The problem with the Francis Bacon exhibition in Hugh Lane is that it kindof confirms everything I suspected I didn't like about the painter. Ambitiously staged with many works on loan from private collections and museums, especially the Tate, the exhibition also makes use of the vast store of research materials, photographs and drawings held by the gallery.
Okay, so I started at the wrong side, and was harried around by impatient stewards and guards from my point of entry on (despite entering more than 20 mins before the advertised closing time, wtf?) but I'm sure I'll have at least one more chance to see this show again before it closes. Major Props to the curators who seem to have dissected entire working practice down into its constituent parts, making up the pieces of the puzzle from torn and modified photographs, drawings and reproductions torn from art books.
The first thing that started to bother me was the type of transference we were supposed to feel by looking at certain images in this context. Was looking at the Muybridge repros different here than it was when I leafed through the copy of The Human Figure in Motion held in the Library in college. In both instances the impetus was Bacon, but whereas originally I was drawn to the images on their own terms, here I felt I was being called to infer from these images something latent which would find its real expression in the paintings which are held tantalisingly at bay in the inner rooms of the exhibition. Maybe if the exhibition had only included those Muybridge photographs (whose intended orig purpose was more scientific than artistic) and those photographs which Bacon commissioned as working material. It gets onto much shakier ground when it starts displaying Old Master reproductions.
Having spent four years in art college as a painter I know full well the need and value of surrounding yourself with work that interests and influences you, hell its this impulse that has led to this blog. But it troubled me when I spent a few minutes once again admiring a Michaelangelo drawing, but once again I felt like it was being proposed that I dwell on these as though they were the raw materials of Bacon's art as opposed to the endlessly compelling works of art they themselves are. I don't want to digress too much into Ways of Seeing territory here, but the torn reproductions and smudges of paint that adorned these drawings, in this instance seemed an insinuation of ownership of some kind. It reminded me of the reservations expressed by my art history lecturer and, I'm sure, many more people over the display of the artist's studio on permanent display in the same gallery. Contained in a chilling central chamber, the studio is preserved in detailed accuracy as a holy relic, just as the artist left it, like the bedroom of a deceased child. The preservation makes the studio mystical, displaced from its context, it appears as an apparition of 80's london in its ghostly Hirst-Like vitrine.
In fact we reach the point, when we see the paintings finally, that they seem so easy. This limb from Michaelangelo, this one from Muybridge and this blurred face from a personal snapshot. The look of paintings has never felt more, well, assembled. All of a sudden, the recurring compositions feel more like laziness, as if the painter has found an easy armature onto which he can easily assemble his collage of influence. Even the bravura painting, which had been what I admired most about Bacon, seems easier due to predetermination, not to mention, paling next to the example set by Titian in the previous room.
Bacon's professed appreciation of a young, up-and-coming Hirst before his passing seems more obvious now. Like Hirst, Bacon is more about Punchlines maybe. His paintings seem more illustrative and conceptual than painterly and exploratory. Maybe it is in this light that we should see them. In truth, his appropriation of all this stuff seems a lot less icky in the context of appropriation art such as Sherrie Levine or Glenn Ligon, its just that I find it hard to come to Bacon as a queer artist. For although he operated outside of artworld orthodoxy for most of his career, Bacon never feels like an outsider now. Anyway, if anyone actually reads this blog at least yet, this is one where I'd love some comment box action.
