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Alien Interview
Alex Alien by his Self Portrait Triptych 1980
"We're all aliens."
Sam Neil, Space, 2002.
"The unknown name, alien to naming."
Maurice Blanchot, 1980.
"O You, the Great God, whose name is unknown."
Pharaoh Unis, Hymn to Amun, PT 276c - ca. 2350 BCE.
"Art cannot be modern; Art is primordially eternal."
Egon Schiele, 1912.
"Art is alien. Every man is an alien. Alien art is the primordial memory trace of man as alien."
Alex Alien, 2003.
"...in one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien..."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk, Penguin Books, 1990.
"...we say that art is serving alien values; it is being exchanged in a practical way for certain realities, whose price it raises."
Maurice Blanchot. From Dread to Language,The Blanchot Reader, Station Hill, 1999.
"If you are not alienated you're not an artist; a precondition to be an artist is to be alienated; art is the communication of alienation."
Evert Potgieter, 2003.
"Slavoj Zizek's subject is always already 'already alien' where the human hides the inhuman in the Name of the Law of the Ather."
Alex Alien, Being & Alien, 2006.
"If subjectivity and society abject the alien within, is abjection not a regulatory operation? Is the abject, then, disruptive of subjective and social orders, or foundational of them, a crisis in these orders or a confirmation of them?"
Hal Foster, Obscene, Abject, Traumatic, October 78, 1996.
"It is the best of times, it is the worst of times for aliens. they have everything before them, they have nothing before them...'Alien Love' preserves the absolute difference upon which 'alien hatred' was once constructed: an alien is still an alien....'Alien Love', accordingly, is Alien Chic."
Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within, Routledge, 2004.
"Largely because extraterrestrial portraiture has never (to the best of my knowledge) been either superbly rendered with oils on canvas and put into an expensive gilt frame, or cunningly carved in Carrara marble, or expertly cast in bronze by any recognised modernist master, such ubiquitous imagery will never, of course, be called 'art.'...Another reason why such omnipresent imagery - extraterrestrial portraiture - is never analyzed by art historians is that it can never be manipulated as an 'original'; in fact, it is only made tangible to the public as such as it is repeatedly reproduced in the mass media."
John F. Moffitt, Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Mass Culture, Prometheus Books, 2003.
"...science-fiction horror movies practice two modes to render the Alien Thing: either the Thing is wholly Other, a monster whose sight one cannot endure, usually a mixture of reptile, octopus and machine (like the Alien in Ridley Scott's film of the same name), or it is EXACTLY THE SAME as we, ordinary humans - with, of course, some 'barely nothing' which allows us to identify Them (the strange gleam in their eyes; too much skin between their fingers...)."
Slavoj Zizek, On Belief, Routledge, 2001.
"The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one's own."
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1970.
"Man is himself, is man, only at the surface. Lift the skin, dissect: here begin the machines. It is then you lose yourself in an inexplicable substance, something alien to everything you know, and which is nonetheless the essential."
Paul Valéry, Cahier B, 1910.
"Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it to this day, is a life voluntarily spent in ice and high mountains - a searching out of all that is alien and questionable in existence, of all that until now has been held in the spell of morality..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888.
"When the other crushes me into radical alienation, is my relation still a relation in the other? Is it not rather a relation to to the 'I' of the master, to absolute egotistical force, to the dominator who predominates and ultimately wields the force of inquisitorial persecution?"
Maurice Blanchot.
"I would like to make and maintain a strict distinction between two terms in what follows: 'the other' and 'the alien'...Let me now turn to the concept of the 'alien.' I believe it is safe to say without too much qualification that Husserl tends to use the term 'alien' when he stresses the novelty of transcendence, its inaccessibility, its unfamiliarity or strangeness; he also uses 'alien' when he wants to emphasize a cultural and historical phenomenon It is also significant to note that when articulating the theory of intersubjectivity in terms homeworld/alienworld Husserl invariably uses the expression 'alien' and refrains from the expression 'other'..."
Anthony J. Steinbock, The Other and the Alien; Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl; Northwestern University Press, 1995.
"When Dasein, tranquillized, and 'understanding' everything, thus compares
itself with everything, it drifts along towards an alienation in which its own
most potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it. Falling Being-in-the-world is not
only tempting and tranquilizing; it is at the same time alienating. Yet this alienation cannot mean that Dasein gets factically torn away from itself.
On the contrary, this alienation drives it into a kind of Being which borders on the most exaggerated 'self-dissection', tempting itself with all
possibilities of explanation, so that the very 'characterologies' and 'typologies' which it has brought about are themselves already becoming something that cannot be surveyed at a
glance".
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927.
"In order to understand the meaning that death has in shamanism, it is necessary to understand the concept of the alien. Death is not the alien but is the crawling space, the passage to the alien. In order to understand this we also need to understand the radical separation between the logocentric and egocentric perspectives of the west and the thought structure, or rather mood structure, of Shamanism. The alien is that which is initiated by dread and death. It is nothing less than the opening up of reality; it is nothingness and the void. The alien is not some thing which we can grasp in its entirety, but it is rather the artistic production of death. The alien intrudes into the mundane as death and reveals itself in this dimension. The initiation and the transformation of the Shaman is realized through his encounter with death. What follows is a short discussion of the problematic of encountering the alien while still bound within the western dualistic mode of experience."
Gary Smith, Death as the Thought of the Alien, 1999.
"The subject in responsibility is alienated in the depths of its identity with an alienation that does not empty the same of its identity, but constrains it to it, with an unimpeachable assignation, constrains it to it as no one else, where no one could replace it. The psyche, a uniqueness outside of concepts, is a seed of folly, already a psychosis. It is not an ego, but me under assignation."
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence, Trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, 1981.
"Conscience summons Dasein's Self from its lostness in the 'they'. The Self to which the appeal is made remains indefinite and empty in its 'what'. When Dasein interprets itself in terms of that with which it concerns itself, the call passes over what Dasein, proximally and for the most part, understands itself as. And yet the Self has been reached, unequivocally and unmistakably ....The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the 'they,' lost in the manifold 'world' of its concern, than the Self which has been individualised down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the 'nothing'?"
Martin Heidegger, 1962.
"Artworks become appearances, in the pregnant sense of the term - that is as the appearance of an other - when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone, and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden. This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed when faced with an important work...Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification; the terror of that age is recapitulated vis-à-vis reified objects...Because the shudder is past and yet survives, artworks objectivate it as its afterimage."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997.
"Art is
constantly invisible to us. That it is always anterior to what it speaks of and
to itself. Nothing is more striking than this movement which always hides the
work and makes it all the more powerful in that it is less manifest. It is as if
a secret law required of the work that it always be concealed it what it shows
and thus that it only show what must remain concealed, and that finally it only
show what must stay hidden by concealing it. Why
is art so intimately allied with the sacred? It is because in the relationship
between art and the sacred, between that which shows itself and that which does
not - in the movement whereby disclosure and dissimulation change places without
cease, appealing and reaching to each other where, nevertheless, they are
realized only as the approach of the unreachable - the work finds the profound
reserve which it needs. It is hidden and preserved by the presence of the god,
manifest and apparent through the obscurity of the divine, and again kept safe
in reserve by this obscurity and this distance which constitutes its space and
to which it gives rise as though thus to come into the light....What will become
now of art, now that the gods and even their absence are gone, and now that
man's presence offers no support? For at present man no longer belongs to
art..."
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press,
1982.
"Perhaps - I am only speculating - perhaps poetry, like art, moves with the oblivious self into the uncanny and strange to free itself again. Though where? in which place? how? as what?"
Paul Celan, Collected Prose, Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.
"An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body, attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture, to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate."
Antony Gormley, November 1999.
"What little can we in the art world do to make things better? The most important contribution must be to work against the creation of “enemy images”, that is, the paranoid vision of people whom we consider alien and therefore dangerous...We must all nurture our friendships with scholars and artists in whatever country this US government decides to turn into an enemy next."
Anna Somers Cocks, 'No man is an alien', The Arts Newspaper, April, 2003.
"Art negates the conceptualization foisted on the real world...Aesthetics cannot hope to grasp works of art if it treats them as hermeneutical objects. What at present needs to be grasped is their unintelligibility."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997.
"The alien, given other, must remain permanently impenetrable, opaque, a thing-in-itself that defines the self-contradictory ideal of an object that is to be known (that is, to be in relation to a subject) precisely as devoid of any relations."
John Russon, The Systematics of Hegel's Visual Imagery, Sites of Vision, The MIT Press,1997.
"Art is estrangement, self-estrangement (causing self-forgetfulness) nut also estrangement from the human. Art is uncanny in the sense of monstrous, the not quite or no longer human, the almost - or once-human...Art perhaps pays the price by 'going [Celan says] beyond what is human, stepping into the realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny - the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them...oh, art, too seem to be at home..."
Gerald L. Burns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
"Alienation does not, however, surrender Dasein to an entity which Dasein itself is not, but forces it into its inauthenticity—into a possible kind of Being of itself. The alienation of falling—at once tempting and tranquillizing—leads by its own movement, to Dasein’s getting entangled in itself."
Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time,
"By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the counter-tendency to it...The subject only becomes the essence of the artwork when it confronts it foreignly, externally, and compensates for the foreigness by substituting itself for the work."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press.
"Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there's an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But it's very rare...You have to be able to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant, even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind of disastrous life that i have had. That is it."
Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, 1996.
"In the novel The Phantom of the Opera the chief scene shifter is relating to the girls of the corps de ballet what it is he has seen in seeing the face and says: And then you look there where there are no eyes which is a horrible thing to look on - no eyes which is a horrible thing to look on. Now a certain kind of elementary logic would say - in a sense this is a category mistake - if there are now no eyes how can you look upon them - how can you - as it were - see things that are not there - but see things as not being here? Either there are eyes or there are no eyes - if there are eyes you can see them - if there aren't any eyes you can't see them - but that's not how things work... Seeing the eyes that are not there: let's call them Negative objects. 'No Eyes' exist in a positive dimension. Negative Objects: objects which exist in their negation nut in a positive form as far as the psychical apparatus is concerned. The 'No Eyes' are there and they are objects which terrify the subject. The sight of 'No Eyes' terrifies the subject. Negative Objects: objects by definition cannot be described in terms of their materiality - because their materiality is what, as it were, hollows-out materiality. This does not mean they are immaterial. Negative Objects have a profound and exhaustive materiality but the form that their materiality takes is that it hollows out materiality: there where there was a positive materiality there is this constant corrosion of materiality. These 'Eyes' that are not there which I find horrible to look at are all the time destroying what ever satisfaction I might have from seeing the eyes that are there...Contradictions are not just mistakes; they are accurate descriptions of an object..."
Mark Cousins, Negative Objects, lecture 10th November 1995, Architectural Association, London.
"Since the 'sixties, the painting is the torture. The scale is often epic, but portraiture is always at the centre, because it states, in its most radical terms, the contradiction between the autonomy o the paint and the identity of the subject, corralled, attacked from several sides at once. The light is switched on suddenly , to catch reality by surprise. The contortion characteristic of Bacon's forms is a hanging on to a quarry that tries frantically to escape. There ensures a seesaw struggle in which writhing pigment achieves a succession of brief and partial triumphs: those moments when we forget it because it has suddenly become, with a kind of savage presence, a foot, an ashtray, a cheekbone, a knee clasped in that inimitable British way. And at once the image dissolves into brush-strokes. Thus painting can be said, in Bacon's words, 'to be and not to be.'
Pierre Schneider.
"It's only by going too far that you can hope to break the mould and do something new. Art is a question of going too far. Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before. The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you've got its looking real."
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1987, Thames & Hudson.
"Long before Anton Ehrenzweig published his The Hidden Order of Art in 1967, Bacon was a master of the ' which was on of unconscious scanning' which was one of Ehrenzweig's main contributions to our notion of creativity. 'Unconscious scanning' is the name which Ehrenzweig gave to the active but unfocused attention as a result of which we make discoveries and establish correspondences which are denied to 'normal', concentrated, focused attention...Ehrenzweig suggested that what was formerly known as 'the chaos of the unconscious' is, in reality, a serial structure of supreme beauty and complexity; and that it is accessible only to unconscious vision. 'What matters', he said, 'is that the undifferentiated structures of unconscious (subliminal) vision, far from being weakly structured or chaotic, as first impressions suggest, displays scanning powers that are superior to conscious vision.' And, later: 'It can be stated as a general psychological law that any creative search involves holding before the inner eye a multitude of possible choices that totally defeat conscious comprehension'....The 'undifferentiated structure of unconscious vision' is what the artist needs, and 'day-dreaming' is its nursery-name....and it is because Bacon has done this that his day dreaming, and its out come, are worth loser investigation. "
John Russell, Francs Bacon, 1971 Thames & Hudson.
"...one wants to make a new object that is as organic and surprising as, say, a newly discovered species of lizard: the incoherence of experience caught in the coherence of an independent form."
Frank Auerbach to Michael Peppiatt, Tate, Issue 14, Spring, 1998.
"What was called the individual - or what was called individuality - is in fact nothing more or less than this interior - this existence of the object - which begins to leak - begins to leak out - of its representation. You can begin to see that in fact that if, if the reason why you do not use an individual in a work of art that's supposed to be beautiful - it's precisely because they do not conform with the representation or the image of a human being. At this point nothing could be further apart the ideal figuration of the human form; nothing could be further apart than that actual individual because an individual will be nothing more or less than the set of differences from that ideal form. The set of differences will actually always be experienced in some sense as disgusting because there are those pats of an individual which are as it were leaking out and exceeding the individual as a representation of him or herself. I mean, quite often, - at the level of experience, this is related to kind of things like hair coming out of people's ears, - it's often combined with bits and the places from which things could be leaking: stuff that's coming out of your eyes, or your nose, or your ears, or your mouth. I mean this is another reason why it - like the Alien - always drools - the kind of stuff which is drooled - which may come from your mouth, your eyes, your ears, your anus - all that in a sense has the mark of radical individuality - radical individuality because it is precisely there - the stuff - which is getting out."
Mark Cousins, Ugliness, lecture 27.1.1995, Architectural Association.
"The identification of art with beauty is inadequate, and not just because it is too formal. In what art became, the category of the beautiful is only one element, one that has moreover undergone fundamental change: By absorbing the ugly, the concept of beauty has been transformed in itself, without, however, aesthetics being able to dispense with it. In the absorption of the ugly, beauty is strong enough to expand itself by its own opposite.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997 Edition.
''...tactile sensations of slime, ooze, and wriggly, slithering, creepy things…make us cringe and recoil."
William Ian Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, Harvard University Press, 1997.
Amar Amun Self Portrait Alex Alien 2006
Alien Resurrection
Alexander Lives
Michael Verney-Elliott 1938 - 2007
In 2007 Alex Russell became Alex Verney-Elliott in loving memory of his partner Michael Verney-Elliott to which Being & Alien is dedicated.
Shudder Sensation Self Portrait Alex Alien 2002
Evert at The Louvre 2002 Alex at The Lipp 2002
Evert Potgieter: "When and where did you first meet that ancient reptilian fuck Francis Bacon?"
Alex Alien: "It was the summer of 1981. I was walking through Archer Street in Soho when I saw Bacon coming out of Charlie Chester's Casino flashing his wad winnings of fresh fifty pound notes in a plastic transparent envelope. At first I did not know if I should just rob the cunt, finish him off , and run for it, or talk to him. My art was influenced by his and I had always wanted to meet the man: in-the-flesh, off-the-bone, as it were. I greeted him saying how much I admired his art and he seemed to be glowing from his winnings and maybe even (subconsciously) inviting me to attack and rob him. He invited me to lunch at an Italian restaurant where we conversed on every thing from Alban Berg to Inge Borkh. He gave me his phone number and later on I visited him at his Reece Mews studio in South Kensington only twice. On one mid day visit I devoured a whole bottle of whiskey while Bacon seemed to sip slowly as we arguing over art; I said to him that he had a tendency towards illustration which he refuted and felt he was getting better; I remember arguing that his early sixties work was far superior to his recent early eighties illustrative images; he seemed nonplussed. I remember he seemed very intense as he stared and spoke with his huge dinosaur head slightly bent to the right supported by his china-white arm. He took me into the studio and I saw this headless breasted torso creature with an orange background and remember nearly knocking it off its easel by accident as it was so cramped in his studio. I felt very elevated by the image which had these breasts where the head should usually be; I may have been one of the first to see it as it had just been finished and smelt very fresh; it was part of the Diptych; Study From The Human Body; Study Of The Human Body - From A Drawing By Ingres, wrongly dated as 1982-1984. I told him that the Lettraset transfer type and red arrow did not work and he should remove them. I stole a tube of vermilion paint from his studio as I could not afford to buy it at the time. I gave Bacon a some slides of my work; I asked him if I could borrow some money and he gave me 40 quid and I swaggered pissed down the fucking stairs."
Oils Self Portrait Alex Alien 1981 Watercolour Self Portrait Alex Alien 1981
EP: "So you made criticisms of his paintings when you were in conversation with him?"
AA: "As I've said, I remember saying how too illustrational his later portraits were becoming. Bacon did a great reptilian-portrait of Lucien Freud in 1967; one of his greatest paintings. However, by the mid 1970's, Bacon fell back into the safety-zone of lazy literal illustrational painting. Bacon tended to be very contradictory concerning critique: he would welcome argument but not when it took apart his own work. He often said that friends should tear each other apart but he did not like his art taken apart, only his arse. He said that Lucien Freud was too delicate, too illustrational, too detailed and refined but then could not see that his own later portraits were becoming too literal, too weak and illustrational. Bacon said painting had nothing to do with illustration but returned to illustration."
Rose Wound Legs Self Portrait Alex Alien 1980
EP : "A few definitions first, what do you mean by the concepts of the Alien, Reptilian, Dinosaur? Are they all the same? Are they good or evil or both? Or are they beyond good and evil?"
Squid Squirm Slither Spunk Stuff Self Portrait 1981 Alex Alien
AA: "The Alien is the abject object hibernating in the human subject. The alien, reptile and dinosaur are the monster of our primordial being and subconscious. We are not descended from the apes; that is pure racist-monkeyist rubbish. We are all aliens, dinosaurs, reptilians Sub-Consciously, and Sub-Bodily; and controlled by reptilians from far away. Alien and reptile are beyond good and evil; they are rather active and reactive forces forging against or in unison with other alien forces. One can always smell and see the 'reactive forces' of the abject aliens reptiles that slime our streets: the most insidious are the hivhomosexhybrid clones with their reptilian features (many calling themselves 'hiv'' and mutate their reptilian forms via 'anti-HIV drugs' and 'recreational drugs' to give them that Miss Belsen Poppers Dis-eased Shaven-Head Look): they have facial wasting and grow humps via Protease Inhibitors; creating a kind of Pharmacopeia Reptilian Replicant. We are all aliens with diverse blood-lines: proactive and reactive, radical and reactionary. We have moved beyond the human but most people still assume they are human...I strongly identify with Bacon's snorting, sipping, slipping, sliding, snarling, sniffing, spunking, sliming, sailing shitting shape-shifting reptilian aliens....Take Bacon's Turning Figure (1963) or his Lying Figure in a Mirror (1971) - they are mutated beyond the human to the reptilian shape-shifting alien."
EP: "You see yourself as an alien. Do you think you are really a shape-shifting alien? Are you a lizard reptilian being?"
Alex Alien 1981 Shape Shifting Self Portrait 1981 Alex Alien
AA: "Yes. I don't have any human features. My eyes are reptilian in form. I am ontologically reptilian in my form and shape-shift into numerous reptilian identities as Leon Potgieter has done. In my art, in my thinking, I smell, snore, soil, spunk, shit like a reptilian alien. As a child I strongly identified with dinosaurs; their Sensationistic bone structures and solid shattered skulls ; I saw myself as more alien, more dinosaur than human; I even felt a strong sexual attraction to dinosaurs. David Icke, the master of modern myth, has instinctively opened up the valves of reptilian retina sensationism returning and reuniting us with our lizard reptilian dinosaur roots. We have nothing to do with descending from apes; Bacon saw us as descending from fish forms. If you subconsciously scrutinize the so-called human head you'll see and smell certain lizard reptilian signs and shapes not ape shit shapes. My recent self-portrait charcoal drawings resemble the head features and textures of Dromaeosaur. The Independent ran the headline recently: 'Revealed after 130 years: The face of a dinosaur' - displaying a photo of the head of Dromaeosaur. (The Independent, 26 April, 2001: this edition also ran the headline: 'Mayfair gallery sued in £100m battle over the life and legacy of Francis Bacon'.)
Fragment from The Goat Woman 1979 Alex Alien
EP: "As Mike Verney-Elliott put it: Bacon is to Popes what Russell is to Nuns and what Fellini is to both. Why do British critics always associate Bacon and Russell with sex, violence and horror?"
AA: "Because our cunting critics have no instinct about images and merely repeat the inanities that have become the current clichés associated with Bacon and Russell. Both these image makers have been consistently misunderstood and mauled by our critics. Just as a Prophet is without honour in his own country, so Bacon and Russell have always been appreciated and revered abroad. Bacon said in 1987 after a show at the Lelong Gallery: 'I don't know why the French seem to like me, but what I do know is that the critics in England loathe everything that I do.' Bacon and Russell are accused of being too 'in-your-face' and of going 'over the top' and of 'going too far'. And here is that quote from Bacon: 'Its only by going too far that you can hope to break the mould and do something new. Art is a question of going too far'. As superb sensationism image makers, Bacon and Russell have always stated that art is a question of going too far; one can never go far enough in art....Russell and Bacon strip away the veils of tame 'good taste' and subdued subtlety to reveal raw the vapour and valves of voluptuous sensations...beyond the pleasure principal...penetrating the body...by bathing in 'bad taste'..."
Portrait of Richard Aplin Alex Alien 1980
EP: "Did Bacon ever go and see Ken's The Devils when it was first released? If so, what scenes appealed to him?"
AA: "Yes, Bacon saw The Devils when it was first released with Eddie Gray - who was also in the film. Eddie told me that Bacon very much liked the first scene with the plague victims whirling around on cart wheels stuck on tall posts. Eddie Gray was also an extra in The Devils."
Alex Alien with Richard Aplin by John Lazzarini 1980
EP: "Do you recognise any images from The Devils that may have been transcribed by Bacon in his image making? Or any other of Ken's films?"
AA: "Not directly apart from Christopher Logues's smirking Cardinal Richelieu and Derek Jarman's clinically cold white washed walls and stark sets - the best thing he ever did! The image from Altered States with William Hurt crawling along beating the ground shape shifting was Baconian."
Head VI 1949 Francis Bacon Altered States 1980 Ken Russell
EP: "I see Bacon's work as celebrating-confronting the so called modern monster - man's decaying, rotten side of the liquidating psyche and bruised blooded broken body - not as a concern with the 'human condition' but the 'animal condition'. How do you see his work?"
On the Set - Alex between Toby, Ken, Shirley and Victoria Russell
Ken Russell : Filming Sensationism in the Seventies
Shirley and Ken Russell on the set of Women in Love 1968
AA: "Bacon does indeed celebrate our internal raw animal decay, degeneration and as a state of ruin. In Heidegger's sense of 'falling'; our falling and eventual death where being becomes time and body becomes nothing. Bacon is recording our will to nothingness and our non-existence: we are just shitting, vomiting, bleeding bodies in constant smelly decay. Bacon crudely reduced being to the body; a body hollowed of being; that is an 'inauthentic' body devoid of subconscious stuff, leaking life; a violent void, the body as a void of being. The liquid stuff of being is ejaculated from the body; being is ontological liquid. But early Bacon imagery initiates liquids flowing forth but by the 1980s Bacon's bodies dried up and were served off the bone: spineless, boneless and bloodless, Bacon's bodies were bled bleached bare."
EP: "Why do you think you are Francis Bacon's successor and when did you and Bacon ricochet?"
Strié Shuttered Self Portrait Alex Alien 1980
AA: "Because I learnt from the old master; none of his other friend-artists seemed to have done this. I still cannot see any other artists about who are directly influenced by Bacon's irrational-arbitrary articulations in paint. He preferred the company of trailer-trash and I may have been too over bearing in my youthful obsessive admiration for him and for being too critical of his work of which became watered-down and too illustrative. Although Bacon stated to Sylvester: 'I've always hoped to find another painter I could really talk to - somebody whose qualities and sensibility I'd really believe in - who really tore my things to bits and whose judgment I could actually believe in....I think it would be marvelous to have somebody who would say to you, Do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that! and give you the reasons. I think it would be very helpful...I long for people to tell me what to do, to tell me where I go wrong...' Bacon is being disingenuous here: he did not adhere to radical critique; he resented it when I told him his work was becoming weak, repetitious and above all, illustrative: I asked him why he went back to illustration in his portraits; why he no longer used those subconscious arbitrary non-illustrational brush marks. It seemed as if he was regressing, going against they very ethos of his art as he so eloquently he states in his interviews with Sylvester. I was too cutting and critical so he cut-off; as Michael Peppiatt aptly peppered it: 'Bacon could not be pinned down. The closer you got to him, the more likely he was to turn nasty or simply disappear.' (Francis Bacon: Anatomy of An Enigma). I invited Bacon to my exhibition at the Fisher Fine Art Gallery - which was a benefit in aid of London Contemporary Dance Theatre - but the cunt didn't turn up! London's Evening Standard ran an arts review headline: 'Bringing Home The Bacon' previewing the show with a grotesque photograph of me as 'Portrait of a Madman'....but Bacon didn't have much time for young artists."
Punk Mohican Alex Alien 1981
EP: "Why has this not been done before, this School of Bacon? Would Bacon have agreed?"
AA: "No, not at all. I am surprised there has not been a School of Francis Bacon before; since he is seen as the greatest British painter of the last century. Bacon would have found the School of Francis Bacon abhorrent - he would have laughed cynically at the idea. Artist, Scattergood-Moore, told me idea of the Bacon School was 'ridiculous'. However, the School of Bacon is not about doing pastiche-Bacons but rather to tackle what he was working towards - making anti-illustrational art".
Medusa Mutant Self Portrait Alex Alien 1981
EP: "What are Bacon's most pungently poignantly putridly soiled sludge shape-shifting sensationism images?"
AA: "Study for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Red Ground (1964): it is solid and soiled and smells of bodily stinks with leaking black smear slime shit skid stuffs spurted on the mattress. This great portrait has the sensuous seduction of an Egyptian Odalisque as does the other Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) reproduced below. And his Study for Head of Lucien Freud (1967) which displays and flays Freud fried and frayed off the bone in a reptilian-green and pink-salmon spunk sauce. I love Bacon's Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne (1966) which has a haunting smelling similarity to Hogarth's Shrimp Girl (National Gallery London). Bacon's greatest arbitrary, accidental anti-illustrational images were painted between 1960 and 1965. By the 1970's Bacon had passed her sell-by date, paint-by date. By the 1980's Bacon slipped back into the worn grooves of weak watery inane illustration; the evil of banality. If you check out the catalogue Francis Bacon: Papes et autres figures (Galerie Lelong,1999), and look at Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1986) Study from the Human Body (1987), Triptych (1991) you'll see Bacon is fucked and finished, absolutely absent, totally out of sync with the sensation of his nervous system, as if Bacon were no longer present; these etiolated ectoplasmic emanations do not even bare the trace of Bacon. He should've knifed them.,,or got John Edwards to knife them...but they were money in the bank..."
Severed Slither Self Portrait Alex Alien 2000
EP: "What are the weak points in Bacon's image making? His total lack of draughtsmanship?"
AA: "Because Bacon was not a draughtsman he was defeated when it came to featuring feet and handling hands - as well as being disarmed over arms and his torsos were not taut but truncated. When it came to painting legs she did not have a leg to stand. She was always fucking legless being a professional piss artist and it was her heavy drinking which often resulted in her producing piss poor paintings towards the end of her legless life. In the end she preferred being a piss-artist, a con-artist than an artist. Bacon's handling of hands and formation of feet are very close to the distortions of Disneyesque caricatures, as John Berger commented on in his comparison between Bacon and Disney...(New Society, 6 January, 1972) And columnist and commentator Paul Johnson stated on Bacon in 1992: 'He could not draw. His ability to paint was limited and the way he laid the pigments on the canvas was often barbarous. He had no ideas, other than one or two morbid fancies arising from his homosexuality, chaotic way of life, and Irish fear of death. What he did have was a gimmick, something resembling an advertising designer's logo. In his case it was a knack of portraying the human face or body not so much twisted as smeared out of shape. It was enough. Such a logo could easily be dressed up by the scriptwriters of the industry into an image of 'our despairing century'; it fitted their favourite words 'disquieting', 'disturbing'.....' Yet our cuntish critics coin the moronic mantra that: 'Bacon was was the greatest British painter since Turner'.."
Aliens in Blues Alex Alien 1980
EP: "But many people, including Bacon scholars like Peppiatt and Sylvester, stated that Bacon could draw and had a fluent line."
AA: "It depends on how they are defining drawing. Bacon could not draw. Bacon was not a draughtsman like Picasso or Schiele."
Self Portrait Alex Alien April 1980 Self Portrait Alex Alien April 1980
EP: "Did Francis Bacon know or work with your father, Ken Russell? Did they ever meet?"
AA: "No: they never met though Bacon told me he admired my father's work. When I knew Bacon, my father was producing opera productions and I suggested to Bacon that he should deign the sets for Strauss's Salome (which my father produced under conductor, Horst Stein in Geneva) or Elektra. Contrary to Michel Archimbaud's claim (in Conversation with Francis Bacon): 'But to come back to opera, have you thought of designing for a production; has anyone ever asked you?' (Bacon replied): 'No; I've never really thought about it.' - Bacon certainly thought about it with me. Sadly, he never met my father. But both Bacon and Russell shared an obsession with the sensation of the image directly nailing the nervous-system of the audience. It was stimulating seeing Bacon and Russell discussing the images from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in the BBC 2 documentary, 'Art That Shook The World'. As the critic Douglas Slater stated in Films Illustrated (September, 1981) regarding Russell's Altered States: 'Russell's serious interest in the movie is for the images and sounds that act upon the audience away from words and rational thought.' Bacon and Russell also believed that their art forms could not be taught; Bacon told me all art schools should be closed down and Russell stated in Films and Filming (May, 1872) on Orson Welles: 'Close down the Film Schools; give everyone a roll of film, a 16mm camera, a copy of the Kane script, turn him lose on the world and stand back. Truffaut started that way - so did I...' Both Bacon and Russell work from their basic instincts and their raw nerves which our cunt art critics have no understanding of because they have no basic instinct for art...which is, after all, why they are critics; the moment you write about art the moment you erase about art; only banal inauthentic art can be talked about because it is merely surface stories signifying something. All cuntish critics can do is pen pseudo psychoanalytic detoured decorations and clumsy cultural critiques that cannot penetrate the art of subconscious Sensationism which is always already pre-linguistic outside inane illustration and meaning. When I asked Ken at the Cannes Film Festival 2001 which of Bacon's paintings he most admired he said: 'His Pope series. His Popes have a distilled silent grandeur of sanctimonious violence...I wish I'd met him.' Francis Bacon stated In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud,: 'You know, I've often said to myself that I would have liked to have been a film director if I hadn't been a painter.'..."
Self Portrait Alex Alien 1981 Alex Alien 1980
Leon Potgieter: "How do you feel about art moving from complex detail (illustration) into compressed, 'non-organised' movement"?
AA: "This is the future for portrait painting: making marks as subconsciously as possible. This means that one must not draw in or paint in conscious detail by drawing in the forms, but by making arbitrary marks to re-make a hyper-reality, or the fourth dimensional extra-empirical reality. Lucien Freud is still stuck in the 19th century with his literal banality of illustration. Literal truth is the real lie as Van Gogh stated in his Letters: 'I want my paintings to be inaccurate and anomalous in such away that they become lies, if you like, but lies that are more truthful than the literal truth.' Literal appearance is the lazy lie that weak painters like Lucien Freud and David Hockney cling to. We need to paint directly from the body, from the nervous-system, the immune-system, smell-system; like the essence of the lemon which makes the lemon taste like the lemon: it's acrid acidic stinging memory trace that you remember. A portrait should smell, stink, of the essence of soggy-spermatic sliminess. Portrait and figure painting should be like lemons and onions; leaving one with a sour taste in torn torrential tears....or having the same sensations as being raped, stabbed, bombed shot, or slowly tortured...or the ultimate smelting sensation of the electric chair...or being very slowly well-hung or being beheaded. What is the sensation of being beheaded?"
Alex Alien by Bacon Bulb 1981 Alex Alien by Bacon Bulb 1981
LP: "Do you feel (not think), that movement can become the detail, the sensation of nailed image itself?"
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Charcoal Self Portrait Alex Alien 1980 Alien in Spunk Stained Mirror Alex Alien 1980
AA: "Yes, paradoxically, the movement has all the detail always already hidden within the arbitrary mark. So one chance made mark can say more than a million marks that make up an illustrative image....non-rational marks in portraiture are much more powerful and poignant because they are more primordially suggestive than illustrative photo-realism which negates psychic sensation."
LP: "Bacon is the master of disaster. Are you heading for disaster? Have you ever had the feeling that your art, being non-organised, could give more life to a seemingly soiled dead-matter inside an inner-dimensions?"
Slipping Sensation Self Portrait Alex Alien 1981
AA: "We are always already heading for disaster; it is always already question of time, as being is, before we are annihilated, erased bombed out of being there. As Bacon said: 'We all need to be aware of the potential disaster which stalks us every moment of the day.' Paint or charcoal are living matter, in that they can be manipulated to explode and implode the body. I want the paint or charcoal to make the art itself without me directing it. To work directly from the subconscious body. Working by instinct is working directly from the body not brain. Bacon is right in stating that one simply cannot talk about painting, real painting that is. The moment one starts to analyse, to critique is always already the moment language fails and misses the point which is the paint - non-illustrational paint that is. Painting begins where language ends. Language cannot unveil, cannot penetrate real art only decorate, make detours around it. Take Gilles Deleuze's easy essay on Bacon entitled Logique de la sensation - recently translated into English - he says nothing but just skates, slips, slides, slithers, sneers, surfaces, shakes, snarls, sinks and sails away. Pure painting cannot be penned or pinned only pain-ted. The abjected alien image is always already trapped living in the paint and trying to make escape routes through the thrown and perverted paint. It is just knowing how we can free the stuff through our nervous body movements and our own forms of force from the body. The body makes the image; the body's blood and spunk is the paint. In your paintings, Leon, I see you are conjuring up images out of what seems to be nothing, thin air; they just begin to form from no-thing yet are never illustrative heads because you never fill-in the boring details of illustrative form (eyes, nose, mouth). Like what I strive for in my art, you put the facial features in without having to put them in! Bacon's best work was executed between 1953 to 1967 when he painted non -illustrational portraits; from around 1970 onwards bored Bacon ended up with weak pissy painting-by-numbers illustration - by using that thin inane illustrative pallid paint."
Alex Alien & Neil Turner 1980
LP: "Do think the creative minds acts as the judges of the fore-bearing visionary consciousness of our physical biological composure in an ever changing world? So, in other words, do we direct our own evolutionary steps?"
AA: "It is not just cloning that may mutate our bodily being but also the act of art itself may direct our future identities. Take carnal alien artist our Orlan, who is a shape shifting reptile, like our Kristeva is...they operate outside being woman becoming alien again."
Punk Rocker 1981 Alex Alien Punk Rocker 1981 Alex Alien
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