Junk for Code

Bacon #6: contrasts

Joseph Duemer over at Sharp Sand writes:

"Twenty below zero last night, fifteen below tonight. The dogs are really pissed off about the weather. The terriers have to put fleece jackets on, a great indignity."

A contrast. I write:

"36 degrees today, 25 tonight, 38 tomorrow and more on the way.People and animals are pissed off about the weather. It is hard to go for walks in the heat in the late afternoon as nobody wants to step out of the shade. Few can sleep at night."

All I feel capable of doing at the moment is find a Bacon image to post before I drop off.

Francis Bacon, one of Three Studies for a Portrait of Mick Jagger, 1982

It is too hot to concentrate on reading Deleuze's, the logic of sensation. My mind says leave the intellectual stuff of chapter one until the temperature cools down. Move on. Look for something simple. In Chapter 2 Deleuze connects high culture with pop culture says:

"...modern painting is invaded and beseiged by photographs and cliches that are already lodged on the canvas before the painter even begins to work. In fact, it would be a mistake to think that the painter works on a white and virgin surface.The entire surface is already invested virtually with all kinds of cliches, which the painter will have to break with." (p.11)

That would be the case for a celebratory figure such as Jagger.Ther would be layers of images, cliches and associations.

Deleuze goes on to say:

This is exactly what Bacon says when he speaks of the photograph:it is not as figuration of what one sees, it is what modern man sees.It is dangerous not simply because it is figurative, but because it claims to reign over vision, and thus to reign over painting."

Suprisingly, Deleuze does not comment on either the modernist account of a pure high culture being contaminated by consumer visual culture or the purity of the romantic vision.

Is not that way of understanding a visual not a cliche? Do we not now live amidst an archive of images in our everyday life?

That is all that I can manage for tonight.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 24, 2005 10:29 PM | TrackBack