Alien Interview 2 

                         

                                                           

                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                         Alex Alien in Amsterdam  

 

 

Evert Potgieter: "Which of your contemporaries do you admire in the context of the School of Francis Bacon?"

 

                                                                        

                                                                                                     

Alex Alien: "Rachel Whiteread. Whiteread's alien art is instinctual installation of The Uncanny of the Abject Sublime. Whiteread is the artist of the uncanny, the abject sublime.  Whiteread's  ex-object memory traces of being-their and not-being-there-out-the-world echo Bacon's barren beings, sutured structures and anonymous rooms.  Whiteread's  'Untitled' (Torso)' takes, breaks, the body way beyond illustration; a radical reworking of Brancusi. Brancusi still held on to the human subject whereas with Whiteread the human subject has become reworked into the alien object. And Whiteread's 'Untitled (Bath)', 1990, and 'Untitled (Slab)' 1991, trace, embrace,  the abject leftover  space of the alien body; replacing the body and becoming em-bodied alien objects which  give the absent body uncanny presence; as if the body wanted to be remained to be sensationed leaving its smell-mark in the objects it once laid bare on. Whiteread goes way beyond narrative and illustration; indeed, she negates such inanities as narrative and illustration as nothing can be read and seen in Whiteread's works only sensationed in silence as silence. Whiteread  is the greatest  British artist since Bacon.  Whiteread has been able to reinvent and displace the body and reinvent and displace space; an inverted and reversed psychic embodied emptied space of being-there and not-being-there;  both 'in-the-world' and 'our-the-world'.  With Whiteread, there is no longer an inside or an outside but an opening up and closing down of spaces and  interstices  concealment as unconcealment as concealment- as ruin remainders, imprints, scars and mourning memorial memory traces  - which remind one of those liquid leaks that pour from Bacon's broken bodies.  Whiteread often constructs uncanny places and spaces which never really existed but which remain lodged in our memories;  places that one remembered but never knew, never visited.  Whiteread made a  transparent cast of a Trafalgar Square plinth and placed it upside down on the original plinth giving it an  uncanny  grandeur of ghostlyness; it gives the (dis)appearance of always already Being There; although the inverted plinth is transparent it is difficult to look through it so it erases both its inside and its outside and negates the original on which it kisses, on which it balances nervously. Yet is looks as though the transparent ghost simulacrum plinth was always already there, predating its (non)original on which it weighs down. Whiteread's Plinth, like Black Bath, cannot be read or seen in reality because they are trace ex-objects of the abject sublime. Whiteread's works reveal the emptiness of language and disclose how the subconscious is structured like an an abject alien image and not, as often stated, like a language.  It is very unfortunate that Whiteread  is lumped in with those moronic media manipulated naff nonentities like Emin, Hirst, Lucas,  Creed; who are all petty-bourgeois purveyors of the dross-drek 'dumbing down' of  our crass 'contemporary culture'; an autistic aesthetics! Supine servile Serota and spiv shit Saatchi have a lot to answer for."

LP: "Stockhausen said  that the Twin Tower alien atta attack was 'the greatest possible work of art' - was it?"

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                  

 

AA:  "He was absolutely right. All great works of art aspire to the abject sublime condition of the Twin Tower alien atta attack from Greek Art to Whiteread.  Stockhausen was merely stating 'the brutality of fact' that many think but dare not state: that the Trade Twin Tower alien attack was a great work of art;  Wagnerian and Nietzschean in its Will to the Total Art Work; that is, something only great artists can aspire to.  The Twin Tower alien attack was the greatest work of art man has so far made; or rather, alien, has made. Turner got close to it; so did Bacon. The Twin Tower atta attack is profoundly Turneresque; Turner would have made a great image out of this great image which was pure Turner.  Here's  Stockhausen's radical quote:  'What has happened is — now you all have to turn your brains around — the greatest work of art there has ever been. That minds could achieve something in one act, which we in music cannot even dream of, that people rehearse like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for one concert, and then die. This is the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos. Imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on one performance, and then 5000 people are chased into the Afterlife, in one moment. This I could not do. Compared to this, we are nothing as composers... Imagine this, that I could create a work of art now and you all were not only surprised, but you would fall down immediately, you would be dead and you would be reborn, because it is simply too insane. Some artists also try to cross the boundaries of what could ever be possible or imagined, to wake us up, to open another world for us...'  Bacon and Whiteread cross the boundaries of what could ever be possible or imagined;  I also aspire to that alien condition.  Mohammad Atta's installation alien art attack was  far greater than the weak works submitted by this years slave-morality Turner Prize nominees:  Richard Billingham, Martin Creed, Isaac Julien and Mike Nelson.  The Twin Trade Tower alien atta attack obeyed the logic, condition and sensation of the Turner Prize. Great Art aspires to the Condition of the Twin Trade Towers alien atta attack in all its abject sublime beauty.  But even the Tate director Nicholas Serota has said the Turner Prize:  'is not designed to show the best artists or the greatest artists, but the art that people working together find extremely interesting at that time'.   A classic cop out clause.  The Twin Tower alien atta attack is the abject sublime image of artists wet dream sensations; a dry dream come true, a fantasy nightmare  both materialised and dematerialised at once, as Slavoj Zizek suggested  in his essay 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real!'  (17.09.200):  'When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how the unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other defining catastrophe from the beginning of the XXth century, that of Titanic: it was also a shock, but the space for it was already prepared in ideological fantasizing, since Titanic was the symbol of the might of the XIXth century industrial civilization. Does the same not hold also for these bombings? Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested - just recall the series of movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. The unthinkable which happened was thus the object of fantasy: in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.'  The Twin Tower alien atta attack became the materialisation of the fuck fantasy which The Turner Prize ethos endlessly aspires to but never attains. The reactionary Turner Prize marks the memorial of man - the end - of 'culture' - of 'human' art; 'man made' art."

                                                

                                                                         

                                                                              Stockhausen:  Twin Tower Attack  "the greatest work of art there has ever been."

 

LP: "What are your views on preserving Bacon's pilfered embalmed studio as a time capsule in Dublin?"

 

                                                                                                   

                                                                                                            Slipping  Self  Portrait   Alex Alien   2002  

                                                      

AA: "An absurdity. Why preserve shit in aspic? Bacon's studio was looted by numerous pickers and stealers before Bacon was cold so it does not represent an accurate record of his studio as he left it - but  - more precisely -  it represents the rubbish leftovers left by the  looters....Anything of value was hastily hustled away by the Tomb Raiders...the locusts and parasites picked it clean.  The painstaking reconstruction of Bacon's studio in Dublin is only the rubbish tip of the iceberg because the tomb raiders and robbers got their first. Yet the media reported that the Studio Simulacrum is how Bacon  left it when he died! The rest of Bacon's Studio still remains in London!"

 

      

                                                                       

                                                             Sensation Sockets  Self Portrait  2002  Alex Alien                                   Four Fangs Self Portrait 2002 Alex Alien 

                      

EP: "What do the art critics have to say about this futile fetishism of preserving Bacon's pilfered studio?"

AA:  "The art critic William Feaver ('Should it stay or should it go', Art Review, May 2001) was right to argue that we should torch Francis Bacon studio and its contents....Reconstructing Bacon's studio in Dublin is like displaying Tut's Tomb sans cadaver and grave goods. Bacon would have despised the idea of turning his detritus dump  into a peeping Tom's cabinet of curiosities. Bacon did not even think that many of her paintings were worth preserving and ritually slashed them  -  so she would hardly have wanted to preserve her studio;  - she didn't want her own corpse preserved, as she said to Ian Board:   'When I'm dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter'......Thus it would have been more apt for the Dubliners to  have placed empty champagne bottles, oyster shells, gambling chips, wads of £50 notes and Bacon'sbones in a black plastic bin bag and thrown  it out with the rubbish...However, even in this respect, Bacon's last wishes were thwarted because she was cremated - not dumped.  The idea of creating a futile faux reverential memorial monument to Bacon in the form of  a tacky, alleged recreation of her cluttered chaotic studio, would have struck Bacon as ludicrous - and as irrelevant as mounting an exhibition of Bacon's used lavatory paper..."

 

                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                                  Alex Alien in his Shed Studio mirror

 

EP:  "If you don't approve of the Dublin Reece Mews Francis Bacon Studio installation, how would you keep Bacon  a living force?"

AA:  " Regarding this redundant Dublin dump, it's easy to give away what no one else  wanted  - I think it would be more appropriate to celebrate Bacon's work by awarding  an annual Bacon Prize -  a cash sum.  The award would be given to painters working in the anti-illustrational ethos of Bacon rather than the literal portraiture associated with the BP National Portrait Gallery Prize which is merely illustration - and not painting.  Assuming he would want a memorial at all other than his work, a Bacon Prize is of far more practical use to painters than his embalmed studio dumped in Dublin.  The principle criteria in awarding The Bacon Prize would be on the  arbitrary anti-illustrational use of the paint; this is to emphasise what is often overlooked: that Bacon was a great technician in the manipulator of  paint outside illustration. Most so-called painters today do not paint but illustrate, they avoid pain-ting.....like The Turner Prize which tends to discriminates against painting."

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                            

                                                      Squid Spunk Slither  Self Portrait   1980 Alex Alien                                        Sperm Sliver Self Portrait   1980 Alex Alien

                     

EP: "The Bacon Prize could be complementary to The Turner Prize but without the latter's puerile political correctness?"

 

                                                                                     

                                                                                                   Self Portrait After Picasso     Alex Alien  2002

 

AA: "Yes...like Turner, Bacon has often been described as the greatest British painter of his century, so why not therefore have an annual Bacon Prize to provide a scholarship to encourage painters  working in the anti illustrational Bacon manner. The current conservative BP National Portrait Gallery annual prize is for redundant 19th century illustrative portraiture. Unlike The Turner Prize, The Bacon Prize wouldn't be awarded for elephant shit, unmade spunk-stained beds or sharks in syrup soup but to authentic alien art."

                          

                                                                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                   Ontological Ostium  Self Portrait   Alex Alien  2001

 

EP: "So what would the prize be awarded for....a form of anti-illustrative portrait painting?"

AA: "The Bacon Prize would be awarded for real raw subconscious painting; that is, people who can use paint in an arbitrary non-rational,  anti-illustrational manner rather than photo realist painting-by-numbers which is always just filling-in illustration which is the ethos of the National Portrait Gallery BP Award. The Bacon Prize would be awarded to someone who best typifies and  perpetuates Bacon's innovative ethos of alien mark making painting the head outside  illustration."                                                   

 

                                                                                                

                                                                                                           Slit Slots Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002     

 

EP: "How would you envisage funding this annual Bacon Prize?"

AA: "The Bacon Estate is worth millions.  Prof. Brian Clarke afford to set aside  funds from the Bacon Estate or the John Edwards Charitable Trust to finance The Bacon Prize of  50,000 pounds a year awarded to a painter who can paint.  This would be a ideal way to commemorate a painter who could really handle paint.  What is called portraiture today is not painting but  inane illustration..."       

                                                                               

                                                                                          

                                                                                                         Empty Eggo Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002     

 

EP:  "Would The Bacon Prize be a threat to the current conceptualist hegemony that the likes of Serota and Saatchi perpetually promote via the politically correct  Turner Prize and conceptual art?"

  AA: "Hopefully. The Turner Prize has become deeply reactionary, conservative and establishment -  following the politically correct liberal fascist fashions of our day as instituted by Charles Saatchi  who has no instinct about authentic alien art.  Charles Saatchi and Jay Jopling are strikingly similar to TV's antiques show presenter David Dickinson in his seventies suit selling sensational shit. One could argue on purely ethical and political grounds no self respecting artist should ever deal with spiv shit Saatchi because the cunt promoted that petty-bourgeois fascist cunt Thatcher.  And that petty-bourgeois spiv Jay Jopling is a juvenile joke: all that crap at his Cube Gallery;  he said Turner was a provocative artist but nothing he promotes is provocative just pissy, boring, tedious and inane - a kind of  autistic art of arrested development.  Bacon would have  laughed at the shit  that Saatchi , Jopling  and The Turner Prize  syndicate sell us. Bacon said these art politicians,  -  just like our art critics  -  have absolutely no instinct at all about painting but merely follow the politically correct fashions of their day:   'Ninety-five percent of people are absolute fools, and they're bigger fools about painting than anything else . . . Hardly anyone really feels about painting: they read things into it - even the most intelligent people - they think they understand it, but very, very few people are aesthetically touched by painting.'  Bacon said in an interview with  William Burroughs in 1986 for BBC's Arena:  'I don't know if critics of literature are the idiots that critics of painting are in this country, because they're the biggest idiots that exist.  They know absolutely fuck all about it to begin with.  They've got no instinct about it, they've just got theories....It's always those bastards with the money behind everything, but what do they know? Nothing, nothing but money...'  Enough said."
                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

                                               

                                      Charcoal  Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002                                           Charcoal  Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002

 

EP: "Can we overthrow The Turner Prize? Who will win the politically correct Turner Prize 2001?"

AA: " I think Isaac Julien as he has all the politically correct credentials being a black homosexual conceptual artist and it is conceptual artists who have dominated the prize, dubbed 'The Serota Tendency' by The Stuckists, an anarchic confederation of painters dedicated to mocking the Turner Prize and Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.  Charles Thomson, the main man behind The Stuckists stated:  'Serota's admirable achievement with Tate Modern is not in question.  But while the Tate wants to offer a comprehensive overview of new British art, they only really show and promote Britart and conceptual work. So a lot of disenfranchised artists and art students are made to feel they've failed before they've begun because their work just doesn't fit that mould.'  The Twin Trade Tower alien attacker Mohammad Atta should have won the Turner Prize 2001 posthumously for his outstandingly beautifully executed abject-sublime 'video-performance' art work which is played back again and again on TV news stations hungry to sell sensationism.  Mohammad Atta's  perfectly executed and awe-inspiring 'installation art work' was far more mind-blowing, radical and inventive than the dull drek works of  the Turner Prize nominees Richard Billingham, Martin Creed, Isaac Julien and Mike Nelson who are no more than moronic petty-bourgeois shit Saatchian business men in naff mafia shit suits.  I hope The Stuckists can overthrow the trite, tawdry and turdistic Turner Prize."

 

 

                                                                                

                                                                                                                       Shape-shifting  Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2000

 

EP: "Creep Creed won. How does Creed's Light On, Light Off compare with Atta's Twin Towers Alien Attack?"

AA: "Atta's Alien Attack is authentic alien art. Creed is crap. Atta made the greatest image ever made by an alien. The sick Serota and Saatchi Syndrome symbolises the 'dumbing-down' liberal-fascism of our times: the failure of democracy and the ends of art, that is, human art, but points to the beginnings of an alien art.  The Turner Prize is living proof that democracy simply just does not work and what we really have now is a pernicious politically correct liberal-fascism. Andrew Vicari stated: 'There are no artists of that calibre now...There is no craftsmanship any more...The two devils who are responsible for this are Nicholas Serota and Charles Saatchi. They should be executed for what they have done to British art. The Turner prize? Every year our greatest painter's name is sullied by that award.'  (Andrew Vicari, The Guardian, November 16, 2001). How right he is."

                                                                

                                                                                               

                                                                Self  Portrait   Alex Alien  2002                                                     Self  Portrait     Alex  Alien   1980             

                                                                                                

EP: What composers  approximate to a kind of Baconian sensationism and influence your image making?"

AA:  "In addition to Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Varese, Sibelius, Nielsen and Shostakovich, the great Swedish composer, Allan Pettersson who paints pain pulsating sensationism song sounds in his 7th, 8th, 9th symphonies...and Varese's  Integrales and Arcana recall Bacon's primordial pain punctures. Varese and Bacon juxtaposed prehistoric alien reptilian imagery with post-modern industrial caged clangor....Varese and Bacon mutate the muck of primordial prehistoric reptilian being with a post human alien being. The grunting sounds in Wolfgang Rhim's Tutuguri Two recall the primordial animality and alienanility of Bacon's art.  There is no such thing as 'the human condition'; only 'the alien condition'. Yet every book on Bacon always refer boringly to Bacon recording 'the human condition' - it's all nonsense....Bacon was recording the sensation of the alien condition stripped of sexuality, subjectivity and gender."

 

                                                                                       

                                                                                        Severed Snout Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2000

 

EP: "Why did you title one of your alien self portraits Ontological Drool ; where did it come from?"

AA: "Ontological Drool came from a Mark Cousins lecture when he was describing the slime stuff that ooze and drip from the alien's mouth in the Alien film. I found a  psychological and ontological identification with Alien and merge and morph my self-portraits with the alien's  features and drool drippings. As 'I' do not exist -  'I' have no interior self  -  so 'I' identify with what is outside me, prior to me, external to me which exists without me but 'I' become a trace of its future-past and can morph multiple alien identities where man and woman (sexuality) never exist. Slavoj  Zizek's subject is always already 'already alien' where the human hides the inhuman in the Name of the Law of the Ather."

 

                                                                                            

 

EP:  "What  films especially evoke Bacon's  tense, taut, tortured and trapped trans-mutated body imagery?"

 

                            

                                                       

                                                                         Alex Alien  incorporating  Francis Bacon

 

AA:  "Hollow Man, hated by critics, depicts 'being there' as 'not being there' with horrific humour.  Kevin Bacon, as the Invisible Man,  is flayed flesh falling, and, when invisible,  can only be seen, traced, by all the alien substances spattered splattered on him making 'positive form' out of 'negative presence'.  So the invisible Kevin Bacon is felt by the traces he treads like 'blood on the floor' or water washing over his negative form becoming positive presence. His absence has great presence.  And images in David Lynch's  Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive echo Bacon's dissolving of the subject: in some of the early scenes the distinction between subject and object (figure and back ground) are blurred and dissolved where subject becomes object; where the subject is eaten up by the (back) ground: the negative no-space becomes the positive trace of the dissolved subject. Also a lot of the scenes in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet seem to have been initiated from Bacon's images. David Lynch is the most Baconian  of film directors.  David Lynch stated:  'The first artwork that made an impression on me was an exhibition of Francis Bacon'swork that I saw at Marlborough Gallery in New York when I was 18. It was images of meat and cigarettes and what struck me about them was the beauty of the paint and the balance and the contrast in the pictures. It was like perfection.'  Lynch's remarks about his own image making uncannily and succinctly sums up both my own and Bacon's attitudes to image making:  'What I'm trying to do with each canvas is create a situation in which the paint can be itself, which means letting go of any rationalization. It's important to let ideas blossom without too much judging or interference...It's one person acting and reacting with paint; it's a process that does not involve words...I never end up with what I set out to do....A lot more happens when you open yourself up to the work and let yourself act and react to it....Whether it's a film or a painting...I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises...I call my painting `bad' because bad painting has its own beauty.'  When  Ulrich Lössl asked Lynch who his models were he replied:  'Francis Bacon the painter certainly has influenced me.'  Lössl  then asked:  'Could you imagine decorating your living room with a Bacon painting?'  Lynch replied:  'Absolutely. That should be wonderful. I know this might sound confusing - but I certainly would put a Bacon-painting in my living room....' (Focus, 29.11.1999).  Lynch has an anti-narrative alien instinct about intense image making and image mutating.  Like Bacon, Lynch is trying to avoid the banality of story telling and thus negate narrative. It would be refreshing to make a film devoid of script and subject and merely shoot shadows, spaces, sounds of not being there..."

 

                                                                  

                                                                                 David Lynch  incorporating  Francis Bacon

 

EP: "There's a quote you use introducing our interviews from Hollow Man:  'Its amazing what you can do when you don't have to look at yourself in the mirror anymore'.   Does this apply to your work?"

 AA: "Yes, when painting self portraits, I do not use the mirror as it is too distracting, too literal, too empirical. However, when drawing self portraits, I always begin from the mirror to suture structure and organize order but then abandon the mirror once I have formed framework.  The mirror is not reflective and never reveals and the mirror is too close to 'commonsense' empirical appearance which is always already a leech lie. So one has to  smash, shatter, shutter, the mirror and resort to memory, mourning and the subterranean subconscious evil eye, that is, the ab-extra empirical eye....and the nervous system in order to nail the sensations of authentic alien being before the human arrived and left the scene."

 

                                                                  

                                                                         String Star Sliver Self  Portrait   2002   Alex Alien

 

EP: "So you do you always find that Uglow, Hockney, Freud and Saville only operate on the 'commonsense' empirical level of the faces skin skid surfaces?"

AA: "Yes: which makes their work so empirically boring, meaningless, weak and banal because it is all about slick surface skin fetishism negating the subterranean psychic sensation of alien being or being alien."

 

 

                                                                                            

                                                                       Primordial Shudder Self  Portrait   2004   Alex Alien

 

 

EP: "Do you and Bacon, as alien artists of psychic sensations, record the psyche of our time like Picasso and Alberto Giacometti had done in their own own time?"

AA: "I could not tell you what the psyche of our time is as I do not know what our time is or what the time is let alone what the the psyche is or what the time of the psyche is or what the psyche of time is."

 

                                             

                                                                               

                                                                                   Slither  Self  Portrait   2002  Alex Alien

                                                              

Leon Potgieter: "For you, what other films breed bodily Baconian shape-shifting imagery?"

AA: " The Cell directed by Tarsem Singh - with Jennifer Lopez -  and Altered States  directed by Ken Russell - with William Hurt.  Lopez and Hurt become mutated in watertight wet wired claustrophobic spaces that spills their stuffs beyond the pleasure principle; they float and fly in abject alien slime slithers.  And John Crapenter's The Thing where the alien thing mimetically incorporates human form.  Reviewer  Bryant Frazer wrote in Deep Focus:  'In his cultural history of the horror genre, The Monster Show, writer David J. Skal compares Francis Bacon's famous 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to equally disturbing special effects work in John Carpenter's The Thing. The surrealistic imagery conjured by Rob Bottin to depict the transformation of a human being into a shape-changing thing from another world is nearly unimaginable, and Milton is one of its few precedents. It must be seen to be believed...'  And Species (1995) directed by Roger Donaldson had a bimbo blonde shape-shifting into an alien animal which came close to Bacon's mutant portraits of Henrietta Moraes and Muriel Belcher.  Yet ironically, Maybury's boring Bacon biopic, Love Is The Devil, didn't incorporate Bacon's real life or Bacon imagery; it was all so arty, slick, safe, queeny, poofy, faggoty, glossy; so very Vogue, so very Channel 4, so very Guardian, so very Observer."

 

                                                                                                

                                                                                 "Fuck off, Cunty!"   -  Belcher in They Live 

 

LP: "Does contemporary cinema recall the memory traces of Bacon's alien heads? What films feature his heads?"

AA:  "Images in John Carpenter' much underrated film They Live (1988) remind me of Bacon's alien-eated portraits of Belcher, Rawsthorn and Moraes who were really aliens anyway. Also Graham Baker's Alien Nation (1988) ."                     

LP: "Why do you think Bacon failed to paint the brute fact of his own physical decay in his self portraits?  Bacon never tried to emulate the deterioration of his fucked face in his self portraits."

 

 

                                                                                 

 

AA: "Like many homosexuals of her generation she always saw herself as a lovely lush lady. Yet Bacon was no oil painting. She always gave herself face-lifts in her plastic surgery self portraits; like skin grafts a la Orlan.  She was a master of make up and would have been a great drag artist  had she not become a sturm und drang artist.  Critics come out with the cliché that Bacon remained as 'ageless as Dorian Gray'.  Nonsense. Bacon  failed to paint herself with what she termed 'brute fact' and ended up painting illustrational idealized icon self portraits like the official 'mask of youth' portraits of Elizabeth 1: after a certain date, they never changed to accommodate aging.  Bacon's silky self portraits are uncannily like Jawlensky's  Heads, Faces and Meditations with their ghostly grit glint glare of sombre sad soulful solitary spiritual starkness. Both Bacon  and Jawlensky also used disc-like shapes in their portraits to nail the form. Bacon and Jawlensky used the disc to pin-point the psyche of the subject. Bacon and Jawlensky used 'make-up' colours to give their heads extra body, extra bite, extra brightness."

 

                                                                            

    

LP: "So how do these sombre soulful Bacon's self-portraits synthesise with Bacon smeared shit self-portraits; is it a kind of Onto-Theology of Shit Being?  Did Bacon believe in Shit as Being There shat out in the world as truth?"                                                                                                         

AA: "Bacon one said to me in his studio that we: 'Manure the earth'; and he kept on repeating this statement. When Bacon was 17 he had a strong identification with shit, as he remarked to Sylvester: 'I remember looking at a dog shit on the pavement and I suddenly realised, there it is - this is what life is like. Strangely enough, it tormented me for months...'  In Bacon's self portraits the materiality of shit becomes spiritualised; onto-theologised; his face takes on ghostly turd traces of shit skid stain stuffs stamped on his fuck face; running, dripping.  Art critic Andrew Graham Dixon stated after reviewing Bacon's Russian show in the autumn of 1988:  'Excrement is a subject close to Bacon's heart....Bacon's paintings deal in prime biological fact, the stink and gore and flesh of us all; man cornered by his own mortality, blurs into meaty putrescence. In Moscow, his art - the screaming, trapped heads, the crawling things that perform for the viewer in Women Emptying a Bowl of Water and Paralytic Child on All Fours - have never looked more ferocious or unsettling. The shit has really hit the fan...'    Like alien abject animals, Bacon and Auebach know what to do with their shit, how to manipulate it and metamorphize shit into paint.  As Jacques Lacan once said:  'The characteristic of a human being is that -  and this is very much in contrast with other animals  -  he doesn't know what to do with his shit.  He is encumbered by his shit... Civilisation means shit, cloaca maxima'. The smear sensations of Bacon's shit-self-portraits and spunk self portraits often recall porn photos of 'scat facials' and 'cum facials'  seen on the Internet; shit smeared across the face and jet loads of semen shot violently across the face;  these shooting jet loads of  spurting spunk  have the same soiling sensational visceral poignancy as Bacon's thrown white whips of pure paint puss. Bacon throws the white whips of paint to ignite the image; to give it intense immediacy. Yet Jackson Pollock's whip lashes of paint are too multiplied and therefore cancel each other out; one whip lash of paint by Bacon has more intensity than Pollock's serialised layers of lace which are mere pretty patterns. Bacon  initiated a radical Philosophy of Shit, a Philosophy of Spunk, a Philosophy of Sensationism. The only truth for Bacon was being shit. For Bacon, the truth of being is shit...I shit therefore I am. We are all shit. We fear shit because it constitutes our interiority  - our inner essence  - our inner being. When the child offers its parents its shit as a gift it is a profound act of  generosity - as an opening out - an exteriorising - an excrementlalising  - of its being thrown-out-of-the-world. We have a philosophy of mind  -  so why not a philosophy of shit, or a philosophy of piss, or a philosophy of spunk? "

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne  1967  Francis Bacon 

 

L.P: "Which of Bacon's portraits give the sliver silver sensation spatter of shooting spunk across the fuck face?"

 

      

                                                                                               

                          

 

AA: "Shooting spunk sensation is found in Bacon's portraits of   Belcher, Moraes, Rawsthorne, Dyer,  Freud but oddly not in his images of his close companion John Edwards; maybe because Bacon  had no violent sensationism about Edwards only a fatherly friendly love so does not add insult to injury as it were."

 

                                                                                           

                                                                                               Slither  Self  Portrait  (Detail) 2002  Alex Alien

 

LP: "Talking of shit and spunk, what did you make of Auerbach's cool shit at his retrospective at the Royal Academy? How does Auerbach's shit compare with Bacon's shit and Freud's shit?"                                             

AA:  "Auerbach's shit is sensational.  Auerbach's  mid 1980s Head of J.Y.M was the finest portrait on view at his retrospective; it has the same fresh fleshyness as Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl.  When Bacon went back to banal illustration in the 1980s, Auerbach was painting non-illustrational portraits. Auerbach superceded Bacon and Freud in non-illustrational portraiture. Bacon smoothes out the shit textures of his paint whereas Freud's shit paint  became clogged and claustrophobic -  not being able to retain the freshness of his shit which became caked cack. In judging  art, Auerbach came out with an interesting remark to Michael Peppiatt:  'Well, I think what Hemingway said - that it's important to have an in-built shit detactor - is absolutely true.'  Both Bacon and Freud wound up trapped in illustration and merely filling in the form rather than allowing the raw organic shit of paint to do the work of immediate sensation on the nervous system.  However, Frank Auerbach's chard charcoal drawings remain too illustrative, too mannered; the aesthetic value of a drawing cannot be measured in the amount of time it took to carry it out;  Auerbach labours mightily to bring forth a sloppy scribble endlessly rubbing away yet getting no where - taking time does not necessarily produce profundity. Picasso can combine an economy of line with a minimum of effort."

 

                                                                                      

                                                                                                               Portrait of Ting Fay Ho,  1979, Alex Alien

 

LP: "Degas, Picasso, Giacometti, and Bacon  thrived in filth, in muck, in mess, in making a mess, in their studios."

                           

                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                   Charcoal  Self Portrait     Alex Alien 1980

 

AA: "But a deeply ordered mess; chaos, chance, mess are always already deeply ordered."

LP: "Do you use photographs as triggers for images like Bacon had done; and don't lie?"

 

                                                                                 

                                                                                               Eggo Eyed Self Portrait    Alex Alien 2002

 

AA: "Very rarely. Photographs may suggest a sensation but the texture of photographs are always already too flat, too fixed, too illustrative; and always too glossy, too polished and too unified.  Bacon never used photographs in a literal way but as a trigger  to trap an image which may have nothing to do with the photographs he was looking at. When he used photographs for portraits they were merely memory traces to trap the sensations of the subject, or what he called the pulsations of the person. Photography always already remains on the level of illustration. The talk on Joel-Peter Witkin at the ICA, I think in 1999, by Parveen Adams inadvertently  'illustrated' my point: Adams spoke of some skin texture coming through the scratch surface of the image but this had no effect on to the nervous system because the actual texture of the stuff is too smooth."

             

                                                                                        

                                                                                                                Slither Sliver Self Portrait    Alex Alien 2001

 

LP. "Why can't  we see  Cézanne, Monet, Degas, Bacon with the commonsense empirical eye?"

AA: "Because the sensation castrates the eye by shimmering, destablising, throwing the viewer. At the Royal Academy exhibition, From Ingres to Monet, Cezanne's Mont Saint-Victoire from the Bibemus Quarry 1897, and Claude Monet's Waterloo Bridge cannot be seen because the sensations are so  strong that they blind us and are read by the body.  The Monet Haystacks sold at Sotheby's had the same sensationist stranglehold where it burnt the eye and pierced right through the body bypassing the brain."

 

 

                                                          

                                                    After the Bath   1895  Degas                                                                                     After the Dyer  1975  Bacon    

 

LP: "Your charcoal nudes seem influenced more by Degas than by Bacon. Why?"                                                                                         

AA: "Well Bacon could not draw, despite the current circulating myth that he could draw;  and he could not handle  hands and feet when sketching them crudely out in his paintings; they always look cartoonish, clownish, clumsy. Bacon was not a draughtsman and it shows in his paintings. One can see Degas' influence on Bacon  in his Three Figures and a Portrait, 1975.  It is obvious that Degas is a superlative draughtsman, a discipline which Bacon  affected to despise ;  - a typical example of contempt masking ineptitude. Bacon's total  lack of draughtsmanship comes through again and again in his sloppy sketchy handling of form. In 1985, Bacon  chose Degas' After The Bath, Woman Drying Herself for the National Gallery's The Artist's Eye exhibition and said it was the use of shuttering, so that: 'the sensation doesn't come straight at you but slides slowly and gently through the gaps' that he found fascinating. It is a great pity Bacon did not have Degas' rigour and grounding in drawing."

 

                                                                                 

                                                                                                     Alien Animal (Self Portrait) 1980 Alex Alien                                        

                                                          

LP: "Have we experienced any shape-shifting shit recently? Does it effect your images?"    

 

                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                      Alien  Resurrection  

 

AA: "Yes we have. One night my left arm raised up and grew and grew becoming green and blue and my fingers morphed into a sharp silver knife point; I was in that nebulous interstices sensation between consciousness and sub-consciousness.  I often take on alien form like the alien in the great film Alien Resurrection.  My atta abject art aspires to the Condition of (being) Alien or The Alien Condition. There is no such state as 'The Human Condition' though this historically meaningless mythic sound bite is often found repeated again and again in texts on Bacon. Degas also realised, materialised, the alien in woman...showing 'woman' as alien and not human."    

 

                                                                                    

                                                                                                              Femme se coiffant     Edgar Degas  

 

LP: "You  mimic Bacon's love, obsession, of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Picasso  -  why?"

 

                                          

                                                                                                   

                                                                                                      Headless  Torso  Self  Portrait    2000  Alex Alien 

                                                

AA: "Because I feel I am very close to his type of instinct, his type of psyche;  and like Bacon, I have no interest in Vermeer, Surrealism, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko; Abstract Expressionism. Like Bacon, Marcel Duchamp hated the Abstract Expressionist Movement with all their retard sloppy spastic child-like dribbling and slapping the paint on.  Although both Bacon  and Duchamp used chance they were both highly disciplined about what they did.  Both Pollock and de Kooning  drip and dribble  diarrhoea and are not toilet trained. I agree with what Bacon said about  Pollock:  'That dribbling of paint all over the canvas just looked like old lace' - though today it is not a fashionable thing to say this.  Bacom said to William Burroughs:  'Jackson Pollock's paintings might be very pretty but they're just decoration. I always think they look like old lace.'   David Sylvester scorns Bacon over his views on Pollock and Abstract Expressionism; in an interview a few months before his death, Sylvester said to Tim Marlow:  'I said to Bacon when he put down abstract expressionism, so why do you think it moves me? And he said, 'Oh, you're too subject to fashion',  or something like that.  Well, I didn't argue with him, and I didn't argue with him about his idiotic opinions about Pollock...'  And Sylvester adds:   '...there are several American artists  whom I would place above Bacon -  Newman, Pollock,  de Kooning, Johns and Twombly.  They were, to me, greater painters than Bacon ..'  And Sylvester said to Martin Gayford in 1997:  'One thing about Francis that I very much disliked was his tendency to dismiss the work of virtually every other artist. He didn't like much art. He didn't even like much of the art of the artists he most admired, such as Picasso, Velazquez and Rembrandt.   But then he didn't much like his own work, which was, in a sense, the excuse...'   But Bacon  had a hyper-critical subconscious alien instinct about art whereas Sylvester's was a cultivated conscious critique based upon the politically correct fashions of his day:  Newman, Pollock,  de Kooning, Johns and Twombly are retard spastic autistic artists daubing diarrhea; Bacon  is far superior to these turds. Sylvester had incredible insight into Bacon's instinct and image making but had blind spots about  Pollock and Rothko which are pure passé decoration. Bacon never followed the fashions of his day like Sylvester did.  It has been said by some of Bacon's friends that Sylvester was yet another parasite leeching a living off the ever burgeoning Bacon Industry.   However, I began reading  Sylvester's insightful Interviews with Francis Bacon  when I was about 17 or 18 and I found them an invaluable and easily assimilated source; these intense interviews taught me more about sensationism and the chance dynamics of image making than all my effete training at Byam Shaw and Chelsea School o Art."

                              

                                                                    

                                                                                          Headless  Torso  Self  Portrait    2001  Alex Alien 

 

LP: "Did Bacon grasp the social construction of AIDS and the illusion of HIV?  It seems that  Bacon and Foucault had an oddly conservative, uncritical  and establishment reading of the AIDS discourse and the HIV construct."

 

                                  

                                                                                         

                                                                                             Spectral  Slime Self  Portrait    Alex Alien  2000

                                                 

AA: "Bacon and Foucault had incredibly naive reading of the AIDS construct; they fed into all the currently circulating homophobic mythologies about a sexually transmitted gay plague; maybe the 'HIV' myth merely reconstituted and replayed the historical construction of the homosexual as a pathologized, dis-eased sexualized subject; - they did not live long enough to realise that 'HIV' does not exist. As Dr Val Turner  recently stated:  'HIV is a metaphor for a lot of quasi-related phenomena. No one has ever proved its existence as a virus. We don't believe it exists.'   And  Etienne de Harven, a former professor of pathology agrees with Val Turner:  'Of course, I am very familiar with the many reports and electron microscope pictures of HIV particles.  Indeed, they show particles which could very well be taken as retroviruses on the basis of their ultrastructure alone.  But all these particles have been found in complex cell cultures, never in one single AIDS patient!'  And there are  no electron microscope images of isolated HIV  - because HIV does not exist.  Endogenous cell products generated in response to certain disease conditions, and only first noticed by microbiologists by the mid nineteen seventies, have been mistakenly identified and classified as exogenous infectious viral particles.  Thus an  epiphenomenon associated with some seventy plus disease conditions has been wrongly supposed to be a causative viral agent and classified as a retrovirus. All assumptions made about the casual transmission of HIV are in fact totally wrong. HIV is not an exogenous invasive transmissible agent - viral or otherwise - but  is  more likely to be  a collection of antibodies generated by stressed cells associated with  certain diseases.  HIV is not, repeat not, a sexually transmissible exogenous retrovirus but endogenous microvesicles, cellular debris and other misinterpreted matter."

                                 

                                                                                      

                                                                                                                Sliced Shape-Shifting Self Portrait Alex Alien 2003  

                             

EP:  "Did the immediate impact of the image of the Atta alien attack against the Twin Towers by pass the brain in the sense that it was outside illustration and narrative and logic and meaning;  - that is -  it was an impossible and an unbelievable image?  Like the Titanic, the Twin Trade Towers were seen as unassailable."

                       

                                                                                                   

                                                                                             Empty Eggo Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2003       

                                                                       

AA:  "Well Bacon  said to Michel Archimbaud:  'Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.'  The sheer sensationism impact of the images erased any narrative and reading as the images went straight to the nervous system with a visceral jouissance frisson. It is always already only after the immediate impact image event of sensationism that a narrative can then be added. The aftermath images reminded me of Whiteread's ghostly objects; notably her brute Black Bath.  The Twin Tower alien attack by passes narrative becoming angoisse abject alien art."

 

                                                              

 

LP: "Do you associate Bacon's imagery with a pain, horror and violence, as most of our art critics do?"

AA: "No. Not at all.  On the contrary Bacon's imagery is often lyrical, distilled, tranquil, serene, even humorous.  In fact most of Bacon's images are boring and banal, as Bacon scholar, April Hunter has observed.  Hunter's radical reading of Bacon breaks down all the banal clichés associated with his images and psyche. Hunter is the only person I know who really has an instinctual understanding of Bacon and his images - far more so than David Sylvester. It is the violence of the raw paint that ignites the otherwise inane imagery. Bacon said to Michel Archimbaud:  'I really cannot even begin to believe that my work is violent. But maybe it's the actual word violence that basically I don't understand properly.. In a certain sense the Picassos that I like are violent, but not in their subject matter; they are violent in the colours and forms that they use, and it's because these pictures are so remarkably well executed that one could say that they are violent in a certain sense. They are violent because of the incredible emotional charge which they produce, and that is an impressive sort of violence...' The so-called 'violence' in Bacon's art is in his use of raw pain paint and not in his subject matter."  

LP: "And the violence in Bacon is when the paint is the image and the image is the paint? The violence of the paint?"

AA: "Exactly: this violence of paint is what Bacon admired so much in Matthew Smith, and Rembrandt and Monet."       

 

 

                                                                                    

                                                                                             Study for Portrait of Peter Lacy,   1963  Francis Bacon 

 

LP: "So when did Bacon achieve this union of paint as image, image as paint?"

AA:  "From around 1950 to 1970 Bacon used  non-illustrational paint where  image and paint are one -  thus negating narrative and inane illustration; depressingly, after around 1970 Bacon fell back into the banality of illustrational painting where the paint becomes etiolated....In an interview with Tim Marlow, David Sylvester states that Bacon had two really great periods:   'One was from about 1944/1945 to 1954; the other from about 1971 to 1976. I don't think there were many great works during the last fifteen years of his career...'   While David Sylvester is right in saying  Bacon produced nothing great during the last fifteen years of his life, he fails to recognize Bacon's very greatest works which were painted between 1960 to 1963;  notably: Head of a Boy 1960, Head (Man in Blue) 1961, Head 1962, Seated Figure on Couch 1962, Figure on a Couch 1962, Turning Figure 1962, Three Studies for a Crucifixion 1962, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1963, Study for Portrait of Peter Lacy 1963.  But Bacon did a few more non-illustrational images up to around 1970 -  including Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1965, and a reptilian Portrait of Lucien Freud 1967, as well as a full-length Portrait of Lucien Freud 1968 (which has a wonderful whip of white paint, like splattered spunk, by his boot). After 1970 Bacon returned to the evil banality of illustration where he no longer uses non-illustrational paint and involuntary marks and abandons arbitrary accidents.  By 1980 Bacon was fucked and finished. Bacon's  Study for Portrait of Peter Lacy 1963 is one of his most successful images with great black discs which recall Jawlensky's discs as well as nailing timpani thwacks...but I've never seen it reproduced in colour."