Bacon

I recently visited the Francis Bacon retrospective now showing at the Met, & will be heading back for a second go in a few days. I am by no means an expert on visual art, & am far from qualified to comment with intellectual sophistication on the subject. I can, however, talk without embarrassment about how I feel in front of a beautiful painting. Good art, in my opinion, is art that does something. Just as my poetic tastes draw me toward pieces that are somehow in motion through time, work that refuses to stagnate in its specific context, my eye is consistently drawn to the painters who bring the canvas to life, often with violence. A good friend once had a poetry teacher who placed a rock in the middle of the table during workshops. He challenged his students to "move the rock" with their poems. Some poems made the rock move, & they were the good ones. I like paintings that move the rock. & I love paintings that throw the rock through a plate-glass window, grazing your face, maybe knocking out a tooth or two.

That's why my favorite Bacon painting is the 1962 triptych titled "Three Studies for a Crucifixion," particularly its central panel. I had never before experienced the painting in person, & therefore had no idea how deeply textured the piece was. The mutilated carcass featured in the center panel literally protrudes from the canvas with such violent grotesquerie that many people walking through the gallery avoided it. Wide-eyed tourists crowded around papal portraits & screaming baboons while I camped out in front of this triptych, captivated by the delicacy of Bacon's violence. This is a startlingly meticulous execution of a human emotion that is anything but delicate. Bacon accomplishes with focused detail what Pollock created with dynamic chaos. Standing in front of this painting, I was struck at once by both panic and arousal. Something about the blood spatters above the carcass is ejaculatory, something about the body's position screams of the post-coital slouch & exhalation. & yet there is blood & horrific mutilation, something like afterbirth surrounding the body's legs. & there's the revelation. Seeing this painting brings me to life. It kills me. And it fucks me senseless. Bacon forces you into a corner, draws your eye up, down, sideways & in, always in, to something so beautifully grotesque that you can't help but want to touch it. It's precisely how I imagine the phenomenon of Crucifixion, & yet the experience of the painting is still startling. Bacon tells the truth you always knew but never wanted to admit. There's something highly projective about his work, something that forces the viewer not only to interpret but to create as she perceives the image. Because of his abstraction of form, & because vibrant blankness is juxtaposed with insistent detail in so much of his work, Bacon gives the viewer the power to experience & not just receive. When you can't keep your mind from racing, when you're faced with the onslaught of not one, but several of the most insistent & consuming physical & emotional responses to phenomena, you are undeniably active. & good art, in my opinion, is art that activates its audience. What draws me to Bacon is what draws me to Brecht, to Olson & Creeley, to Joyce, to Godard. Passivity, when it comes to all of those men, is death. Act, engage, participate always in a process, or fail.