ch - CPA Lecture

Wandering to Uni through New Street you can't help but be drawn along to the German Christmas Market, I was a bit early so I decided to have a mooch around. The smell of Bratwurst and Stale Beer was overwhelming as you push your way through the completely undersized alleyways, getting in people's way and they treading on your heels. It's the same old fodder, mugs with your name on, paper theatres, bags and scarves made from Alpacca fur, as the great man said, I've never seen so much stuff I didn't want. Having said that though, I cant deny it's Christmas appeal, I am starting to feel a lot more festive because of it.

Anyway, last nights lecture... I've been reading Giles Deleuze's Francis Bacon and the Logic of Sensation as part of my Contemporary Philosophical Aesthetics lectures. I have to say that I find reading the text a lot more enlightening than listening to the lecturers interpretation of it, I don't know why that is. So my tip is to always read what's on the reading list aswell as attend the lectures!

We were dealing with Bacon's use of couples and triptychs in his paintings. The key to understanding (or at least attempting to understand) Bacon's works is that they don't contain any narrative elements, the figures in them have no relationships to speak of and that a series of paintings are to be read in no particular order, they are not cells from a comic book, the three panels are 1 painting. My way of looking at them is to view them as one moment captured in 3 simultaneous photographs arranged around the figure.

The figures within the paintings act in three ways: active elements, passive elements and witnesses. Any figure however can act in either role and as such the sensation caused by the paintings changes according to the role the viewer assigns to each figure. If you didnt know that this rubric existed or had to be applied to the works, then how on earth are they meant to function in the prescribed way? What happens if two figures are assigned the same functions? Does the painting malfunction? Explode? I am finding this really interesting though, guess I should go and read a bit more...