A Catalonian Cosmology: Part Two

Joan Miró (1893 - 1983) - The Constellations (12-22 of 23), 1941


'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.'

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

The Week In Review

Films:

Be Kind Rewind, 2008 - d. Michel Gondry
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, 2007 - d. Sidney Lumet
The Bride Wore Black, 1968 - d. Francois Truffaut
Day for Night, 1973 - d. Francois Truffaut
Death Proof, 2007 - d. Quentin Tarantino
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007 - d. Julian Schnabel
Planet Terror, 2007 - d. Robert Rodriguez
A Scanner Darkly, 2006 - d. Richard Linklater

Television:

Monk: Seasons 1-2

Books:

Miró by Jacques Dupin

Articles & Chapters:

Cannibalism, Senegal, Géricault's 'Raft of the Medusa' by E. G. Grigsby
Delecroix and the Orient by Maurice Sérulaz
Liberty in the Barricades: Women, Politics and Sexuality in Delecroix by M. Pointon
Orient or France?: Nineteenth-Century Debates by Roger Benjamin
Portraying Monomaniacs to Service the Alienist's Monomania: Géricault and Georget by Albert Boime

Exhibitions:

Game On - ACMI
The Medieval Imagination - State Library of Victoria

Music:

Dummy (1994) - Portishead
Portishead (1997) - Portishead
Roseland NYC Live (1998) - Portishead
Blue Lines (1991) - Massive Attack
Protection (1994) - Massive Attack
Mezzanine (1998) - Massive Attack
100th Window (2003) - Massive Attack

Addendum III

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - Monk by the Sea, c. 1809

'Art may be a game, but it is a serious game.'

Caspar David Friedrich

Palimpsest I

With A Little Help From His Replicators

Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) - Untitled, 2002

Eric Doeringer - Maurizio Couldn't Be Here, 2005

The Little Artists - Maurizio Cattelan's La Ballata di Trotsky (The Ballad of Trotsky), 1996


'You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself; and you may say it has always been like that, but now it's entirely a game. And I think that that is the way things have changed, and what is fascinating now is that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all.'

Francis Bacon

A Catalonian Cosmology: Part One

Joan Miró (1893 - 1983) - The Constellations (1-11 of 23), 1941

'And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Addendum II: Hermits, Perverts and Extroverts

In Praise Of Strangers To Normality

Henry Darger (In The Realms of the Unreal, 2004 - d. Jessica Yu)




Robert Crumb (Crumb, 1994 - d. Terry Zwigoff)




Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding (The Mighty Boosh, 2004-2008 . . . )

Claude Monet (1840-1926): Pondscapes

Water Lilies (The Clouds), 1903

Water Lilies, 1906

Water Lilies, 1908

Water Lilies, 1908

Water Lilies, c. 1914-1917

Water Lilies, c. 1914-1917

Jacob Izaaksoon van Ruisdael (c. 1628 - 1682): Cloudscapes

The Ray of Sunlight - c. 1660

Landscape with Church and Village - c. 1665-70

An Extensive Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Village Church - c. 1665-72

Wheat Fields - c. 1670s

Landscape with a View of Haarlem - c. 1670-75

The Shore at Egmond-an-Zee - c. 1675

Trilogies Of Obscene Beauty And Operatic Carnage

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) - Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988

'I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me that belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a non-believer, it was just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.' FB

'Well, of course, you're working then about you're own feelings and sensations, really. You might say it's almost nearer to a self portrait. You're working on all sorts of very primitive feelings about behaviour and about the way life is. . . . If you go to some of those great stores, where you just go through those great halls of death, you can see meat and fist and birds and everything else all lying dead there. And, of course, one has to remember as a painter that there is great beauty in the colour of meat.' FB

'Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal.' FB









'Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon's pity, his only object of pity, is Anglo-Irish pity. . . . Meat is not dead flesh; it retains the sufferings and assumes all the colourings of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, colour, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, "Pity the beasts", but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a "fact", a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to a butcher shop as if it were a church, with meat as the crucified victim.'

Gilles Deleuze

'Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal, and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least were sightless. One was bandaged. The left-hand figure had the hairstyle of a female jail-bird. At shoulder-level it had what might have been mutilated wing-stumps. An inch or two below these there was drawn tight what might have been either a shower curtain or a pair of outsized pajama trousers. Set down on what looked like a metal stool, the figure was trashing round as if to savage whatever came within biting distance. The central figure, anatomically somewhat like a dis-feathered ostrich, had a human mouth, heavily bandaged, set at the end of its long, thick tubular neck.

What that neck might have looked like without the bandage was indicated by the right-handed figure. It had big ears at the corner of its mouth, and was able to open that mouth to an angle of about ninety degrees. It's one visible leg was as much a sofa-leg as an animal leg, and the patch of grass on which it stood was nearer to a bed of nails than to the shaven lawns of Oxford and Cambridge.

Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was if as cornered, and only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level.'

John Russell

'With hindsight, it is evident that the Crucifixion theme in Bacon's art evolved in several distinct stages. First, there are his early attempts to address the subject in largely abstract terms, with the aim of modernising it or giving it a contemporary twist. Second, there is the revolt against the motif, which is seen as nothing but a hollow convention: the figures rise up against it, repudiating it and categorically denying its authenticity. This is followed by a transitional phase in which the theme appears to have been abandoned; but in fact, it returns through the back door, in a different and disturbing guise. The crucified body is 'costumed' as a carcass, a piece of butcher's meat. Golgotha has moved to the abattoir.

In the fourth phase the Crucifixion theme is grafted onto the triptych form. This development is ushered in by Three studies for a Crucifixion, painted in 1962 at the end of an eighteen-year period when the triptych was effectively eliminated from Bacon's repertoire. From the mid-1960s onwards, the format was Bacon's most important vehicle of artistic expression: that he should abandon it again became quite unthinkable. At the same time, the theme of the Crucifixion began to recede into the background. It was as if the subject had dissolved into something more general, as a ground or premise underlying all the subsequent triptychs but no longer requiring explicit mention.'

Wieland Schmeid

God's Butcher And His Unholy Worm

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) - Crucifixion, May 1962


DAVID SYLVESTER: Now, in some of your most recent paintings you've both been using strong background colours and gone back to precise and sculptural sort of forms...Do you have a general desire now to make the form more clear and precise?

FRANCIS BACON: Oh yes, the clearer and more precise the better. Of course, how to be clear and precise is a terribly difficult thing now. And I think that's the problem for all painters now, or at any rate painters who are absorbed in a subject in a figurative thing. They just want to make it it more and more precise; but of a very ambiguous precision.

DS: In painting this Crucifixion, did you have the three canvases up simultaneously, or did you work on them quite separately?

FB: I worked on them separately and, gradually, as I finished them, I worked on the three across the room together. It was a thing that I did in about a fortnight, when I was in a bad mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. And it's one of the only pictures that I've been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink made me feel a bit freer.

DS: Have you been able to do the same in any picture that you've done since?

FB: I haven't. But I think with great effort I'm making myself freer. I mean, you either have to do it through drugs or drink.

DS: Or extreme tiredness?

FB: Extreme tiredness? Possibly. Or will.

DS: The will to lose one's will?

FB: Absolutely. The will to make oneself completely free. Will is the wrong word, because in the end you could call it despair. Because it really comes out of an absolute feeling of it's impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of this, one sees what happens.

DS: Did the actual placing of the figures change while you were doing this triptych, or did you see them before you started painting?

FB: I did, but they did change continuously. But I did see them, and the figure on the right is something which I have wanted to do for a long time. You know the great Cimabue Crucifixion? I always think of that as an image - as a worm crawling down a cross. I did try to make something of feeling which I've sometimes had from that picture of this image just moving, undulating down the cross.

Cimabue (c. 1240 - c. 1302) - Crucifixion, 1287-88


DS: And of course this is one of a number of existing images you've used.

FB: Yes, they breed other images for me. And of course one's always hoping to renew them.

L'après-midi D'une Peinture

Georges Seurat (1959-1891) - Bathers at Asnieres, 1883-84 (retouched 1887)


'There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno's bells, the uncouth shapes and colors which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. In life the miracle doesn't happen, and it is rare enough in art, because great painters have usually created imaginary worlds, outside the range of our ordinary visual experience. But it happens in Seurat's Baignade. As I catch sight of this large canvas at the end of the gallery, framed by a door so that the illusion of reality is increased, I feel that the haze and stillness of summer have at last fulfilled their promise. Time has stopped, everything has become its proper shape, and every shape is in its proper place.'

Kenneth Clark

'Admirers of Seurat often regret his method, the little dots. But the dots are not simply a technique; they are a tangible surface and the ground of important qualities, including his finesse. Too much has been written, and often incorrectly, about the scientific nature of the dots. The question whether they make a picture more or less luminous hardly matters. A painting can be luminous and artistically dull, or low-keyed in color and radiant to the mind. Besides, bow to paint brightly is no secret requiring a special knowledge of science. Like Van Gogh, Seurat could have used strong colors in big areas for a brighter effect. But without his peculiar means we would not have the marvelous delicacy of tone, the uncountable variations within a narrow range, the vibrancy and soft luster, which make his canvases, and especially his landscapes, a joy to contemplate. Nor would we have his surprising image-world where the continuous form is built up from the discrete, and the solid masses emerge from an endless scattering of fine points - a mystery of the coming-into-being for the eye.'

Meyer Shapiro

'Bathing has never been labeled "Monday"; yet its tranquil assembly of men and boys resting against the backdrop of a working factory must have been inspired by the all-male work-stopping rituals of Saint Lundi. The link between bathing and the celebration of Saint Lundi in the 1880s reveals the simultaneous contemporaneity and chronological incongruity (which I will call "anachronicity") of Seurat's social awareness and descriptive practice . . .

By the time Seurat completed Bathing in May 1884, the working class tradition of Monday off was changing. Workers had come to associate its celebration not with resistance to employers or to wives, but rather with the resignation and frustration of admitting to being a worker. During the Second Empire, for example, workers preferred to take off Monday because, unlike Sunday, there was no need to dress up. But, by the 1880s, workers dreamed of escaping from their blue smocks and dressing like the middle class did. Indeed, more and more workers managed to do precisely that: analysis of worker's budgets in the later nineteenth century, shows that an increasingly large percentage of income was expended on leisure-time clothing in order to reduce the sartorial distinctions between the classes on Sunday.

[In] its early stages, Bathing was conceived as a proletarian picture but was transformed into an image of shopkeepers and artisans in the course of the development of the project. In the final canvas, knee-length white cloaks, tabbed leather boots, bowlers, and straw boaters (shopkeeper's garb) were substituted for the blue smocks and casquettes worn by the men in earlier sketches. Seurat updated the subject of his first major painting by replacing a working-class population with members of the ascendant class of the day, the lower middle class . . . '

S. Hollis Clayson