Francis Bacon Critical and Theoretical Perspectives
Rina Arya
Rina Arya is
a senior lecturer in art history and theory at the University
of Chester. She has written on Francis Bacon, Georges Bataille
and art and spirituality.
Bacon was deeply inspired by sculpture, photography, cinematography, and even architecture. He described himself as being like a pulverising machine, where he absorbed everything around him and then reduced it down in the formulation of his images. This breadth of experiences means that he should not merely be regarded as an artist who comes from out of an art historical canon, but as a critical and cultural thinker whose work cuts across the neat paradigms of painting or photography, and whose work can most pertinently be described with recourse to critical theory.
… Previous scholarship has largely focused on biographical, archival and formalist perspectives of Bacon. Whilst these perspectives are valuable to the understanding of his art, they often neglect the more critical and theoretical aspects. This collection of essays represents a move away from the art historical paradigm and presents two different but related approaches: first, the problematic of experiential viewing of his art; and second, uncovering his allegiance to critical theory.
… Bacon suggested that one of his motivations as a painter
was to update images and perspectives so that they are pertinent
to a contemporary audience, and this analogy can be applied to the
motivation of this volume. Bacon’s work may have been untimely in
the 1940s and 50s but has increased over time in its resonance.
With the explosion of the digital, and the condition of the post-humanism,
where technology attempts to supplant the human body in all guises,
the alienation of Bacon’s figures mirror the responses of Western
culture to cultural change. This volume establishes the significance
of Bacon’s art in contemporary culture making it applicable not
only to artists and art historians, but to those in cultural studies,
media studies, phenomenology and the sociology of the body.
