Head VI

     On Sunday morning, Carolina and I woke up early and got on the bus to NYC so that we could see the last day of Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. For some reason, we hadn’t heard there was such an exhibit until Justin Audia mentioned it to us on Friday evening - thanks Justin. 

     Before leaving for the bus, I decided to bring Rob Halpern’s Rumored Place. Last March, Halpern read for Moles Not Molar, a reading and performance series Justin co-curates with Emily Abendroth. Halpern’s work turned out to be appropriate preparation for a day in the museum looking at Bacon’s paintings. An excerpt from one of Halpern’s prose pieces in the book, ”BESIDE THE FUNERALL OF JOHN DONNE,” haunted me throughout the visit: 

“Snap the fuck out of it he screams and slaps me rocking like some autistic on the bed. Each touch returns like a sentence can’t be parsed. Posts animate wrists. Thoughts spindle down from better brains than this compose you in me. He was gentle with leather. Power’s not a metaphor he says whacking me with the backside of his hand and then quickly asks me if it hurt. A moan rimmed with teeth buried deep in gum mimes the only meaning. Why are you always reaching for your wrist like that. To see if I’m still here. A soft chew floats the room in a nibble where I locates itself inside your mouth. So concentrated a location opens the flow in a bedpost or between. Where we is this brush this friction this abrasive rubbing of unfit worlds without which there’d be no fiction no love.”

Sunset

     Fragments of Halpern’s lines above were reverberating in my ears all day, and Bacon’s work only amplified the volume and intensity. For one, Bacon continually works the trope of the mouth. In an interview with David Sylvester, and in this BBC documentary on Bacon’s work, Bacon mentions that he “always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.” I think Bacon and Halpern suggest that the mouth’s actions shape the world, whether those sounds be, to borrow from Halpern, ”A moan rimmed with teeth buried deep in gum…”, or verbal statements from politicians and religious leaders as in Bacon’s Head VI (pictured above) which derives from his various studies of Diego Velazquez’s Innocent X (pictured below), the pope who reigned from 1644 - 1655. In both cases, the mouth more directly participates (or suffers) in systemic power structures, while Monet’s sunsets deal more with the powers in/of Nature. With this in mind, it’s interesting to see how Bacon’s interest in painting the mouth like Monet painted sunsets begins as an aesthetic move and becomes political after the fact.  

Innocent X

     To turn to Halpern again, “Power’s not a metaphor he says whacking me with the backside of his hand and then quickly asks me if it hurt.” As I was arranging that last sentence, I was reminded of a phrase I overheard another viewer say in one of the galleries — “I feel hurt by it” — but I have no idea if the viewer was referring to Bacon’s work or to something else altogether. With the violence of Bacon’s work surrounding me, it was easy to assume the viewer’s comment was a response to the paintings. In Bacon’s and Halpern’s hands the relationship between power and pain takes an inherent hue. But, Halpern, in “RECONCILIATION, UNDER DURESS,” the final piece in Rumored Place, unlike Bacon (at least the Bacon I’ve seen), points to a place beyond where we are: “So where’s this ‘rumored place,’ he asks, and I’m pointing out beyond the docks, out to rock on the horizon as if the thing out there were already in here with us, screaming — something I’m not doing — ‘there, O there!’” It’s a “rumored place” Halpern’s speaker points to, but it’s “to rock (italics mine) on the horizon.” I can’t help but notice the firmness of the rock when juxtaposed with rumor. I’m not sure if Halpern’s commingling of the concrete with the abstract in this example suggests alternatives to power, or alternative forms of power. Either way, the “as if” in that phrase suggests that the specificity of the “rock on the horizon” may already be with us, or as Halpern says, “in here with us…”, if we would only acknowledge it. Interestingly, Bacon’s work of the late 1970s and 1980s uses arrows, as in a painting like A Piece of Wasteland (pictured below), to focus the viewer’s attention on what’s happening now, because for Bacon, as an atheist, there is only here and now. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything particularly religious about Halpern’s work, so I don’t mean to imply that one can’t point to or suggest alternatives to power without religious faith. Rather, there is simply a difference in attitude towards social engagement. It seems for Bacon his work is akin to saying, “This is what’s wrong.” For Halpern, “This is what’s wrong. Is there an alternative? Yes, I think there is.” Or, perhaps my reading of their work is restricted by my desire for art to more obviously make suggestions. 

A Piece of Wasteland

     What ultimately connects Bacon and Halpern, right now anyway, is their visceral response(s) to socio-political struggle(s). With that in mind, perhaps Bacon’s work does point, in Halpern’s words, “out to rock on the horizon,” but without saying, “Look over here.” Rather, Bacon says, “Look here, you bloody fool.” And by looking here, if we’ve a mind to look with, we should know the “rumored place” is possible, and if not possible, then certainly desired. Bacon’s 1950s Man in Blue paintings refer to a social criminalization of homosexuality in England. The notion of a “rumored place” surely must not have been far from his mind. So, for me to suggest that Bacon’s work avoids suggesting alternatives misses the point. In a painting like Man in Blue IV (pictured below), Bacon illuminates the hypocrisy of authority and masculinity as it becomes clear to viewers who are aware of the cultural repression of homosexuals that the painter is perhaps making a political statement regarding the lack of civil rights protecting sexuality. Bacon need not point to a “rumored place” because it’s clear from the suffocating feeling of the blue in the painting that an “actual place” is necessary. Both Bacon and Halpern are invested in finding that “actual place,” but through different methods of suggestion.  

Man in Blue IV

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Obviously, there’s a lot to consider in terms of Bacon’s and Halpern’s work, and I’ve only skimmed the surface. One thing’s for sure, as I’ve literally and figuratively worked on this post over the past few days, I’ve become much more conscious of how I’m reading what’s around me, and not just paintings or books, but the conditions that make up my day to day. As I write these lines, I’m becoming more aware how “the visual” works and how “the verbal” works. Of course, the printed word is both visual and verbal, but there are, it seems to me, clear differences in how a visual work makes suggestions, i.e Bacon, and how a verbal text like Halpern’s performs that same task. The visual (most of the time?) chronicles what’s here, and it’s up to the viewer to decide where to go with the depictions and ideas in the work. Now that I think of it, much of documentary poetry (Mark Nowak and Jena Osman are two examples) does just that. The verbal has a tendency (oftentimes?) to more consciously point to alternatives, i.e. “rumored places.” I don’t know if I wholly buy the distinction between the visual and the verbal I just made above, but I do hope to further this line of thinking, either here or elsewhere, about how and why visual and verbal texts work the way they do.