#dufu

Joan Halifax

I enjoy reading about artists’ intellectual/aesthetic pedigrees.  When I came across David Bowie’s voracious reading habit, he listed “Conversations with Francis Bacon” as one of his favorite books.  My knowledge of Bacon was limited at best, but I took a chance on the book anyway and am glad to have done so.  The book’s really a reflection on -- among other things -- aesthetics, the interplay of the conscious and subconscious in the creative process, and the role of history (specifically its subjectivities, failures and opacities) on the individual mind and body.  These broad topics of conversation all discussed with Bacon’s work as the spine of the entire collection. 

Although I’m only 1/3 of the way through the book, a passage I came across today really stood out.  It reads as follows:

...I have been accustomed to always living through forms of violence -- which may or may not have an effect upon one, but I think probably does.  But this violence of my life, the violence which I’ve lived amongst, I think it’s different to the violence in painting.  When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war.  It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself.  And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say that a rose or something is violent, but it’s the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint.  (*Emphasis my own.*)

I found fascinating Bacon’s belief that his painting carries specific, capable means to effectively actualize pure violence.  To me, his struggle underpinning the “attempt to remake the violence of reality itself” is one of luminosity.  (Maybe I’m splitting hairs.)  My initial reaction was to relate Bacon’s struggle to that of a poet’s, specifically the process of delivering a poem from its obscure origins of intention to allowing the body of the poem to become as it ought.  I’ve found that the most effective poetics are those that reject obscurity or outright force of intellect and allow the pure body of a poem to rise via linguistic accessibility.  (Ironic perhaps, given how I’m attempting to explain my point.)  East Asian poetics, especially Du Fu, Li Bo and Basho immediately come to mind at masters in this specific craft.  

Nevertheless, without veering too far from Bacon, I think his explanation is a good lesson at allowing the end-result of the image to self-reflexively influence one’s creative approach.  Without proper analysis and understanding of one’s work as a whole, I think the work’s final appearance loses significance, for it negates one of creation’s primary purposes: the rendering of an ideal form.

“露从今夜白，月是故乡明.”

Hung’s Tattoo Parlor