis period the cleverness the genius of the subject or artists herself so in other word humor does not stand here for a lady with his subject making jokes about various things including herself but whatever material that is being treated in in this way this material is not the subject matter or the content of this art it is not what is on display in it what is on display is actually the humor the witness itself claims here that is to say precisely the subject so it is in this sense it is subjective the subject does not simply joke about things the subject is the joke and Haggar actually uses this quite ingenious expression that which the Subic this he says there is again a very short quote the artist does therefore not produce a finger new start but the subject makes itself seen or displays itself the subject nor zzip to them and what shows itself are the feeling sensations the joke of the subject so you see we have like here in Higa on the one hand this kind of a willful disappearance of the subject in the attempt to do nothing but record things as realistically not realistically as possible like one extreme art and on the other hand we have what ultimately boils down to displaying the artistic genius itself that is to the so attempt to make great art to use what as bacon puts it almost 150 years later so you see that it's I think it's quite interesting how they put things almost in the literally same terms okay so I started with this resonance surprising echoing between Higa and bacon yet this Eric not wins notwithstanding we cannot of course ignore the fact that between Hegel and bacon something did happen and something that pushed so to say the Hegelian dissolution of art into two extremes over its edge we could say and bacon relates the same thing to the discovery of photography in a sense photography with it with its capacity to record and report precisely closed off the objective extreme of art like took it over when eventually and left only one way for art to continue namely following precisely this subjective path as hen's Bacon's suggestion that contemporary art is all about it attempt to make great art now just a brief note I don't have time to go into did but this of course does not mean that for bacon photography can be reduced to this that photography is just about recording fact so it can be much more than this and he actually uses this as to it as you probably know very much in his own art but there is just this point that there is a certain dimension of this recording reporting which makes no sense in this way anymore because of photography kind of occupies this place you can do it better okay let's move on so Blake as dismissive views on abstract art are also a guest very well known he's quite combative and critical and provocative in this confrontation but again what is perhaps less known or less emphasized is the properly kind of dialectical even a Guinean way in which he formulates this abuse and here is again a quote from the interviews he says one of the reasons why I don't like abstract painting or why it doesn't interest me is that I think painting is a duality and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing it always remains on one level it is only interested in the beauty of its patterns and its shape or its shapes we know that most people especially artists have large areas of an undisciplined emotion and I think that abstract artists believed that in this mark that they are making they're catching all these sorts of emotions but I think that quote in that way they are too weak to convey anything I think that great art is deeply ordered I think it's a kind of yeah I think it's an nice interesting quote so what is this duality that painting is for bacon in which accounts for the tangent that makes it captivating that makes its trunk according to him it is the tension or the duality between precisely what he calls recording or the illustration or thing and something else more or whatever in this sense for bacon del it's a traditional old painters were indeed lucky because they were born in into the world where they were expected to do the recording this illustration of thing they thought that they were recording and of course they did something very much more than just recording they at least some of them produced artistic masterpieces yet the kind of inevitability on a necessity of recording was crucial according to bacon also for traditional painters their artistic freedom and what they produced on top of the recording was kind of inseparable from the belief that they or the yet this imperative did they need that they had to record things also illustrating this particular sense and so things no longer stand this way as I said before mechanical means of recording starting with photography have taken over this is a quote from bacon the illustration a thing that painters in the past believed they had to do and then bacon kind of further speculate it's a kind of a possible pair of how he thinks that abstract painters think he says that abstract painters realizing this have thought why not just go on in a free fancy way throughout all illustration in all forms of recording and just give the effect of form and color okay it goes without saying that this particular phrasing of what abstract painters thought is about all in the service of Bacon's particular argument that he's making contrasting he wants to contrast precisely what he sees as this kind of a free fancy play with something that he conceives as a deeper necessity and tangent that gets lost in this move if I was simply kind of give him here so it is also clear of course that for bacon this deeper necessity and tangent or duality cannot be simply regained by going back or ignoring precisely the historical break of modernism in all its aspects including technological ones it cannot be gained by it by saying ok let's continue to record things and in this way the will perhaps reappear until perhaps produce something more unexpected or captivating now baker's ass room was different it was to shift the very focus of recording without the dismissing it's imperative this is how I would put it and I will even with paintings and with quotes try to argue for this and I think this is precisely what makes him so interesting the imperative to record has changed recording is no longer about what artists are expected to do or what they think they have to do even if they do something more or else it is about one could even formulate it in this way what about what they really have to do in Bacon's word for this new type of necessity is obsession he uses this word several times let me being stuck with something in life in reality in others that you absolutely want to record yet still have to find a way of the coordinate of doing it again quote from Bacon abstract painting hasn't worked out because it seems the obsession with something in life that you want to record gives a much greater tension and a much greater excitement then when you've simply said you just go on in a free fancy way and record the shapes and colors you know it's it's again the same kind of argument there is certain obsession with something that you absolutely want to record so the obsession is the key term here obsession with something you want to record and not simply the recording itself perhaps you get stuck in wanting to record make a pure a singular thing that strikes you in something this at least is the imperative kind of Drive that was there for bacon when he painted the ad very extreme of subjectivity like this obsession and darkness with something are kind of subjective modes there emerges a kind of new and perhaps surprising dimension of object this kind of absolute necessity activation of of doing it so I want to record an image is is a phrase a sentence that bacon repeats at many points in during this interviews I wanted to record an image which is a kind of a interesting say to thing to say for a modern painter but what is this image what is the status of this image or appearance as you also term state appearance obviously it is not simply out there to be properly recorded things or let's say people appear all the time I can record how people look or appear to me but how can I record how they really appear this is a kind of a phantom of this question that disturb for for Baker so this image this particular image that he wants to record I would say it's not a natural appearance it can only be a made appearance and again this is his term these are his terms an artifice which renders that in reality which cannot be seen in a direct way yet which we somehow immediately recognize as some crucial element or aspect of this reality and say yes that's it or in the case of a portrait that's him or her this is what kind of drives him not bacon so you see there is a split right there there is a speak between we could say two kind of images there is image okay as a resemblance illustration and there is we could say an image that helped me in the appearance of a person something that I absolutely want to convey record more clearly more exactly more violently he says it is something that we will be able to recognize immediately when we see it but it's still kind of waiting to appear properly speaking it's not kind of there perhaps we could say that it is somehow like a ghost image and the term ghost makes some sense in this context because there is a persistent lack six Lexus in break-ins interviews which rhymes profoundly with the famous hamlet theand dictum the the famous words that he utters apropos of the mousetrap no the the device set up to make a pure boat Hamlet knows only from his father's ghost precisely he says the plays the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king it's this mousetrap device or artifice that should make a pure what this ghostly knowledge is and the idea of setting a trap that will capture the reel of some situation occurs again and again in in bacon in interviews it this is really kind of again a reoccurring lexical he says for instance it's really a question in my case of being able to set a trap with which one would be able to catch the fact at its most living point like an artifice which would bring in life in a more violent way that by simply immediately conveying or recording life or another very short quote he says I think the difference from direct recording through the camera is that as our as an artist you have to in a sense set a trap by which you hope to trap this living fact alive no it did so I think it's interesting that the to think about this what this trap and we'll come back to it also a little bit later so this question of the trap is directly connected to two further questions obviously the question of how to record an image by means other than illustration or mimetic depiction as well as to a more general interrogation of the status of appearance as such and I will start with this later let a letter a little bit hope not too much in a discretion digression wise but I think it's quite essential this is all about as I said before making the appearance again something that he repeats making the appearance this is not meant in the sense of pretense or deceit but literally of working it making it like handwork make the appearance work as process and bacon has disingenuous formulation he says the mystery of painting today is how can appearance be made it can be Illustrated it can be photographed but how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of making okay it's a complicated quote but I think it's quite ingenious it's how do you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of making look it is about making of appearance which means with means others then illustration involving of obviously also this is his words the whole questioning of what appearance is so I think now just to kind of break this speech a little bit this quality of poor appearance is for me at least this is how I see it particularly striking in paintings like the one we have here we're bacon kind of produce a seat this is how I sit as a result of a kind of lack of depth of anything behind the figure okay one can see it we were just talking about it before with Paul as a kind of decay but if you look particularly the picture on the extreme left I think this kind of absence of day I mean it conveys for me for me this idea of appearance that kind of stands on its own but nevertheless has a certain real so this is the triptych from August 1972 and the one could perhaps produce other examples but I think it's a it's an interesting way of Al for me it's kind of a reflection on what is appearance and how to make this mystery of appearance in the to appear in the very mystery of creating again perhaps surprisingly this idea of appearance in this insistence resonates strongly with what he does situate with the way he goes situate what painting is all about throughout his lectures of the statics namely shine on China usually translated in English as pure appearance and also showing sometimes see for pages and pages he girl insist on how painting is all about creating a pure appearance and not about the appearance of disorder thing and he meant he means this kind of appreciate the obviously he says for instance very short quote painting must press on to the extreme of pure appearance that is to say to the point where the content does not matter and when the chief interest is the artistic creation of that appearance you see it's a again for me this resonates a lot with how bacon puts it and for hingle shine is precisely a made appearance in made in the same sense that I was referring to before and also what he calls an unsold appearance which is a most interesting notion I think in the kinkle explicitly states that what is at stake here is not the conformity of the painting with its object like the object it represents but he says to show the correspondence of the portrait object with itself of the painterly object with itself this is what is at stake and this is said to be reality insult for itself so incidentally but I don't think accidentally bacon for his part likes to speak about an image that lives on its own that has a life of its own and I think this is very much his version of an insult appearance precisely it relates directly to also to another aspect of it that I will not go into this familiar notion of objective humor but anyway so the crucial point here in this Guinean idea is the idea that what is at stake is the kind of correspondence or not of the portrait object painterly object with itself and I think that this idea can actually take us very far in understanding how bacon does and thinks art in the art for him is not about how painter is affected by different object simply how she sees them and so on it is also not about making an appearance of this real object it is about making you could say creating precisely a knob appearance as object of how this object really to themselves in this precise sense it is in this precise sense that appearance is insult or has a life of its own so again to cut this a little bit with appearances with pictures I think this could be a way of seeing or understanding Bacon's propensity for series you know the there is this there are all these paintings that begin with titles like three studies particularly triptychs but there are three studies were simply series of paintings so there is this tendency to to produce to paint series of paintings and I think this can be related to what I just said about this logic of appearance and the painterly objects relating to each other and creating the real of it of what it is about with precisely within this movement so this is one example and I will then explain more what I think about it very briefly but still three studies for portrait of Henrietta mariah's this is from 63 then I have another one from a later period which is three studies for self for self portraiture which again has this for me this kind of aspect of appearance what exactly is appearance for this purpose that I was referring to to before so it cannot be kind of good examples of both so these paintings are these appearances do not tell a story bacon is very much insisting on this when he talks about precisely he's asked about why he paints this why series why there are several paintings it's not about telling a story but what does this mean I think it means that we are not dealing with kind of a temporal sequence and with narrating some segments of reality but precisely with the constellation where one picture reflects on other on the other continuously and this is from bacon one picture reflects on the other continuously so figures in the series do not exactly we could say relate to each other day in a sense they are in a sense the same painterly object which relates to itself through this serie structure so it's not between them there is this kind of it's it's like one split in three which moves or split or whatever in three forms it which kind of moves around and produces a certain movement within itself so and it is only through this relation relates to itself through this area structure that the painterly object actually becomes what it is or appears it only appears is created in this very process so that this cereal or tripartite structure is one of the ways I think in which painterly object related to themselves and in doing this kind of trap and convey the real they want to record there is a kind of a construction going on with the Surrey ality as a way for some real to kind of return to its place or find its place in it okay and this consideration will now lead us to measure and this went to the concluding part and not not immediately concluding but the second last part to measure not only the proximity but also the distance between giggling Baker obviously as I already said before there is something like a historical event reality of which Hegel could not have any idea and I think it would be very non Hegelian to claim otherwise so I'm not simply saying bacon is all there in Hagar or disease to please and the same thing there is something which in fact does I think separate them although it's still eliminating to think about this precisely through Hagar like pushing this Hegelian edifice kind of over its edge so bakers are as well as his reflections on art forced to distinguish forces to distinguish between two things which are often taken together or confused I think one is the question of resemblance of recognition of recording of recording and the other the second is the question of illustration or illustrative and non illustrative form and as I've already tried to emphasize the first the question of resemblance recognition recalling recording remains absolutely valid even imperative for bacon one doesn't just go and display one's feelings on the canvas one doesn't present the onlooker with kind of a soup of feelings and sensations that the later can enter and be captivated by I have an interesting quote here but perhaps we'll can come back to this in the discussion painting is an artifice a deeply ordered and disciplined form that works on feelings but not simply with feelings a form for bacon that unlocks as he puts it different layers of sensation and abstract expressionism is on the other side for bacon as a kind of running subjective commentary and exposition of how things make us feel this is how he kind of recordings of our sensation whereas keys insert of form that or a finger that could unlock simultaneously different layers of sensation be more kind of violent in this in this sense also more competitive one aims here at some sort of recognition at producing the effect of es debt it with the kind of paintings but this recognition is not based on what we would call illustration as and of point-by-point correspondence it can come from an image that looks very much distorted for instance bacon says what I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance no there's this kind of movement in in relation to this last quote I think the first thing perhaps not to do is to take this distortion which is obviously very much present in bacon to take this distortion itself as an illustration or as a metaphor of say the distorted world that we live in and actually after the end of the world bacon first exhibited the probably most famous three studies four figures and the base of a crucifixion from forty four this interpretation is precisely what happened it also to some extent what made him famous that namely the deformity was kind of generally seen perceived as in a way reflecting the horrors of the world and this kind of and bacon was very much opposed to this reading and I think very rightly so because what he was after here when I think much deep then this kind of psychology the world was shattered and in its foundation and the question is not it cannot be how do we feel about it but rather how does this affect our rate or capacity one of feeling and perception itself in its own ontological core how does this affect the way we can recognize record recall things at all so something has changed in the very mode in which the word or spirit or life appears to itself or can appear to itself who just simply appear something has changed in the words mode of relation to itself so this is why the painter as part of this relation it has obviously to change her way of doing art but this is not simply about choosing more macabre objects and motives like the one that yeah abandoning bacon like crucifixion meat screams and so on but it's also about the way in which objects now relate to themselves correspond to themselves across a violent interruption of all immediacy precisely in this relation and I think this is the this is the violet point it's not and he also kind of exists he doesn't want to accept this idea that David Sylvester also kind of suggests that his paintings are like there is this horror there is this Wireless at all he really doesn't want to go there and kind of endorse this it's not not there that the violence is situated in like the motifs painting the flesh to the meat and so on for him this is beautiful it's not horrible but again and I will try to explain this what I mean by this violent interruption okay so I said that what what happens is now that the object they can only relate to themselves or correspond to themselves as I said before this painterly object across this violent interruption of all immediately immediacy in this relation and for me for instance an example of this of how he how this is part of the way he makes his art his Bacon's insistence that he prefers to make portrait based on photography's of his models people whom he knew otherwise but when he painted them their portraits he preferred to do it from photographer photography's rather than to have these models like posing directly and the way he explains this is he says the only thing that can bring about the real recognition is an artifice now that is to say an image with absolutely no immediate like direct or organic whatever links with the model whereas this is quote the real model before you in my case inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought back or recollected so in other words you see that there is this interesting paradox that actually interacting with a live person with this life sitting for you kind of inhibit the artifice which can bring real life into the image know that their life is here on two different levels and he goes for this other kind of interrupts way where also as we will see this idea of the trap comes in okay so bacon sustained against illustration is so much part of the I think predominant way in which we in which modern art thinks itself or about itself the we risk missing bacons exceptionality here namely precisely the fact that for bacon distant against illustration is absolutely bound up with the seemingly contrary imperative of recalling recording recognition of recording of an image of the coincidence or correspondence of the painterly object with itself so this imperative is something that he will never give up because it is the very generator of the tangent that for him makes the art interesting and powerful so the fundamental opposition or difference here is rim between illustrative and non illustrative form this is where now things get also very interesting conceptually and this in turn relates to what bacon calls a logical outcome and an illogical way of getting to it in the processes in which he works he wants to do a portrait of a person but not by copying her threat he has to do it yet he also has to do it in a completely illogical way that is without there being any kind of direct continuity between this person or this object in the appearance and the whole question becomes how I know what I want to do but I don't know how to bring it about he keeps repeating again this is one of the phrases that keeps returning in the whole walking process is about that and this the famous in famous chance that he talks about it that I will now focus on a little bit like simply throwing paint at the picture hoping for some accidental way of finding out how to do it enters precisely here sometimes when he throws paint an accidental mark appears the trenders perfectly or shows him a way to go about it what he wants to record he kind of recognize it without this coming from an kind of illustrative descriptive activity and when this happens the effort must be he's a debt of inevitability not simply of some free fancy freedom so again we have this seemingly contradiction aliy mode in which he puts it in other words the idea would be this you are obsessed with something you want to record you paint and draw paint not working by means of illustration you work in a totally illogical way but when you succeed the thing is quote totally real and in the case of a portrait totally recognizable as the person so it's this kind of so the only way to the logical outcome is the illogical way of going about it otherwise logic itself relating of the object to itself is kind of lost in translation it is lost in illustration in copying loses its vigor and becomes something else more or less an exotic okay what exactly is going on here this would be my kind of last question and I will try to make some sense of it why this insistence on resemblance that is not brought about by an effort to create resemblance but by means of illogical non-voluntary non-represented representational Marx actually marked that he for instance recognizes already in Rembrandt he says the way Rembrandt portraits like eye sockets and stuff it's precisely not that you can see mark that are there precisely in this way not in an illustration way this is why Rembrandt is one of his kind of big idols so why does one what does one gain but no by not doing it logically there are two answers I think are better two steps in answering this question first the results the image it's much more powerful in this way bacon is convinced of it it can in one can see the difference actually if this succeeds and it works like this it kind of gets to you in on another level then what through this kind of more representative illustration away and the other step or part of the answer is simply one cannot do it the old way any longer not simply because photography and other available means of technical production reproduction have cut off this path for art but because more importantly the illogical Proceedings preceding marks precisely an interaction a discontinuity a gap that is essential I think this is how I understands Reed bacon here that essential to the new logic of appearance as such precisely understood as the coincidence in the very difference of the object appearance with itself and of course this coincidence is far from obvious or necessary so I think it is here at this point that the whole idea which is so central for bacon of the accident you know that he was also a passionate gambler the moment he sought a picture he went I don't know to Monte Carlo and kind of gamble so the the question of chance is very important for him also in this level and what he called a guided chance again a short quote I want a very ordered image but I wanted to come about by chance the same kind of dedication so the idea says bacon would really be just to pick up a handful of paint and throw it at the canvas in hope that the portrait was there this is and I think we can have from this quote this idea of a kind of radical discontinuity precisely or severus of all and of organic links at the very core of of your object in its ontological Constitution as appearance throw something and the appearance is there yet by saying that this would be his idea I don't think that bacon has in my mind a kind of unattainable ideal but rather something like perhaps his version of the end of art namely this would be the painting to put an end to painting as art because what art as practice consists of according to bacon is precisely the work the dedication the passion that makes this happen it brings about this the quiz he does from the very discontinuity the world that brings about the Queen this craziness of the object with itself from the thin this discontinuity or as a form of this very discontinuity if this work were no longer necessary then we could say perhaps there would be no room or need for art so so did chance this accident only becomes chance and this is important for bacon when you spot it and size it sees it that is when you are able to see in the strange thing that just happened when you did some something this happened out there when you recognize a surprising match with what you want to recorder or surprising way in which you the chose you how to do what you want to do it didn't know how now you have a way at least an indication of it and the work of the end the art proper only we could say begins when something like this happens and quote again it has to do with using your critical faculty where you suddenly see an opening so there is this idea of there is a certain opening something happens here you use your critical need your critical faculty to recognize it because obviously Daniel Silvester asks him at some point okay if you're whatever cleaning lady would just throw paint would this be the same thing I mean yes and no I think for him it's not he's not and I will insist on this he's not just saying this is not about throwing paint and seeing what happens and then preserving let's say aesthetically interesting result it's not at all about this bacon doesn't want to his images even to look like thrown paint he he is quite explicit on this point he want them to look inevitable and kind of bring on precisely this idea this obsession this something that he wants to do to record so this is not with all these insistence on our important role of the accident of the chance in his discourse on this it is not about glorifying simply the accident accident as say the spontaneous or the unconscious or whatever it is about a very disciplined selection which only works with things or accidents that enable him to record the image he wants to record it is not about preserving displaying the accident but more about kind of using it putting it in the service of of some necessity of some obsession like a way out precisely like an opening what one wants to record and I think this is what he calls chance in this strong sense and or guided change which is again this kind of paradoxical notion it has a lot to do with luck obviously with something that happens something that unexpectedly and quite literally enters the picture but it has at least as much to do with the ability to recognize what happened there just not simply didn't do it out of the artistic work to recognize what happened there and that it did happen one thing it to happen in being able to also dismiss discard the rest as you probably know bacon was quite famous for allegedly throwing away destroying a lot of good pictures even once they've already sold very well so it was he had this tendency to say this this is too went too far so he would immediately destroy it so it is about recognizing the right accident using that accident working in a most disciplined way to do with its help what you want to do it is also a wave one could say of making something substantial emerge out of this contingency which is basically let's take here so you throw paint or other staff and something happens you use it to work your way back to the appearance you want to make to do the pearance in this sense that I defined before the image or object you kind of want to record so again this going out like throwing out and then working your way back is kind of deeply Hegelian move yet I would say radicalize here by an element of we could say pure discontinuity in Hegel it seems at least according to predominant critical accounts of him we in Ljubljana have some different ideas about this but nevertheless the predominant critical account of Hegel is that the spirit goes out of itself alienates from itself and loses itself in the other only then to come back to itself as if logically necessarily from within this experience of losses is a kind of the electrical move which yeah it's there in Hegel and I would say that what is different now in bacon or what he kind of wants to enforce with how he does things is that there is absolutely no necessity no logic anymore no guarantee that the spirit will find itself again it can simply stay out of itself wandering indefinitely in this ghostly form in the form of a ghost image I think Baker's implicit thesis is that it can only happen that it finds itself again it is a question of chance precisely and of art which is this kind of guided chance and we could perhaps say again using this bacons opposition that he likes to use differently from abstract expressionism which contains itself with recording these ecstatic forms of the spirit it's falling out of itself and kind of airing around in its ghostly form bacon kind of wants to bring it back to itself he wants for it to find its figure we could say and with it of course the very itself to which it has to return this itself it's not simply somewhere in hiding but has to be actually invented created in this very movement we could say the point is precisely to create in the appearance itself the thing that his appearance resembles recalls but which is not simply it has a certain dimension of the real so when he speaks and I am really very close enough to concluding when he speaks of the appearance of how this mystery of the painting is how can appearance be made I think we could say he speaks precisely of the figure of the famous Bacon's figure and here I would go perhaps a little bit against the very very interesting and productive reading the for instance de leurs has a bacon I think there is nothing which is basically the he makes the figure explode precisely by finger that uses figure in order to explode the figure which I think it's the most Hegelian formulation one can find the loss is sometimes much more directly Couvillion that he would like to be but I propose a slightly different reading here I think there is first of all there is nothing obvious let a lot alone easy in making proposing a figure today because if what has no figure and uncountable images of people objects landscapes whatever that we are sank into thanks to whatever visual media and so on there are not really figures in this strong bacon Ian sense the most often recall nothing real or or around hardly so that perhaps we could say that figuration also in the classical this strong but also classical painterly sense of the term does not really need to get exploded it already has exploded and the effort is rather the opposite it is a kind of a task to make to make a figure to bring about a genuine figure and I think this is the dis interesting tension that bacon talks about in which kind of drives his work and particularly in his early work it is often quite striking how we have this idly this is just a way of seeing this but how figures literally kind of strive to appear to form themselves out of and what is often a very dense net of abstract patterns and I have like three its obviously cannot be reduced this but I have like three I think very direct examples of this this one is a study for portrait from 49 this is the famous study after asked us from 1950 and again study after will ask us portrait of Pope Innocent 10 it's 53 so yeah you see this kind of attention if you want or struggle at work here in the de stake of of the figure and the whole reflection of what is within it so we could tell and now this is really the end there is a fundamental discontinuity but there remains attention and at stake is the inscription I would say for bacon of this radical discontinuity and not simply explosion of all continuty because it's a different logic if you inscribe and discontinuity is here in the world tension and because of it or we could say discontinuity appears for all the more violently because there is coming back a recalling a creation of recognizable appearance discontinuity is there because something is returning to its place and discontinuity is observable precisely at the moment stunting returns to its place and not simply perhaps while it's kind of wandering around so in this sense recognition I think itself is a surprise or rather it is the surprise what is surprising is that we recognize something at all okay I think in this is precisely in this sense that bacon will say with humor okay I will finish with something that sounds like a joke but I think it's not he will save it humor but also quite sincerely I'm always surprised when I wake up in the morning even what is more most obvious there is this element of discontinuity at work in it and the surprise that accompanies it okay this is it basically thank you very much oh yes I think I couldn't take a gap between the kind of quartz it's been a longer day effort so it's because of Big Love yes as the figure sort of being a birth out of this surrounding abstraction I wonder if we could return to the first image you showed the way before very first good I think it might be doing something a little bit different it strikes me as very witty series of images particularly in its differentiation of planes mm-hmm because particularly on the left and the right it looks like the figure is sort of posed in a traditional kind of posture for portrait photography and I think that's emphasized by the black campus what could be construed as a black campus behind him maybe something like a photograph but then the sort of spill of blood or paint is on a different plane that sort of resembles the plane of abstract expressionism Holland framed in dollars for more paintings or you know even Jackson Pollock strip paintings and it seems like it's sort of a witty separation of this idea of illustration versus abstraction but then abstraction the sort of paint and the blood is coming out of the figure and that may be the moment of capture of the figure is actually sort of the moment that the mechanism of painting or of this artistic dialectic that you're constructing is sort of revealed in painting itself mm-hmm so that the capture of the figure is the Berthe process and I wonder if maybe these these images are actually sort of doing the philosophical legwork maybe even more poignant Lee than then he constructs in his interviews no this is a this is a very ingenuous remark no I very much I think it's second way of formulating what is going on and also there is at some point in the interviews when he speaks precisely of how obviously he does use the the abstraction in a certain way it's not that he wants I mean he uses it in a way that brings something else out I mean just what you as you said so I think it's also obviously I mean I think if one would have to decide probably one could say that he was a even better painter that he was a philosopher materials but so I am absolutely convinced that there are ways I mean I don't know I really started to work with the the words with the the interview to kind of even find a way of also perhaps some artifice to look to the pictures in a way that would not be some kind of attempt a direct commentary but I think for somebody who is as a gas perhaps probably you are much more trained in this I think this is a way I mean obviously the paintings the pictures themselves are reflection precisely are they I mean this thought process is built into them and it's and this is also what makes it so powerful I think it yeah thanks those very interesting I have two questions or two suggestions for contrast I think both are directed at maybe hearing some more about the role that the real has in the paintings understanding of bacon glass and let's use to contrast so I very much like the description that you gave of the of the series and Baker in which the picture articulates it serves as a continuous reflection upon itself mm-hmm so one way of thinking about this could be that somehow art is very self referential it just returns one dose of pure appearance it's not about the thing anymore depicted but just it circles around itself if you describe it like then it seems it becomes look seems to look similar to other understandings of modernism just returns to its own yeah but it seems to be something else that's going on and I would be interested here here some more about this relation that this type of self reference has maybe to the wheel and another suggestion in the same direction so you were describing the the role that chance has and also the kind of inevitability of the product now we could relate this to to a certain kind of understanding that we find in content and that hiegel also adopts in a certain manner so the artwork appears as natural and then Hegel heads that it's important that's not just appears is not sure but it's made natural so that's the great thing about the artwork but still there's a certain sense in which it's a kind of a traditional requirement that the product of art should have a natural appearance should be some sort of a second nature but now it seems to me that the kind of chance and inevitability that you're tracing there is something else so it's not just a product of spirit then the P is natural again that doesn't strike us in but another form of inevitability and so my sense is again that's something that could be explained in terms of the real so yeah just about kind of contrasting cases that might help us to narrow this down yeah thank you very much no I hope I will be I'm still focused enough to answer this question because it's absolutely crucial and it I brought in this term of the real which I'm kind of working with and on much more in detail in in the seminar which is the real that is not simply equivalent or synonymous with with reality or like the object in this kind of immediate everyday sense of the world and I think that to some extent we can say for for all art not only Modern Art that it actually has whenever it is kind of strong and will art that it has this kind of dimension of drill which is not reducible to the the the simple what is it makes art art it is not the resemblance with the with whatever the even in the kind of traditional art it is always the genetic something more then reveals precisely this reality in a way that is new and that enables to enables okay enables makes it possible for a subject to to conceive this a kind of a as a kind of an with a new object so there is a certain objective dimension which is not reducible to reflection of the objectivity there but which emerges with the very subjective take on this particular reality but which is nevertheless and so then it's the Co question of the real end of what art what is that we recognize and there is obviously this Keynesian questioning there how does it happen that even though we have no firm a priori criteria about what is art how to arrest B how to make art we nevertheless recognize it when we when we see so it's not it's as he put it universality without a concept it's not that we have a pre-established concept and it we apply it and we see okay that it it kind of be only from each work of art we learn what the art what is the object this I think is the the real the dimension of the real that that I'm talking about or at least one part of it another way of putting it would be as you rightly remarked this relating of the the question of the serious and relating of the paintings among themselves or it's not about self referentiality it's not simply about this triple together it's just reflecting upon itself it is precisely about certain the things can only relate to themselves across precisely a certain discontinuity and this discontinuity itself kind of appears as an object or something as something real in the very painting so that they are different I mean I am NOT saying that there is one way in which to describe or define this real but basically for me real or is precisely something about the situation which is not simply or directly visible in it but which nevertheless kind of not really explains it but what kind of gives us the the explains it in the sense that we kind of know what is what the the coordinates of it are and this is why I like this sorry an image or of the mousetrap from from Hamlet because here you have this good image of a real which can never be directly this is what I think interesting really it's not something some hidden reality that needs to be revealed it is only something that could be constructed this is why it's only possible to be there via read a blink of fiction you know there is this mouse it's a play within the play which will catch the produce the real it's not that simply it was harsh harsh it was hidden but it's precisely that the very thing the the core of how the Kingdom of Denmark functions there is about this crime but it's not that we can simply say ah let's eat food on it and eat it there is the only way this is what I want to say the only way not simply to reveal or this real but to inscribe it in the very reality of which it is the real is by redoubling of fish by by artifice and I think this is very much what is going on here in in bacon at least this is how I see it yeah sorry it took me some time to get on my toes I think I can take one more question but then I'm not sure I think it's me thank you so much for this fascinating question the discussion of Bacon's figure which is beyond the Sun of its appearances I keep trying to figure out right for this before first I thought it was Heidegger the arts of truth process which is not reducible to either empirical inventories or subjective gushing no it's Andre Besson and the energy the photographic image in which a true realism would not be reducible to appearance would be something else I thought no people some people joke that that title that that paper from 1945 should be called the oncology what what I think this is about x-rays and images which if you know what bacon was deeply fascinating photograph is usually lousy you're not going to illustrate a matter with a photograph because you can't see the structure and an x-ray image is not going to be particularly clear you need to have some kind of expert knowledge to have to figure out what's going on so I don't this is a comment or question then just how would me do you think that the anatomical image or the x-ray radiograph is an example of no I think it's a it's a very good question and comment in the same thing I think it's absolutely the right question to ask and I think there is something to it I don't have I would have to think about it but it the drinks really when you when you say that is that the way that he used this this and also some other it's one is the x-rays and the other is which is I think related perhaps also to this thing that we were just discussing before the serious it's the the photography's of movement or which kind of will break down the movement into this in which is I guess yeah the definitely yeah related to - to what type of trying to kind of formulate or or say here yeah [Applause] [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 11,111

Rating: 4.8506222 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, critical theory, art, Hegel, Bacon, Francis Bacon, Zupancic, psychoanalysis, painting, philosophy

Id: rF1b2UUaZM4

Length: 80min 23sec (4823 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019