Art and Death

Chris Townsend

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781845116620
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This highly sensitive and beautifully written book looks closely at the way contemporary Western artists negotiate death, both as personal experience and in the wider community. Townsend discusses but moves beyond the 'spectacle of death' in work by artists such as Damien Hirst to see how mortality - in particular the experience of other people's death - brings us face to face with profound ethical and even political issues. He looks at personal responses to death in the work of artists as varied as Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin and Derek Jarman, whose film 'Blue' is discussed here in depth. Exploring the last body of work by the the Kentucky-based photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Jewish American installation artist Shimon Attie's powerful memorial work for the community of Aberfan, Townsend considers death in light of the injunction to 'love they neighbour'.

Chapter 1

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon’s painted self-portraits are unusual as examples of their genre. For much of art’s history the convention for self-representation involves the use of a mirror, from which the artist paints his/her reflection, with the mirror itself often taking a figured role as a metaphor for meditation and self-scrutiny. The most obvious examples of this mise en abyme – a concept which they come to define for André Gide – are perhaps Parmigiano’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c.1524) and van Eyck’s inclusion of himself, painting, in The Arnolfini Betrothal (1434).¹ This convention of the artist representing himself in vivo continued lustily into the twentieth century, checked only by oddities such as Bayard’s Le noyé (1839), where the artist poses as if found drowned and arrayed for inspection in the Paris morgue. It is no accident, I think, that this example of the self-portrait of the artist apparently ex vivo is made, and exhibited, photographically, with a suicide note written on the work’s reverse.

By contrast to this established tradition, Bacon (1909-1992) often painted himself, as he painted almost all his subjects, not from the posing life model but from photographs.² But if the photograph is fundamental to Bacon’s œuvre, it is not in its making present an image of a body that may be transcribed. Rather, its significance lies in the absence of that image, its cancellation, often accompanied by the destruction of the photographic object itself. And in his peculiar and specific use of photographs as the origin of many of his paintings, Bacon raises a series of questions about photography – as one of the dominant media of art in the twentieth century – that relate to mortality. Death, it might seem, is not simply a question of subject matter. With photography as medium, death comes as an operating concept; death arrives embedded in those very uses of time and space that bear the image to us. Hundreds of painters, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Georges Seurat, to name but a few), had used photographs; Bacon’s uniqueness is in his realisation of, and phobic reaction to, the unavoidable and, crucially for him, inaccessible ‘death’ bound up in every image.

Bacon’s employment of found images, from medical textbooks to film stills and the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, is well documented, as is his commissioning from John Deakin of photographic portraits of subjects such as Henrietta Moraes and Isabella Rawsthorne. Bacon also used informal photographic studies in his self-portraits, however, taken most commonly by Deakin, Dan Farson and the artist himself in photo booths. Occasionally, as in Four Studies for a Self-Portrait (1967), the source of the painting is literalised, at the same time as the deliquescent faces transgress both the framing effect of the strip of images and the literalness of their subject. Michel Leiris has suggested that, for Bacon, the photograph was no more than a guideline.³ Nevertheless, I would both agree with Dawn Ades, who remarks that ‘Bacon is not so much using the photograph as attacking it’,⁴ and go much further, in suggesting why this violent attack takes place. Bacon assaults the photographic subject not only because the photograph represents death – a moment of lost time – but because this representation is a death that is beyond his grasp as an individual (a fixing of the self in the order of others). In this chapter I outline Bacon’s attempts at the reclamation of the self through a call to life, a call to be something that precedes subjectivity – Heidegger’s Dasein. In the self-portraits the essence of being that Bacon is trying to reclaim is not, distinctively, his own – that would be to argue for a revelatory, psychological disclosure of truth from the self-portrait that the whole history of the genre teaches us to approach with profound scepticism. Rather, I’d suggest, Bacon uses his self-portraits as another paradigm for the salvaging of essence from object, a strategy that he also deploys in his portraits of other models.

Bacon undertakes this project through representation and through a savaging of the representation that precedes his painting (the photograph) as somehow not enough, and therefore historically an inadequate substitute for painting. The violence that we find both within and against the image in Bacon’s self-portraiture is not so much directed towards its annihilation but, rather, towards ‘getting something out’. I suggest that what Bacon is trying to lay hands on is a form of being, after the manner of Heidegger’s ideas about being and the authenticity of the self, otherwise encased in a photographic moment of death that is alienated from him and within the problematic construct of the stable self-portrait. Bacon’s self-portraits, then, are not authentic declarations of self but, rather, the works of an artist in pursuit of such an authenticity, expressed here through the control over death, that would make him (and his other subjects) ‘a being’. We might, then, concur with the judgement offered by Gilles Deleuze of Bacon’s paintings in general:

Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out and makes visible through the scream. Death is judged from the point of view of life, not the reverse, as we like to believe. Bacon, no less than [Samuel] Beckett, is one of those artists who, in the name of a very intense life, can call for an even more intense life. He is not a painter who ‘believes’ in death. His is indeed a figurative misérablisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life.⁵

We must, however, distinguish Beckett from Bacon here. Though the Irish writer is often aligned with the Irish painter as a figure of existential thought and art, affirming an intensity of life through a textual and dramatic ‘misérablisme’, I would suggest, as does Simon Critchley, that Beckett offers us

[a] paring down or stripping away of the resorts of fable, the determinate negation of social meaning through the elevation of form, a syntax of weakness, an approach to meaninglessness as an achievement of the ordinary without the rose-tinted glasses of redemption, an acknowledgement of the finite and the limitedness of the human condition.⁶

This is something very different from what Bacon is about. Whilst we might compare Beckett’s attenuation of prose to Bacon’s assault on his canvases, which involved a deal of erasure, Bacon’s violence against painting’s visual syntax (if we can allow such a thing) is anything but a pursuit of the ordinary, and cannot acknowledge finitude and limitation unless it is a property of the extraordinary self.

Roland Barthes claims that a condition of the photograph is the coherence between the ‘having-been’ of its subject, what he terms the référence of the image, and its referent, the address to the spectator of what we identify as its subject.⁷ For Bacon, the stable referential subject disintegrates in the translation of the photograph into painting. Far from using it as a ‘mere guide-line’, Bacon’s employment of the photograph both reveals and exploits a failure in the coherence between référence and subject. For Bacon, the photograph is – often literally, in his disdain for its material condition – an object to be destroyed. Bacon’s ludic (and, in their occasional destruction of the painting, sometimes catastrophic) acts of addition and erasure to the representations of the photograph and painted canvas might be understood as aggression directed simultaneously against the clarity of his own discourse as a painter – especially the convention of representing ‘character’ – and against the clarity and fixity of the photograph. Within the studies for self-portraits this assault is effected by the introduction of foreign objects such as dust and dirt, by the use of lacunae and by multiple planes of representation, so that it seems as if the subject of the photograph had moved during a prolonged exposure, leaving too soon or entering the picture too late.

Bacon’s self-portraits shift from the référence of the photograph to a partially-erased, deformed, aporia – a gap in knowledge, a site of doubt, and an impasse, a place from which the subject, and we as spectators cannot easily get out, partly because Bacon makes its limits so problematic in themselves. The brunt of that erasure and deformation is directed against that materiality which most confers identity, individuality and human relation: the face. The thick, still-wet, paint of the image is smeared by rags, smudged and rubbed, partially removed and discarded, partially pressed into the canvas, blurring subject and space; elsewhere the head disappears, evanescent, into an impossible spatial field in the same moment as it is manifested upon it. In other works the head is cut through, reconstituted around conflicting planes of vision, or else the paint that renders it is so insubstantial, so provisional, that the shirt collar appears through its faint flesh haze. Whilst Bacon’s self-portraits are not limited to painting of the face, whilst a similar question of ‘liberation’ from the spatio-temporal constraints of photography is at stake in both the full body self-portraits that I address in my next chapter, and more generally in his portraiture, and whilst death is, I’d argue, an almost overriding universal theme in his œuvre, I want to attend specifically to Bacon’s treatment of the face here – whether his own or the faces of others. This defacement and disfiguring, this negation that seems, paradoxically, to be a step forwards (for the artist, at least), has an important resonance for the development of this study as a whole. It draws attention both to the question of the face and human relation, of community, in particular a relation articulated around the death of the other that is raised by the work of Levinas, and to the idea of the negation that is also a step beyond, and the step that negates itself, that is worked out in Derrida’s Aporias, one of his central texts on mortality.

For Levinas, the other person’s face, presented to us, is the opening to the field of ethical relation. Responsibility – and, as I’ve suggested already in my introduction, that includes both a responsibility for the other in death, and a concomitant political responsibility – emerges from the encounter of one to another, face to face. Levinas introduces his idea thus:

For the presence before the face, my orientation towards the Other can lose the avidity of the gaze only by turning into generosity, incapable of approaching the other with empty hands. This relationship, established over the things hereafter possibly common, that is susceptible of being said, is the relationship of discourse. The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we name face.⁸

The face of the Other (not just any other person, but the Other, the possibility of anyone of a multitude, who we do not, cannot know) turns us inside out; it’s like love at first sight, if we accept that ‘love’, in all its complexity, demands from us not just sentimentality or sex, but ethical practice. Love includes gifts that are, necessarily, forms of sacrifice; love includes actions as well as words. The word that Levinas uses here for the transformation of the gaze, its turning from possessiveness into giving, is muant, a participle of the verb se muer, ‘to turn’, which, as Jill Robbins points out, also implies a turning inside out, metamorphosis, and even a shedding of skin.⁹ We are convulsed into responsibility by something far bigger than any idea we ever had of what our relationship to other people might consist of, of who someone else might be, of how they might simply be versions of ourselves. It is through the face that we deal with others in all their strangeness.

We are brought back here to Anna’s cradling of her dying mistress in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Anna, up to that point, has been the paid servant, her duties exchanged for nugatory reward; now she is ‘convulsed’ (and Bergman, we might add, emphasises the point by having her ‘moult’, shedding her clothes so that her warmth directly touches her former mistress who is now her ‘friend’). Yet we know that Anna’s ‘generosity’ is a gift that cannot be received. Dying, that moment when we might most crave the intervention of the other – an Elisha come to save us, a lover come to die in our place – is the moment when the other can do least for us. The responsibility that comes with love is, at its limit, profoundly irresponsible, for there can be no response to it, no corresponding gesture. It is this complication that is Derrida’s subject, when he observes that all the propositions he can make concerning death, whether negative, interrogative or ‘interro-denegative’, involve a certain negation that is also characterised by the language of stepping beyond.¹⁰ What is on the one hand a limit, that which ‘terminates all determination, the final or definitional line’,¹¹ is also a stepping through. Yet this is a step, which I take, of which I cannot speak, for it annihilates me.

There are profound implications here for our consideration of Bacon’s work. It is not simply a matter of Bacon’s partially exfoliated heads, the skull almost visible beneath the skin – as in his two portraits of Michel Leiris from 1976 and 1978 – nor of a rhetoric of convulsion in the style of his painting. It is not simply a matter that the negation of the object – the photograph’s insistence on ‘this was’ – becomes an affirmative ‘this is’, even in his paintings of the already dead. (Though, as we shall see, that shift of tense is crucial to understanding both Bacon’s relation to the photograph and a wider problem with photography as representational practice within art.) Rather, I want to stress a generosity of violence in Bacon’s work – a strange, contradictory idea, perhaps – but, as Slavoj Ž;ižek has pointed out, there are moments in our relation to the other when smashing his/her face is the necessary thing to do (whether as a matter of politics or representation), and this violence calls into question the limits and the possibilities of Levinas’s ethics.¹² In his violent questioning of the relation of oneself to another individual through the photograph, a relation that includes ‘smashing’ his own face, Bacon phrases for the individual – in an awkward, smashed syntax – the question of relation that is raised in terms of community in Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s photographic series ‘The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater’. Where Meatyard masks himself and his community behind a grotesque, seemingly unbearable stereotype, Bacon wants to shatter the mask of realism that conceals the individual from him. I would suggest that Bacon comes to a different answer because, unlike Meatyard, he cannot pose the question of relation in terms that escape the constraint of ‘the idea of the other in me’ that Levinas proposes as limit in our imagination of the other. Bacon – and this is why I particularly want to examine his relation to the photograph and death in the light of Heidegger’s idea of Dasein – goes beyond (or, rather, behind and before) objectification, beyond (or, rather, behind and before) discourse. But whilst he seems to yearn for an ethical relation to the other, achieved through the repossession of death, its reunification with life, he can imagine and enact this only in terms of individual agency.

The left-hand panel in Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970) is typical of Bacon’s approach to representing the self: it is also characterised by an extraordinary use of ‘unnatural’ colours. The lips are purple, as though glossed by a lurid lipstick. Bacon’s predilection for wearing make-up suggests that this element of the portrait can perhaps be understood as more natural in its unnaturalness than might otherwise be imagined. Escaping ‘realism’ and ‘nature’, the right cheekbone is defined by two swathes of red and blue over a white ground – each broad hook produced by a single protracted gesture of the brush. The red, still wet, has been picked up on a corduroy cloth and printed by two separate, cross-hatching, movements further across the face until it obscures one eye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Francis Bacon
• 2. Damien Hirst – Francis Bacon
• 3. Tracey Emin
• 4. Nan Goldin
• 5. Ralph Eugene Meatyard
• 6. Derek Jarman
• 7. Shimon Attie – Aberfan
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography