The Body without Organs
Yesterday I wrote about Francis Bacon’s pope studies of which one is part of the current show in the Hunch of Venison. Bacon is the main subject in Deuleze’s Logic of Sensation, but there were other paintings in the exhibition that helped me understand and appreciate, what I would argue is the key concept in the book: the body without organs.
One of the significant features of Bacon’s screaming pope is that the sensation of the cruel is not linked to the representation of something horrible. Rather we witness the figure of the seated pope, who’s body becomes transformed by a wave of cruelty. His body is no longer defined by an internal organisation of bone and muscle tissue, nor is it the organisation of its organs that the skin systematically covers: Classical methods of documentation, representation, and proportion are abandoned for the body without organs. Which — free of the ballast of internal restraints of the organism — can now be deformed and transformed by the waves of sensations that traverse and pass through it. It is the body without organs that allowed Bacon to reject the purely figurative as well as the abstract in painting.
It is no longer my head, but I feel myself inside a head, I see and I see myself inside a head; or else I do not see myself in the mirror, but I feel myself in the body that I see, and I see myself in this naked body when I am dressed… Is there a psychosis in the world that might include this hysterical condition?
Especially the paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff are strong examples of the body without organs. With their use of thick bold impasto techniques they even add an additional layer of visual effects that blur the level of representation: Their paintings become so spacial that one perceives them almost as reliefs rather than paint on a canvas.
The painting of a minimalist and clean room by David Hackney on the other hand extends the body without organs into the space and the narrative of the painting. We are left with only hints of the happening, a figure of a man wearing only a shirt and socks lying face down in a clinically clean room.
