Cliché

Bacon surrounds himself with media:He is truly fascinated by photographs (he surrounds himself with photographs; he paints his portraits from photographs of the model, while also making use of completely different photographs; he studies photographs of past paintings; and he has extraordinary abandon for photographs of himself…) (74) photos, print, newspaper clippings.  These objects are already loaded with meanings.  As an artist, Bacon must fight off the cliché by means of transforming it.  The cliché for us is a generator: it automatically loads and reloads.

By transforming the cliché, Bacon processes objects through the logic of sensation. This is to say he has a system for creating an affective meaning.  It is a process of turning the image into an image ontology.  Bacon is creating a metaphysics of affect that is not rational nor cerebral.

His machinic impulse towards transformation is analogically similar to Muybridge’s creation of motion through photographs.  Rather than motion, Bacon is seeking a way to generate emotion.  The cinematic quality of sequence is found in his triptychs, but by its own principle it defies the sequential and narrative nature of the cinema.  The triptych is a way to mobilize affect by way of distribution. The triptych, in this is sense, is indeed one way of going beyond “easel” painting; the three canvasses remain separated, but they are no longer isolated; and the frame of borders of a painting no longer refer to the limitative unity of each, but to the distributive unity of the three. (70)