After the End of Art: Lecture by Alenka Zupančič at Yale

This conference is part of an intense critical theory program that, through a large fund at Yale University, the critical theory collective is able to bring theorists to multiple seminars on their current work. We have seen in recent days thinking with Alan katsu. Pankaj to think about various logics that seem to me the more I listen to her vital for us yesterday the logic of the real and double today the logic of sexual difference as she has developed it and tomorrow the logic of apocalyptic thought I want to thank her for coming and share so patiently and openly his most meticulous, broadest and most rigorous dialectic, the coupon church of alinka is a researcher at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a member of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and a professor at the European Graduate School that she describes. herself in a truly singular way as Lakhani and philosopher and social theorist the general nouns philosopher and theorist singular eyes for adjectives Lacan Ian and social but equally important I think that the adjectives are radically expanded by the nouns in a daring proposal if it moves Psychoanalysis Christian could be a way of philosophizing, it would become a theory of the social.

This is, I believe, the professor's bet on Poncho Cheese because of his writings that have crystallized into several important and well-known books. I'll give the titles of the English translations, though. appeared in Slovenian and many had also been translated into other languages, starting in 2000 we received as gifts the ethics of real content locked in the shortest shadow Nietzsche's philosophy of why psychoanalysis three interventions the strange in comedy and more recently What is sex? It sounds like a joke but it's not. Some elements were the subject of intense discussion in today's seminar. The titles of his books should give an idea of ​​the risk to which philosophy and psychoanalysis are exposed in his work, perhaps no other.

Lakhani and writes about Nietzsche. I heard her say this in passing yesterday, but in reading her book on Nietzsche you learn that Nietzsche might be necessary to turn some of Lakhan's ideas about human subjectivity into ontological claims. This is directly. I think his project is to take psychoanalysis beyond where it is. Sometimes she feels comfortable in the office, the theory book or the classroom, which is in the field of self-knowledge as a tool for potentially better self-knowledge, she takes it with the help of Nietzsche, now through sex and not does a lot through comedy. According to a principle of how things are, an ontology, our problem is not that we can only know ourselves through a dark glass, so to speak, but that we are this glass and everything we do is divided into its two sides. , like the social field, this thought.

It is also tremendously powerful in taking into account a particular experience, what Professor Suppan Church calls ontological ambiguity, the feeling that even though you are called that and you do not fully identify with this or that, in fact you cannot because you are the way you are. It is divided into two. and it doesn't match itself, you might say: how can I live this way? This is a joke and yes, Soup on Church is a fervent advocate of jokes and is also a great connoisseur. You'll probably hear some tonight, the books are full of them and it seems to be a form of speech that is in solidarity with this divided state, he says a fantastic joke in the sex book, I don't know where it's from, he quoted it in a quote from the seminar, there are no cannibals here, we ate the last one yesterday, clearly the cannibals are opaque with themselves, they do not know themselves enough to see that their full bellies are exactly the sign of their capacity for power, that is not a DuPont word who uses this joke to illustrate something else, a very complex system of denial in Lakhani and Logic, but also illustrates or embodies the strange ontological fact he has been working on for many years that being responsible is precisely what you feel, this loss of identity and anxiety about your place in the delay between eating your friend yesterday and maybe eating the other one tomorrow.

Maybe that's why they or we need to eat another one in the first place. This may not be the time to invite you to the reception after the talk, but I do and there will be one if I have given you the slightest hint of the complexity and charm of these systematic and entertaining philosophical books I would be glad to have more. I encourage those of you who have not read them to read them tonight Professor - Pankaj will be giving a

lecture

entitled After the End of Art Hegel with Francis Bacon welcome thank you Thank you very much Paul, thank you all for coming and I would really like to emphasize How truly honored and happy I am to be able to be here this week, to share my theory, as you expressed it, with the group at the seminar.

Well, it's evening today and I want to emphasize that I really think about how extraordinarily important what you're doing with this critical theory initiative is. I think it is really one of the most important also if you bought a political act in the times in which we live. and it is related, I think it goes far beyond the simple limits of academic discussion, so thank you very much, okay, my talk today will be mainly about Francis Bacon, not so full of jokes, in fact, some images will replace them . talk about bacon I am not, as you have also said, I am a philosopher, any Lacanian philosopher, obviously, I am not an art theorist.

I don't intend to approach this this way. I will approach it, bacon, in my own particular way and a very important part of this path will be to analyze the theory of bacons or, if you want, the philosophy, that is, the famous interviews that David Sylvester did with more than two or three destinations from '62 to '86 that were first published in '75. and then there were later editions with a couple of new interviews and for me this really was a kind of discovery, something extremely fascinating to read and I think it is of great importance and It also has great philosophical value.

The interest that the interviews have is not simply explaining his art, he thinks the way he thinks art and thinks about what he is doing, he is extremely precise and articulate in ways that resonate for me and this is a kind of surprising resonance , probably with certain things from Hegel and this will be my starting point so I will show this or why I believe it by focusing mainly on the bacon of course okay so let me introduce you to this Hegelian aspect as you know of course in his

lecture

s on Hegel's aesthetics. concluded that art has come to an end or, more precisely, to debt, it is for us a thing of the past, this is the exact quote, he does not use the word end and it is very interesting and perhaps also surprising to see to what extent the Higa's account of what this really means what he means by this rhymes with Bacon's vision of the situation in which he says modern artists find themselves and I will read you a quote from the interviews this is bacon now he says I think we are in a very situation It is a curious position today because when there was no tradition there were two extremes: there were direct reports like something very close to a police report and then there was only the attempt to make great art and what is really called intermediate art in the A time like ours no longer exists end of the quote, what for me was quite surprising and impressive is that Hegel uses almost the same terms when he describes how at the end of a romantic art that also considers the climax of the movement in in which art is freed from all prescriptions regarding artistic content in the form, that is, prescriptions arising from different traditions, precisely so that art is finally freed from all these prescriptions related to tradition, but in that precise moment Hegel says that art crumbles or disintegrates. at two extremes, so now a brief quote from Hegel says that in the course of the disposition of romantic art it developed to the point where we had to come to an exclusive interest either in a contingent contingent externality or in an equally contingent subjectivity .

Now, what does this mean Hegel? The first relates that this is this objective extreme in art, so to speak today, as expressed by the imitation of external objectivity in all its contingent forms, which is too meticulous a type of naturalistic reproduction or recording and report to use the vocabulary Bacon's previous quote from what is said around there and Higa relates the other extreme of this liberation of subjectivity according to its internal contingency with what he calls humor, but it must be noted that humor is delayed and is not For Higa, it simply refers to something like hilarious jokes but simply to the fact that what is mainly shown in this type of art that he associates with humor in late romanticism is not this or that object but the testimony that the period, the intelligence, the genius of the subject or the artist himself, in other words, the humor.

It does not depict a lady here with the subject of her making jokes about various things including herself, but any material that is treated in this way, this material is not the subject or content of this art, it is not what is shown in it. what is shown is actually the humor that the witness himself states here, that is, precisely the subject, so in this sense it is subjective, the subject does not simply joke about things, the subject is the joke and Haggar actually uses this rather clever expression. What the Subic says, there is again a very short quote, the artist therefore does not produce a new beginning but the subject makes himself seen or shows himself to the subject or approaches them and what is shown are the sensations of the feeling. joke of the subject, so you see, we have like here in Higa, on the one hand, this kind of deliberate disappearance of the subject in the attempt to do nothing more than record things in the most realistic way possible, like an extreme art, and on the other hand, we have what ultimately comes down to showing artistic genius itself, i.e. trying to make great art to use what Bacon says almost 150 years later, so I think it's quite interesting how they put things almost literally in the same way.

The terms are fine, so I started with this surprising resonance between Higa and Bacon, but this Eric does not win, even though we cannot, of course, ignore the fact that between Hegel and Bacon something happened and something that pushed, for so to speak, the Hegelian dissolution of art towards two extremes. about its limit we could say and Bacon relates the same with the discovery of photography in a certain sense photography with its ability to record and inform precisely closed the objective end of art as if it finally took over it and left only a path for it.

Art must continue, that is, following precisely this subjective path, as did Hen Bacon's suggestion that contemporary art is about this. He tries to make great art. Now just a quick note. I don't have time to go deeper. But this, of course, does not mean that for Bacon. Photography can be reduced to this: Photography is simply about recording facts, so it can be much more than this and he really uses this as you probably know a lot about his own art, but there is a point where there is a certain dimension of this recording report that no longer makes sense in this way because photography occupies this place, you can do better, okay, let's move on, so Blake, like dismissive opinions on abstract art, is also a well-known guest , is quite combative and critical. and provocative in this confrontation but, once again, what is perhaps less known or less emphasized is the dialectic itself, even Guinean, in which he formulates this abuse and here again is a quote from the interviews, he says that it is one of the reasons why I don't do it.

I don't like abstract painting or the reason I'm not interested is that I believe that painting is a duality and that abstract painting is something entirely aesthetic, it always remains on one level, it is only interested in the beauty of its patterns and its form or its forms we know that most people, especially artists, have large areas of undisciplined emotion and I think that abstract artists believed that in this mark that they are leaving they are capturing all these types of emotions, but I think that quote from That way it is too. weak to convey anything I think great art is deeply ordered I think it's kind of a yes I think it's an interesting quote, so what is this duality that paint is for bacon, where the tangent is explained What makes her captivating, what makes her trunk?

According to him, it is the tension or duality between precisely what he calls recording or illustration or thing and something else or whatever in this sense. For bacon del it is an old traditional painter who was lucky because he was born in a world where They were expected to record this illustration of what they thought they were recording, and of course they did something much more than just record. At least some of them produced artistic masterpieces, but the kind of inevitability of the need to record was crucial. According to Bacon, also for traditional painters their artistic freedom and what they produced in addition to recording wassomething inseparable from the belief that they or the imperative needed to record things that also illustrated this particular sense and therefore things.

This is no longer the case as I said before, the mechanical means of recording, starting with photography, have taken over this is a quote from Bacon, illustration, something that painters in the past believed they had to do and then Bacon still speculates more, it is a kind of a possible pair of how he thinks abstract painters think, he says that abstract painters realizing this have thought why not continue freely and elegantly throughout all illustrations in all forms of register and simply give the effect of form and color, okay? Needless to say, this particular formulation of what the abstract painters thought is in service of Bacon's particular argument that he is contrasting: he wants to contrast precisely what he sees like this kind of free fantasy play with something that he conceives as a deeper necessity and tangent that would be lost in this movement if he would just give it here, so it is also clear, of course, that for Bacon this necessity and tangent or duality deeper cannot be recovered by simply going back or ignoring precisely the historical rupture of modernism in all its aspects, including technological ones, you cannot win with it by saying ok, let's keep recording things and in this way maybe they will reappear until perhaps producing something more unexpected or captivating now the baker's room was different, it was changing the same focus on recording without discarding it is imperative that's how I would say it and even with paintings and quotes I will try to defend this and I think this is precisely what makes it so interesting the imperative to record has changed recording is no longer about what artists are expected to do or what they think they have to do even if they do something else or it could even be formulated this way what about what they really have What to do in Bacon's words for this new type of need is obsession, use this word several times, let me get caught up with something in life, actually, in others, that you absolutely want to record, but you still have to find a way to coordinate to do it again, Bacon quote, abstract painting has not worked. because it seems that obsession with something in life that you want to record creates a much greater tension and a much greater emotion than when you just say it, go on freely and elegantly, and record the shapes and colors that you know are.

It's the same kind of argument again: there is some obsession with something you absolutely want to record, so obsession is the key term here, obsession with something you want to record and not simply the recording itself, maybe you get stuck on the desire to record, to make a Cigar, something singular that draws your attention to something, this at least is the imperative kind of impulse that was there for Bacon when he painted the advertisement. Very extreme subjectivity, like this obsession and darkness with something, are a kind of subjective modes, a kind of new emerges. and perhaps a surprising dimension of the object, this type of activation of absolute need to do it, so I want to record an image.

It is a phrase, a prayer that Bacon repeats at many moments during these interviews. I wanted to record an image that is a kind of It's interesting to say something for a modern painter, but what is this image? What is the status of this image or appearance? As you also call state appearance, obviously it's not there just for things to be properly recorded or let's say people show up every time. This is a kind of ghost of this question that disturbs Baker, so this image, this particular image that he wants to record, I would say is not a natural appearance, it can only be a made appearance and again this is his term , these are its terms, an artifice that turns into reality that which cannot be seen directly, but which we somehow immediately recognize as some crucial element or aspect of it. reality and say yes, that's it or in the case of a portrait it's him or her, this is what drives it, not the bacon, then you see there's a divide right there, there's a conversation between we could say two types of images, there is an image. it is fine as an illustration of resemblance and there we could say an image that helped me in the appearance of a person something that I absolutely want to convey record more clearly more accurately more violently he says that it is something that we will be able to recognize immediately when we see it but it is still waiting for appear properly speaking, it is not there, perhaps we could say that it is in some way like a ghost image and the term ghost makes some sense in this context because there is a persistent lack of six Lexus at rest. -ins interviews that rhyme deeply with the famous hamlet theand dictum the famous words he pronounces regarding the mousetrap not the device created to make a pure ship Hamlet only knows from the ghost of his father precisely he says the works the thing in which I will catch the king's conscience.

It is this mousetrap device or artifice that should clarify what this ghostly knowledge is and the idea of ​​setting a trap that captures the reel of some situation occurs again and again with Bacon in interviews. It is really a kind of recurring lexicon, he says, for example, in my case it is really about being able to set a trap with which the fact can be captured at its most vivid point, as an artifice that would bring life in a more violent way. than simply broadcasting or immediately recording life or another very short quote, he says. I think the difference with direct recording through the camera is that, as an artist, in a sense you have to set a trap by which you hope to catch this living fact alive no, he did it, so I think it's interesting to think about this , what is this trap and we will come back to it also a little later, so this question of trap is directly related to two more questions, obviously, the question of how to record an image by means other than illustration or mimetic representation , as well as to a more general question about the state of the appearance as such and I will start with this later, let's leave a letter, I hope it is not too much to your discretion.

As for the digression, but I think it's quite essential, this is all about, as I said before doing the appearance again, something that he repeats by making the appearance, this is not in the sense of pretense or deception, but literally of working it so that it is as if it were a work done by hand. work as a process and the bacon has a false formulation, he says that the mystery of painting today is how you can make the appearance, you can illustrate it, you can photograph it, but how can you do this in a way that you capture the mystery of appearance within the mystery of doing the right thing?

It's a complicated quote but I think it's pretty clever it's how you capture the mystery of appearance within the mystery of making seem it's about making appearance what it means with others so illustration that involves of obviously also these are his words all the questioning of what is appearance, so I think now, to break a little with this discourse, this quality of bad appearance is for me, at least that's how I see it particularly striking in paintings like the one we have here, we are a kind of product of bacon. a seat, that's how I feel as a result of a kind of lack of depth of anything behind the figure, okay, you can see, we were talking about it before with Paul as a kind of decay, but if you look particularly at the image on the far left I think that this type of absence of the day, I mean, conveys to me this idea of ​​appearance that stands on its own but that, nevertheless, has a certain realness, so this is the triptych from August 1972 and perhaps it could produce others. examples, but I think it's an interesting way of Al for me, it's a kind of reflection on what appearance is and how to make this mystery of appearance appear in the very mystery of creating again, perhaps surprisingly, this idea of ​​appearance in this The insistence resonates strongly with what he situates with the way he situates what painting is about throughout his lectures on static, that is, shining in China, usually translated into English as pure appearance and also shows a times see pages and pages.

The girl insists on how. painting is about creating a pure appearance and not the appearance of disorder and he meant that it refers to this type of appreciation, obviously it says, for example, a very short quote, painting must go to the extreme of pure appearance, that is, to the point where the content does not matter and when the main interest is the artistic creation of that look, you see, it is again for me, this resonates a lot with how Bacon puts it and for Hingle Shine it is precisely a look made in the same sense. to what I was referring to before and also what he calls an unsold appearance, which is a very interesting notion, I think in kinkle it is explicitly stated that what is at stake here is not the conformity of the painting with its object as the object it represents, but him. says to show the correspondence of the portrayed object with itself of the pictorial object with itself this is what is at stake and it is said that this is reality insult to itself by the way, but I don't think that accidentally Bacon likes to talk about it a picture that lives on its own, that has a life of its own and I think this is very much his version of an insulting appearance, precisely with it it also directly relates to another aspect of it that I will not go into this familiar notion of objective humor. but anyway, the crucial point here in this Guinean idea is the idea that what is at stake is the type of correspondence or not of the object portrayed with the pictorial object with itself and I think that this idea can really take us very far in understanding how bacon works. makes and thinks art in art for him it is not about how the painter is affected by different objects, simply how he sees them, etc., it is not about making an appearance of this real object either, it is about making, one could That is, create precisely a knob. appearance as an object of how this object really for themselves in this precise sense is in this precise sense that appearance is an insult or has a life of its own so again, to cut this a little bit with appearances with images, I think this could be a way of looking at or understanding Bacon's propensity for series, you know, there are all these paintings that start with titles like three studies, particularly triptychs, but there are three studies that were simply series of paintings, so there is this tendency to produce to paint series of paintings and I think this may be related to what I just said about this logic of appearance and pictorial objects that relate to each other and create the real that is precisely what this movement is about, so This is an example and I will do it. then I explain more what I think about it very briefly, but there are still three studies for the portrait of Henrietta Mariah, this one is from '63, then I have another one from a later period which is three self-studies for a self-portrait which again has this for me this kind of aspect of appearance what exactly is appearance for this purpose that I was referring to before?

So they can't be good examples of both. So these paintings are these appearances they don't tell a story. Bacon insists a lot on this when he speaks precisely about this. They ask him why he paints this series, why there are several paintings, it is not about telling a story, but what does this mean? I think it means that we are not dealing with a kind of temporal sequence and narrating some segments of reality, but precisely with the constellation where one image is reflected in the other continuously and this is bacon, one image is reflected in the other continuously, so the figures in the series do not exactly relate to each other in a certain sense, in a certain sense they are equal pictorial objects that are relates to itself through this serial structure, so it's not between them, there's this kind of it's like one divided into three that moves or divides or whatever in three ways, that moves and produces a certain movement within itself, so and only through this relationship relates to itself through this structure of area that the pictorial object really becomes what it is or appears, only appears, is created in this same process, so this cereal or tripartite structure is one of the ways I think. pictorial object related to themselves and by doing this kind of trick and conveying the real that they want to record, there is a kind of construction going on with the reality of Surrey as a way for something real to return to its place or find its place. okay and this consideration will now lead us to measure and this went to the final part and not to an immediate conclusion but to the penultimate part to measure not only the proximity but also the distance between Baker, who is giggling, obviously, as already I said before, there is something like a historical reality of which Hegel could have had no idea and I think it would be very un-Hegelian to claim otherwise, so I am not simply saying that in Hagar there is bacon or disease toplease and the same thing there is something that in fact I think separates them, although it is still eliminated to think about this precisely through Hagar, as if they were pushing this Hegelian edifice to the limit, so that the bakers, like their reflections on art , they are forced to distinguish forces to distinguish between two things that are Often taken together or confused, I think one is the issue of similarity of recognition of the recording of the recording and the other, the second is the issue of illustration or illustrative and non-illustrative form and, as I have already tried to emphasize the first, the question of similarity. recognize remember record remains absolutely valid even imperative for the bacon one does not go and show the feelings of it on the canvas does not present the viewer with a kind of soup of feelings and sensations in which he can enter and be captivated. an interesting quote here, but perhaps we can return to this in the discussion painting is an artifice a deeply ordered and disciplined form that works with feelings but not simply feelings a form of bacon that unlocks, as he says, different layers of sensation and abstract expressionism is on the other side of Bacon as a kind of subjective commentary and exposition of how things make us feel, this is how herecordings of our sensations, while keys are inserted so that or a finger that it could simultaneously unlock different layers of sensation, be more violent in this sense, also more competitive, one aims here at some kind of recognition to produce the effect of is debt. with the type of paintings but this recognition is not based on what we would call illustration and point-by-point correspondence it can come from an image that looks very distorted for example bacon says what I want to do is distort the thing far beyond appearance , but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance, there is no this type of movement in relation to this last quote.

I think the first thing perhaps not to do is to take this distortion, which is obviously very very present in Bacon to take this distortion in itself as an illustration or as a metaphor for the distorted world in which we live and, in fact, after of the end of the world, Bacon exhibited for the first time probably the most famous three studies, four figures and the base of a crucifixion. Starting at forty-four, this interpretation is precisely what happened and, to some extent, what made him famous, that is, the deformity was generally perceived as a reflection of the horrors of the world and this type of bacon was opposed a lot to this. reading and I think quite rightly because what I was looking for here when I think much more deeply, then this kind of psychology, the world was shattered and at its foundation and the question is not, it cannot be how we feel about it, but more well how this works. affects our rhythm or capacity for feeling and perception itself at its own ontological core, how does this affect the way we can recognize, record, remember things, so something has changed in the very way that the word, the spirit or life appear to themselves or can appear to themselves who simply appears something has changed in the way the words relate to themselves, which is why the painter, as part of this relationship, obviously has to change his way of making art, but it is not simply about choosing more macabre objects. and motifs such as yes, abandoning bacon like crucified meat, screams, etc., but it is also about the way in which objects now relate to themselves, correspond to themselves through a violent interruption of all immediacy precisely in this relationship and I think this is the is the violet point, it is not and he also exists, he does not want to accept this idea that David Sylvester also suggests that his paintings are as if there is this horror, there is this wireless connection at all, he doesn't really want to go there and endorse this, that's not where the violence is situated, like the motifs that paint flesh on flesh, etc., to him, this is beautiful, it's not horrible, but again I'll try to explain this is what I mean. this violent interruption okay, so I said what happens now is that the object can only relate to themselves or correspond to themselves as I said before, this pictorial object through this violent interruption of all the immediate immediacy in this relationship and For me, for example, an example of how this is part of the way he makes his art, Bacon's insistence that he prefers to make portraits based on photographs of his subjects, people he knew otherwise , but when he painted their portraits, he preferred to do it from The photographer likes photography instead of having these models posing directly and the way he explains it is that he says that the only thing that can achieve real recognition is an artifice now, that is, an image without any immediate, direct or organic link. with the model, while this is the actual model that you have before you, in my case it inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be retrieved or remembered, in other words, you see that there is this interesting paradox that, in reality, interacting with a living person with this life sitting for you somehow inhibits the artifice that can bring real life into the picture, he knows that his life is here on two different levels and he opts for this other type of interruption where also, as we will see, This idea of ​​the trap comes in well.

Therefore, Bacon's argument against enlightenment is such an important part of the, I think predominant, way in which modern art thinks about itself or about itself that we risk losing Bacon's exceptionalism here, to know, precisely the fact that, for Bacon against the illustration, it is absolutely linked to the apparently contrary imperative of remembering, recording, recognizing, engraving, an image, of the coincidence or correspondence of the pictorial object with itself, so this imperative It is something he will never give up because it is the very generator of the tangent that for him makes art interesting. and powerful, so the fundamental opposition or difference here is the border between illustrative and non-illustrative form.

This is where things now also become very interesting conceptually and this in turn relates to what Bacon calls a logical result and an illogical way of arriving at it in processes. The one he works on wants to make a portrait of a person but not by copying his threat, he has to do it but he also has to do it in a completely illogical way, that is, without there being any type of direct continuity between this person or this object in appearance and all the question becomes how do I know what I want to do but I don't know how to achieve it, he keeps repeating again this is one of the phrases that keeps coming back throughout the process of walking it's about that and this is the famous opportunity for him to speak That, which I'm going to focus on a little bit now, like just throwing paint at the image in the hopes of finding some accidental way to figure out how to do it, comes in right here sometimes when you accidentally throw paint.

Mark perfectly shows the trends or shows him a way to do it, what he wants to record, in a way he recognizes it without this coming from a kind of illustrative descriptive activity and when this happens, the effort must be he is a debt of inevitability, not just a little freedom of fantasy, so again we have this seemingly contradictory way in which he puts it in other words, the idea would be: you are obsessed with something you want to record, you paint and draw, painting does not work through illustration, You work on it in a totally illogical way, but when you achieve it, the thing is totally real and, in the case of a portrait, totally recognizable as the person, so it is like that, the only way to get to the logical result is the illogical way to do it, otherwise logic itself relates. from the object itself is lost in translation it is lost in illustration in the copy it loses its vigor and becomes something more or less exotic well, what exactly is going on here?

This would be my last question and I will try to understand why this insistence on resemblance, which is not achieved by an effort to create resemblance, but by means of illogical, non-voluntary and unrepresented representations, Marx actually marked that he, for example , recognizes already in Rembrandt, he says, the way that Rembrandt portrays like the eye sockets and stuff, it's not precisely that you can see marks that are there precisely in this way, not in an illustrative way, that's why Rembrandt is one of his great idols, so why does one win, but not by not doing it? Logically there are two answers.

I think two steps are best to answer this question first. The results. The image is much more powerful. In this way, Bacon is convinced of it. You can actually see the difference if this is successful and works like this. in some ways it takes you to another level, then through this type of more representative illustration, the other step or part of the answer is simply that it can't be done the old way anymore, not simply because photography and other media available techniques production reproduction have cut off this path for art, but because the most important thing is that the illogical procedures that precede precisely mark an interaction, a discontinuity, a gap that is essential.

I think this is how I understand Reed Bacon here, what is essential to the new logic of appearance as such, precisely understood. as the coincidence in the very difference of the appearance of the object with itself and of course this coincidence is far from obvious or necessary, so I think it is here at this point that the whole idea that is so central to Bacon of the accident that you know that he was also a passionate gambler, at the moment when he was looking for a photo he went, I don't know, to Monte Carlo and bet, so the question of chance is very important for him also at this level and what he called a guided chance again it was a short time. quote I want a very organized image but I wanted it to come out with the same type of dedication so the idea says bacon would actually be to just take a handful of paint and throw it on the canvas in the hope that the portrait would be there this is and I think that we can have from this quote this idea of ​​a kind of radical or severe discontinuity of everything and of organic links at the very center of its object in its ontological constitution as appearance throws something and the appearance is still there by saying that this would be its idea, I don't think bacon has in my mind some kind of unattainable ideal but rather something like perhaps his version of the end of art, that is, this would be painting to put an end to painting as art because what does art consist of? as a practice according to bacon it is precisely the work the dedication the passion that makes this happen this causes the questionnaire that makes from the discontinuity itself the world that causes the Queen this madness of the object with itself from the thin this discontinuity or as a form of this same discontinuity if this work was no longer necessary then we could say that perhaps there would be no place or need for art, as well as chance, this accident only becomes chance and this is important for bacon when you detect it. and size sees it, it's when you can see in the strange thing that just happened when you did something that happened out there when you recognize a surprising coincidence with what you want to record or the surprising way you chose it. how to do what you want to do I didn't know how now you have a way at least an indication of it and the work of the end the art itself we could only say begins when something like this happens and quote again it has to have to do with the use of your critical faculty where you suddenly see an opening, so there is the idea that there is a certain opening, something happens here, you use your critical need, your critical faculty to recognize it because obviously Daniel Silvester asks you at some point, okay? regarding any cleaning lady would just throw paint, would this be the same?

I mean, yes and no, I think it's not like that for him, it's not like that and I'll insist on this. He's not just saying that it's not about throwing paint and seeing what happens and then preserving. let's say an aesthetically interesting result it's not at all about this bacon he doesn't want his images to even look like thrown paint he is quite explicit on this point he wants them to seem inevitable and somehow provoke precisely this idea this obsession this something that he wants to record , so it is not with all this insistence on our important role of the accident of chance in his discourse on this, it is not simply about glorifying the accident as the spontaneous or the unconscious or whatever says.

It is a very disciplined selection that only works with things or accidents that allow it to record the image it wants to record. It is not about preserving the visualization of the accident but rather about using it and putting it at the service of some need. obsession as an outlet precisely as an opening what one wants to register and I think this is what he calls opportunity in this strong sense or guided change which is again this kind of paradoxical notion, has a lot to dowith luck, obviously with something. that something happens that unexpectedly and literally comes into the picture but has at least as much to do with the ability to recognize what happened there just didn't do it outside of the artistic work to recognize what happened there and that it was like that One thing happens is being able to dismiss also discard the rest as you probably know that bacon was quite famous for supposedly throwing away destroying many good images even when they already sold very well, so he had this tendency to say this, this went too far, so that would destroy it immediately, so it is about recognizing the right accident, using that accident, working in the most disciplined way to do with its help what you want to do, it is also a wave that could be said of making something substantial arise of this contingency, which is basically let's take here, you throw paint or other personal and something happens, you use it to get back to the look that you want to have to make the look in this sense that I defined before. the image or object that you want to record, so again, going out like throwing it away and then going back to work is a kind of deeply Hegelian move, but I would say that radicalizing here through an element of, we might say, pure discontinuity in Hegel, seems at least At least according to the predominant critical opinions about him, we in Ljubljana have some different ideas about it, but nevertheless the predominant critical explanation of Hegel is that the spirit leaves itself, alienates itself and loses itself in the other, only then to return to himself as if logically, necessarily from within this experience of losses is a kind of electric movement that is there in Hegel and I would say that what is different now in bacon or what he wants to impose with the form There is absolutely no need, there is no longer any logic, there is no guarantee that the spirit will be found again, it can simply remain outside of itself, wandering indefinitely in this ghostly form in the form of a ghost image.

I think Baker's implicit thesis is that it can only happen that they meet again is a matter of chance precisely and the art that is this kind of guided chance and maybe we could say again using this bacon opposition that he likes to use differently of abstract expressionism that limits itself to recording these ecstatic forms of the spirit is falling from itself and is venting in its ghostly form. The bacon wants to bring him back to himself, wants him to find the figure of him, we could say, and with him, of course, the same one he has to reach. returning this in itself is not simply hidden somewhere but actually has to be invented created in this very movement, we could say that the point is precisely to create in the appearance itself that which its appearance reminds but which is not simply has a certain dimension of the real then when he speaks and I am really very close to concluding when he speaks about the appearance of what this mystery of painting is like, how it can be made to appear, I think we could say that he speaks precisely of the figure of the famous Bacon figure and here It would perhaps go a little against reading that is very, very interesting and productive, for example, de leurs has bacon.

I think there's nothing, it's basically him making the figure explode with precisely the finger that the figure uses to explode. figure, which I think is the most Hegelian formulation one can find, loss is sometimes much more directly Couvillion than it would like to be, but I propose a slightly different reading here. I think that, first of all, there is nothing obvious and much less. It is easy to propose a figure today because if what has no figure and countless images of people, objects, landscapes, whatever it is that we sink into thanks to any visual medium, etc., there really are no figures in this strong sense of bacon, Ian, most of the time they don't remember anything. real or or around hardly, so perhaps we could say that figuration also in the classic, strong but also classic, pictorial sense of the term does not need to be exploited, it has already exploded and the effort is quite the opposite, it is a kind of a task to do, to make a figure, to create a genuine figure and I think this is the interesting tension that Bacon talks about, what kind of impulses drive his work and, particularly in his early work, it is often quite surprising how we have this idleness.

This is just one way of looking at this, but how the figures literally strive to look like they are formed from what is often a very dense network of abstract patterns and I have like three, obviously it can't be reduced, but I have like three. Think of very direct examples of this. This is a study for a portrait from '49. This is the famous later study that we were asked for in 1950 and again the later study will ask us for a portrait of Pope Innocent. 10. It's 53. So yes, you can see this kind of attention if you want. or struggle at work here in the play of the figure and the complete reflection of what is within it so that we can say it and now this is really the end there is a fundamental discontinuity but the attention remains and what is at stake is the inscription that I would make let's say for the bacon of this radical discontinuity and not simply explosion of all continuity because it is a different logic if it is inscribed and the discontinuity is here in the world tension and because of that or we could say that the discontinuity appears in an even more violent because there is a return. a memory of a creation of a recognizable appearance.

The discontinuity is there because something is returning to its place and the discontinuity is observable precisely at the moment that the stunting returns to its place and not simply perhaps as it wanders, so in this sense, I think that recognition in itself is a surprise or rather it is the surprise what is surprising is that we recognize something at all okay I think in this it is precisely in this sense that bacon will say with humor okay I will end with something that sounds like a joke but I think it is not him I will keep it with humor, but also, honestly, it always surprises me when I wake up in the morning, even more obviously, there is this element of discontinuity in the work and the surprise that accompanies it.

Well, this is basically it, thank you very much. a lot, oh yeah, I think I couldn't leave a gap between the type of quartz, it's been a longer day's effort, so it's because of Big Love, yeah, like the figure is kind of the birth of this surrounding abstraction . I'm wondering if we could go back to the first image you showed the way before the first one well I think I might be doing something a little different. It seems to me to be a very ingenious series of images, particularly in its differentiation of mm-hmm planes because it is particularly visible to the left and right. as if the figure is posed in a sort of traditional posture for portrait photography and I think that is emphasized by the black campus, which could be interpreted as a black campus behind him, maybe something like a photograph, but then the type of blood or paint spill. it's on a different plane that resembles the plane of abstract expressionism that Holland framed in dollars for more paintings or, you know, even Jackson Pollock's nude paintings and it seems like it's kind of a clever separation of this idea of ​​illustration versus abstraction , but then the abstraction A kind of paint and blood comes out of the figure and that can be the moment of capture of the figure, in reality it is a kind of moment in which the mechanism of the painting or of this artistic dialectic that you are constructing is revealed in the painting. itself mm-hmm, so capturing the figure is Berthe's process and I wonder if perhaps these images are actually doing the philosophical groundwork, perhaps Lee is even more moving than he constructs in his interviews. very clever comment no, very, I think it is a second way of formulating what is happening and there is also at some point in the interviews when he talks precisely about how obviously he uses abstraction in a certain way, not that he wants to I mean that he uses it in a way that highlights something else, I mean what you said, so I think it's also obvious, I mean, I think if one had to decide, you could probably say that he was an even better painter than him. was a philosopher, but I'm absolutely convinced that there are ways, I mean, I don't know, I really started working with the words of the interview to even find a way to maybe also some artifice to look at the images in a way that wouldn't be kind of an attempt at a direct comment, but I think for someone who is like a gas, you might be a lot more qualified at this.

I think this is one way, I mean, obviously, the paintings, the images themselves are reflections. exactly they are, I mean, this thought process is built into them and this is also what makes it so powerful. I think so, thank you. They are very interesting. I have two questions or two suggestions to contrast. I think they're both aimed at maybe listening more. about the role that reality has in paintings understanding the glass of bacon and let's use it to contrast so I really like the description you gave of the series and Baker in which the painting is articulated serves as a continuous reflection on itself mm - hmm, so one way to think about this could be that in some ways art is very self-referential, it only returns a dose of pure appearance, it is no longer about the thing represented, but simply revolves around itself, if it describes it Thus, it seems to become appearance.

It seems to be similar to other interpretations of modernism it just goes back to its own thing, yes, but it seems to be something else that is happening and I would be interested here a little more about this relationship that this type of self-reference perhaps has with the wheel and with another suggestion in the same direction, so you were describing the role of chance and also the kind of inevitability of the product. Now we could relate this to a certain type of understanding that we find in the content and that Hiegel also adopts in a certain way. so the work of art appears as natural and then Hegel says that it is important that it not only appears, he is not sure, but that it becomes natural, so that is the good thing about the work of art, but still there is a certain meaning in The fact that it's kind of a traditional requirement that the product of art should have a natural appearance should be kind of second nature, but now it seems to me that the kind of opportunity and inevitability that you're tracking there is something else, so it's not just a product of the spirit, then the P is natural.

Again, that's not surprising to us but another form of inevitability and so my feeling is that it's something that could be explained in terms of the real, so yeah, almost contrasting cases that could help us narrow this down, yeah. thank you so much. Not much, I hope I am. I am still focused enough to answer this question because it is absolutely crucial and I brought up this term of the real that I am working with and in much more detail in the seminar which is the real that is not simply equivalent or synonymous with reality or as the object in this type of immediate everyday sense of the world and I think that to a certain extent we can say for all art, not just Modern Art, that in reality it always has a strong and willful art that has this type of dimension of exercise that cannot be reduced to the simple, what makes art art is not the resemblance to whatever it is, even in the traditional type of art.

The genetic is always something else that reveals precisely this reality in a way that is new and that allows a subject to conceive this as a kind of new object, so there is a certain objective dimension that is not reducible to reflection. of objectivity there but arises with the very subjective vision of this particular reality but which nevertheless is and then is the question of the real Co end of what art what is it that we recognize and Obviously there is this Keynesian questioning about how it happens that, although we don't have firm a priori criteria for what art is, how to stop B, how to make art, yet we know it when we see it, so it's not like he said. universality without a concept is not that we have a pre-established concept and we apply it and see well that it is only from each work of art we learn what the art is what the object is this I think is the real one the dimension of the real thing I am talking about or at least a part of it.

Another way of saying it would be, as you pointed out, this relationship of the question of seriousness and the relationship of the paintings to each other or not is about self-referentiality, it is not simply about this triple set, it is simply about reflecting on oneself, It is precisely that things can only relate to each other through a certain discontinuity and this discontinuity itself appears as an object or something as something real in the same painting so that they are different. I mean, I am NOT saying that there is a way to describe or define this real but basically for me it is real or it is precisely something about the situation that is not simply or directly visible in it but that is nevertheless kind.

It doesn't really explain it, but what explains it to us in the sense that we know what its coordinates are and that's why I like this, sorry, image of Hamlet's mousetrap becausehere you have this good image of something real that can never be directly this is what I think is really interesting, it is not something of a hidden reality that must be revealed, it is just something that could be constructed, that is why it is only possible to be there through read a flicker of fiction, you know that this mouse exists, it is a work within the work that will capture the real, it is not that it was simply hard, hard, it was hidden, but that is precisely the core of how the Kingdom of Denmark works there about this crime, but it's not like we can just say ah, let's eat food in it and eat it, that's the only way, this is what I mean, the only way to not just reveal or this real, but to register it. in the very reality of which it is real is doubling down on the fish by artifice and I think this is largely what is going on here on bacon, at least that's how I see it, yeah sorry it took me some time understand it.

I'm on tiptoe, I think I can answer one more question, but then I'm not sure. I believe it is me. Thank you very much for this fascinating question. The discussion about the figure of Bacon, who is beyond the Sun, about his appearance, I am still trying to decipher correctly. For this, I first thought it was Heidegger, the process of the arts of truth that is not reducible to either empirical inventories or subjective outpouring. No, it is André Besson and the energy of the photographic image in which true realism would not be reducible to appearance would be something else.

I thought no one, some people joke that that title, that that 1945 article should be called oncology, which I think is about x-rays and imaging, that if you know what bacon was, photography is deeply fascinating, it's usually Terrible, you won't go. To illustrate an issue with a photograph because you can't see the structure and an as it seems to me that you think that the anatomical image or the x-ray is an example of I don't think it is a very good question and comment of the same I think it is absolutely correct question to ask and I think there is something in this that I don't have.

I would have to think about it, but really baby when you say that's the way he used this and also a few others. one is the x-rays and the other is the one that I think is related maybe also to this thing that we were discussing before the serious thing, It's the photography of movement or what kind of decomposes movement into this thing that I'm into. I guess yes, definitely yes related to - with what kind of attempt to formulate or say here yes