– Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body, 1949.
What is it that the K. character says about curtains in RJF project? It’s about the children, replacements for him, miniatures, his mother has inside her:
I’m sure they would imagine themselves exactly as I am… day in, day out, underground…
The only exception being that they have a way out, a door, which will, when the time is right, be held open for them and will shut behind them.
But then, they don’t! And so comes a closer resemblance.
The entry they expect is a doorway on a painting, which hands seize violently and thrust aside to see what’s underneath, because it’s actually a curtain.
Then there’s no way out, at all.
[from page opposite: RJF @ sf: working script]
RJF articulated, around the idea of soap, the myth of human soap and the fact of human soaps in the media, the conviction that, just like the future, just like human nature, there is no escape from representation. What has changed in my thinking regarding representation – easily projected onto the Simulacrum – has changed through my reading of Gilles Deleuze. In other words, doubts have arisen.
The Logic of Sense specifically counters the argument that Francis Bacon – recall the Bacon character from RJF – made representations in his work. The paintings don’t represent the human body, for example. They are not figurative but figural and haptic as well as visual. As Anne Carson puts it in her excellent essay, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Bacon’s answer to clarity is to destroy it with clarity.
What’s real escapes from representation by becoming sensible in the one who experiences it as real: it is real in a sense. A logic of sense works in the gap, bridging the gap, enacting a kind of contraction, between the face of the viewer and the surface of the painting. For the artwork to be called a “monument to sensation” (What is Philosophy?) this logic must be at stake. Sensation, sense, becomes acategorical, detypified. It is no longer locked into the hierarchy of the visual. It follows lines on a body without organs, without the organs that would reorder it, represent it, in the viewer according to a mirror logic of representation in the work.
The new work, for City Art Rooms, the second rendering of RJF, whatever it’s to be called, perhaps Study from the Human Body, incarnates this shift in my thinking. Reduces it. To the point where the work is free of the weight of thought.
