Alien Interview 2 

                         

                                                           

                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Alex Alien in Amsterdam  in 1986

 

 

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

 

                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                  Francis Bacon in NYC                                                                                                            Francis Bacon in NYC

                                                                                                     

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 ghostliness; 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!"

 

      

                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                   Soul 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  Beaulieu Abbey 1981                                                                        Alex Alien his Shed Studio mirror 2001

 

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."

                               

                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                        Stehender Mann (Self Portrait)   1911    Egon Schiele   

 

 LP: "Why do you, Bacon and Dahmer often sever the head from the body in image making?"

AA: "Removing the head from the body helps to intensify the psychological profile of the body; the torso displaces the head and retraces the face; the torso, the body has always already internalized the head, so one does not need the head as it is always already embodied as it were. Bacon in his paintings and Dahmer in his Polaroids, would decapitate the head to give the body more weight and to negate narrative. When I draw or paint my torso I realize the head is not needed as it is always already traced in the body. When I painted a headless torso self portrait at art school in 1979 I remember being accused of making a 'non-psychological self portrait'  - whatever that may mean.  In great art the face is always already imprinted indirectly through the body of alien being as in Schiele's torso-psyche-self portraits."

 

                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                     Self Portrait 1910  Egon Schiele   

 

LP: "Does Schiele trace the face through the body; does he operate outside illustration?"

AA: "Yes. I saw this Egon Schiele nude self portrait at Christie's in London which traces the face in the body and his right open eye is outside illustration though you cannot tell this from the  reproduction of the image but the eye is arbitrarily put in...or should one say put out? Also he has cut off his cock which gives the image bite.  Schiele made many Torso Self Portraits where the torso itself becomes the face and his controlled-arbitrary use of watercolour, like Nolde's, is outside illustration. In Schiele, the true sensation of the state of the psyche bleeds from the bruised body." 

 

 

                                                                               

                                                                                                              Self Portrait 1912   Egon Schiele

 

LP: "Damien Hirst said: 'I wanted to be a painter. You know: "I'm a painter."... But the thing is, painting is dead. It didn't work. For me, Bacon is the last result of the great painters. He's the last painter..'..."

AA: "Hirst can't paint so he is going to say painting is dead. He is dead. Well, his kind of non- painting is dead, as is Freud's, Hockney's and Kitaj's becuase it is not real painting but illustration, filling in, painting by numbers. Hirst's anodyne attempts at painting remain on the level of  corporate vestibule  decor - lobby fodder like Pollock; mundane murals, pretty shapes; pure decoration...But I love what Hirst says about Bacon: 'He's the best. There's these two different things, painters and sculptors. And Bacon is a painter... It's not about your ability; it's about your guts, on some level. And Bacon's got the guts to fuck in hell... But it's a sigh of relief from Freud when the cunt dies. I mean, Lucian Freud, without Bacon, would be the best painter we've got. But he's not. He's shit next to Bacon. And Bacon can't paint, and Freud can. What's going on?...'  To answer Hirst, what's going on is that Freud remains locked at the level of conscious and banal illustration so there's no tension, no instinct, no invention.  Because Bacon can't paint consciously and literally he is in fact a greater painter because the paint is pushed arbitrarily and subconsciously manipulated and the throwness of the paint becomes a rebirth of the painter and the reinvention of paint and appearance, Freud is still trapped in a mid- nineteenth century realist mode which looks ironically unreal. Freud, Hockney, Kitaj and Hirst have not learnt a thing from their old master, Bacon, for they have failed to liberate their alien instincts and remain locked into the evil banality of illustration and decoration.  Rumours of the death of painting are much exaggerated  - by those who can't paint. Painting is alive not dead. Conceptual art is dead."

 

 

                       

                                                                          Alex Alien as Egon Schiele 1981 by John Lazzarini        

 

 

LP: "Was  Freud's desire for the return of his stolen portrait of Bacon, a desire for a reunion in hell?"

AA: "Bacon out stripped Freud in the 1950s as a more radical painter and left Freud in the nineteenth century. Freud did not even learn from Degas' great radical pastels which are outside illustration.  And Freud failed to learn from Bacon and remained trapped in inane illustration.  I mean, to paraphrase Hirst's pastiche laddish parlance, the fuck didn't learn from the cunt.  Does Freud want his weak Woolworth Weeping Boy portrait of Bacon back or does he want Bacon's bones back, or rather, Bacon's ashes back?  Freud never was able to make his paint alive and immediate as Bacon's because it was always  over rehearsed, over padded, over cooked and became so mannered and so heavy handed ending up with  clumsy clogged claustrophobic canvas constipation caked cuntness. "

                     

LP: "And Bacon said 'you have to abbreviate into intensity', whereas Freud does the opposite."

AA: "And another thing Bacon said in contradistinction to Freud was:  'The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you've got of its looking real'.  With Freud we have the bizarre paradox that the more real he tries to make the image, the more artificial it becomes. Bacon said to Daniel Farson: 'You know, the trouble with Lucien's work is that it's realistic without being real...'  Freud's realism does not look real because he uses illustrational marks rather than  involuntary or arbitrary chance-made marks which are always already more real, more organic, more nervous. And  Freud avoids chance and arbitrary marks;  Freud is far too self-consciously careful when painting and thus cancels out  nervous tension or radical invention which you find in Degas' late pastels or Bacon's  1960s chance and trance manipulation of oil paint.  Freud always remains on the level of illustration because he negates chance.  Bacon said to Sylvester : 'But you can't order chance. This is the thing. Because if you could you would only be imposing another type of illustration.'  Bacon was right!."

 

 

                  

                                                                       Alex Alien as Egon Schiele 1981 by John Lazzarini     

  

 

LP: "Freud, Kitaj, Hockney  impose just another type of illustration because their illustrative use of paint cannot come across directly onto the nervous system because it is so weak and etiolated."

AA: "Bacon posed the question why certain paint attacks the nerves while other paint remains so placid: 'It's a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.' It has to do with the organic raw texture of the oily stuff that some how identifies with our nervous system's memory of the body; a kind of electric current visceral fusion. Composers like Tan Dun and Magnus Lindberg are far greater painters than anyone today because they are able to manipulate texture, colour, form in a much more organic, visceral and subconscious way. Painters need to learn from our contemporary composers on how to begin to paint again and abbreviate into intensity. We need to open up our primordial reptilian instincts and find new ways to manipulate paint that fuses to the nervous system.  Bacon stated: 'Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there's an artist who does and makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life...We need to invent the techniques by which reality can be conveyed to our nervous system without losing the objectivity of the thing portrayed.'  Bacon and Lindberg work within the Grand Western Tradition but also reinvent it!  Magnus Lindberg stated in 1995:  'For me, the inspirational thing about composing is that each piece has something quite new about it, but also something from the previous work.'  Listening to Lindberg's 'Aura' in concert at the Royal festival Hall was a nerve nailing experience expiring the body of subjectivity and substance making one jellied, liquidated, hollowed out!  Lindberg's note nerve noises de-boned bone and gutted-gut.  Lindberg's nerve noises re-read, re-work, de-gut human subjectivity to an alien objectivity;  where his music re-sings the reptilian rock of the beast body.  We need to paint and compose from the body to the body where the alien art object - be it music or painting - re-invents, re-interprets, re-forms us back-forward to past-future alien being.  Lindeberg's music cannot be listened to per se because the sounds are listening to us  and playing us out  and  hollowing us out and filling us up with rhythms of reptilian remembrance of things past ; erasing our past and reforming our future. Lindberg and Bacon, as alien abimage makers, are re-making us as alien abjects and abimages -  where the human subject has left the scene becoming all alien again attained as our original alien attunenment. Music is always already the abaesthetics of the extra-abvisual; music is really far the most abvisual of all the arts today."

 

 

                                                                             

                                                                                                              Ontological Ooze  Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2002 

 

 

 LP: "You wrote on BBC Online News, 24 December, 2001: 'Lucien Freud's portrait of The Queen is embarrassingly puerile and naive reminding one of that kitsch Woolworth Weeping Boy school of painting. Freud clearly has not learnt from his grand master Francis Bacon because Freud is still trapped in a 19th century mode of realist illustration which remains on the level of painting by numbers. Who says Freud is Britain's greatest living painter?'  Why does Freud's portrait of The Queen fail to attack the nerves, the senses..?"

AA: "Because his paint remains on the level of inane illustration, a retard realism verging on kitsch. Freud failed to record The Queen's Alosaurus like features in his appallingly crude attempt. One is not at all surprised that Freud has denied website access for his puerile portrait of The Queen:  it is so  banal, weak and looks like the work of a retarded child. Freud should have slashed it and started again;  Bacon would have castigated him for saving such shit.  The Queen should have had Freud sent straight to the Tower of London and have him executed for treason! Bacon rightly said to David Sylvester that we must get away from illustrative realism that Freud is so stupidly stuck in:  'You want something new. Not an illustrative realism but a realism that comes about through a real invention of a new way to lock reality into something completely arbitrary.' In an interview in Time (New York, 1951) Bacon said:  'Art is a method of opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object...Real imagination is technical imagination.'  Freud is an illustrator and not a painter; he has no invention, no imagination and has learnt nothing from Bacon, His Mater's Voice. Freud loves to be in with and arse-lick the establishment and the aristocracy as well."

 

                                                     

                                                    Alex Alien and brothers Xavier and James with a Dalek at Ealing Studios 1965

 

LP: "Then Whiteread is more radical than Freud and truer to Bacon's ethos reinventing realism?"

AA: "Yes - Whiteread is more radical in reinventing realism of alien presences and absences. But Whiteread is mistaken for a conceptual artist but she's nothing of the kind because conceptual art always remains on the banal levels of narrative and inane illustration.  As Ivan Massow said concerning conceptual art is in: 'danger of disappearing up its own arse ...Most concept art I see now is pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat that I wouldn't accept even as a gift..It is the product of an over-indulged middle class (barely concealed behind mockney accents), bloated egos who patronise real people with fake understanding...Thousands of young artists wait in the wings to see whether the taste arbiters will relinquish their exclusive fascination with concept art...Boundaries have been pushed further and further but, I wonder, isn't it all now rather piss-poor compared to the brilliant and explosive interventions of our modernist forebears?... anyone who has met Emin knows she couldn't think her way out of a paper bag....'    Emin &  Hirst are the Posh & Becks of the con-art world where trailer trash non-entities are lionised by the politically correct but aesthetically autistic mediocraties in power like servile Serota and shit Saatchi."

LP:" You recently had a correspondence with Ivan Massow concerning The Bacon Prize?"

AA: "Massow seemed excited about the idea of The Bacon Prize and stated:  'I like the idea. I think we could get it sponsored or - possibly do it privately. I'd have to think of a venue and all (it is likely that I'll be sacked from the ICA for my comments)...we'd need the highest profile judges. Do you think that it's pulloffable?...'   I said it was and sent him a list of high profile judges for The Bacon Prize which included Grey Gowrie, Michael Peppiatt, Robert Hughes, Brian Clarke, Frank Auerbach, Germaine Greer and Maggie Hambling. Yet Massow stated The Bacon Prize 'should include other mediums other than paint on a canvas' which would inevitably reduce it to nebulous non-specificity of  The Turner Prize.  Emin, Hirst and Creed would never win The Bacon Prize because they cannot paint.  The Turner Prize is essentially a Thatcherite and Saatchian market manipulated mutation... mixed in with Blairite politically correct liberal-fascism reflecting the evil of banality which marks and markets our inauthentic  age.  The inauthentic art of The Turner Prize is analogous to the inauthenticity of Nazi National Socialist Art.  The democratization of art becomes liberal-fascist art. Because Massow criticized the con-conceptual liberal-fascist art of cunt-ox Emin, he was forced to resign from the ICA. Ivan Massow was forced to resign as Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art for beginning a public debate on so-called contemporary art. Massow is to set up a project known as Culture Trade Mark to counter the cranky conservatism of the ICA,Tate Modern and The Tuner Prize which are all political institutions."  

 

                                                                                      

                                                                                                                            Alex Alien & Bryan Adams 2005 

 

LP: "Does Conceptual Art exist"?

AA:  "No.  'Conceptual Art' does not exist. The very nomination 'Conceptual Art' is an oxymoron, a misnomer, because Great Art has nothing to do with conscious 'concepts' or commonsense comprehension because it is always already anterior to conscious thought, conceptualisation and comprehension. Great subconsciously created art has no concepts and lays outside commonsense comprehension and cannot be comprehended in a literal sense.  Art,  - by its very (un)nature,  - is always already essentially non-conceptual'. Art, as Non-Conceptual, cannot be 'understood' or 'read' because it is outside 'narrative' , 'language,  'illustration' and 'meaning'. Great Art has 'nothing to say'.  The work of Rachel Whiteread and Marcel Duchamp  is not 'Conceptual Art' because their Abject Sublime Images are outside 'illustration', 'conception' , 'narrative' and 'meaning'.  Therefore the 'concept' of 'Conceptual Art' is  a misnomer because subconscious art has no literal conception or linguistic meaning or narrative. The conceptual does not belong to art but to the theorist's desire to build theories and the critic's desire to construct narratives. As Adorno stated: 'the truth of works of art hinges on whether or not they succeed, in accordance with  their inner necessity, to absorb the non-conceptual and contingent. For their purposefulness the purposeless, which is illusion.'  The aesthetic discourse lays outside commonsense conceptualisation. As Duchamp stated:  'In the creative act, the artist...must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane.' Art runs counter to the conceptual and illustration; there simply cannot be a conceptual art; so-called 'conceptual artists' have no concepts to begin or end with anyway."

LP: "Massow resigned from the Institute of Contemporary Art and now you have resigned from Massow's Culture Trade Mark and Jake websites. Why?"

AA:  "There was no critical debate -  merely ad hominem attacks and inane invective as well as censorship on the 'AIDS' debate where my writings were deleted after pressure from 'AIDS' charities. The level of discussion at Culture Trade Mark was on the level of the lobotomised. It is not a very good career move on my part to criticize both the 'Art' Establishment and the 'AIDS' Establishment. It is still taboo to state that 'Conceptual Art' and  'HIV' do not exist because so many have invested so much in these mythic  belief systems.   Massow stated in the New Statesman (Monday 21.1. 2002):  'The parallels between advocates of conceptual art and the dotcom pirates who plundered our pension funds are clear. The arts elite (and that includes the critics) who witnessed the conceptual revolution have invested so much of their reputation in defence of this kind of art that they find themselves unable to criticise it. Moreover, it is supported in so many ways and so thoroughly by the likes of Nicholas Serota and Charles Saatchi'.   For so long now so many people have invested their reputations and built their lucrative lie careers out of the  'Conceptual Art' fraud  and the  'HIV' fraud so they cannot suddenly confess that both do not exist and that they made a tragic blunder so they have to go on believing in these crass cranky charades.  Serota and Saatchi are like Gallo and Montagnier: trying  to sell a dead hypothesis to a cynical public. Their days are numbered."

P: "Why is it so difficult to overthrow the 'Conceptual Art' and 'HIV' paradigms?"

AA: "Because it is so difficult to overthrow those in power who perpetuate those parasitic paradigms...The greatest barrier to the advancement of culture and science is the profitable political paradigm of the dominant group. There are just too many people profiteering from the crass conceptual art paradigm and the putrid 'hiv' paradigm for them to be abandoned.  Leading merican mathematician and 'AIDS' dissident, Serge Lang sums this up:  'The first law of sociodynamics (a) The power structure does what they want, when they want; then they try to find reasons to justify it. (b) If this does not work, they do what they want, when they want, and then they stonewall...'  Or to paraphrase  Slavoj Zizek: 'The 'conceptual art' paradigm and  'hiv' paradigm (Party-and-State bureaucracy) feigns to rule in the name of the people while everybody knows that it rules in its own interest - in the interest of reproducing its own power...'  Everyone knows that 'conceptual art' and 'hiv' do not exist. They're profitable political programmes."

 

                                                      

 

LP: "Does the unique, unusual, sublime beauty of the Twin Tower alien attack negate its narrativistic horror?" 

AA: "The sublime beauty of the images of both the Twin Tower attack, and of its aftermath, recalls the images of Turner, John Martin and  Caspar David Friedrich; one was so awe struck, so overwhelmed and bombarded  by the impact of the images that one could not really read  or see  the images with the commonsense empirical eye because the images operate outside empirical vision and literal meaning.  The  invigorating visceral frisson of the images went straight to  the body - to the nervous system before the mind could begin to register them. It thus became impossible for those shell shocked New Yorkers to read or see the images because of their sensational sublime beauty which went beyond illustration.  In a similar context, Bacon said to the wild-life photographer Peter Beard:  'If you see someone lying on the pavement in the sunlight, with the blood streaming from him, that is in itself - the colour of the blood against the pavement - very invigorating...exhilarating.  In all the motor accidents that I've seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty - the vision of it, before you think of trying to do anything.  It is to do with the unusualness of it....I think the beauty in it is terribly elusive, but it just happened to be the disposition of the bodies, the way they lay in the blood, and perhaps it was also because it was not a thing one was used to seeing...'   So, yes, the poetic beauty of the Twin Tower attack  - as a performance installation total art work  - did indeed negate its 'literal' horror.  Stockhausen was instinctively right to nominate the Twin Tower alien attack as 'the greatest work of art there has ever been'......"

EP:  "From alien attack to Alien Resurrection: does Titian's silky  Tarquin and Lucretia take on the slime and skin of Sigourney Weaver?"

 

                                                       

                                                              Ontological Slime:  Sigourney Weaver in  Alien Resurrection

                                                                          

AA:  "More the shine, the translucency, when the alien leaves its oily ooze slime on her smooth silky soft surfaces."

EP:  "There's a break down of surface; no contours, the skins seem so dissolved blurred by light, by wet."

 

 

                                                                       

                                                                            Alien Predator  Self Portrait    Alex Alien 2003

 

AA:  "Ontological silky slime skin shines through in late Titian and early  Bacon; as well as the Alien films."

 

                                                                      

 

EP:  "And also The Predator  film seems to have  influenced some of your recent charcoal self-portraits"

AA:  "And paintings including one of Shirley Russell  filtered from Titian, Bacon, The Alien film images..."

 

                                                                        

                                                                              "I'm the monster's mother."  Shirley Russell

 

LP: "Your mother, Shirley Russell died.  Would a posthumous portrait move you from mourning to memorial?"

AA: "Incorporation has always already negated that movement from mourning to memorial. I internalised her. She internalised me. Even when she was alive I was wearing her.  I remember she always had a bad back and I started to wear her back. I remember seeing her walking up the stairs and identified with her back, the pain in her back, her nervous system. I always feel my mother hibernating in me like a stow away. It seems absurd to state that I can make the movement from mourning to memorial with her hiding inside me! Since she died certain things like lager taste as though they were tasted from an alien tongue; an uncanny feeling; a totally different sensation as though her tongue was tasting the liquid. My body feels heavier now.  One night I woke to find that I had become her alien conscience. I was estranged from her for years but we were close near the end and now her remains remain buried within me. She wanted me to paint her portrait and had an exact image of how the painting should look by using her ashes as well."

 

 

                                                                   

                                                                                                      Alien Resurrection 1997  

 

LP: "How did she look when she died?"  Will you paint her from the memory of her death?"

AA: "Uncannily close to The Predator. Like a gentle soft delicate alien child. Her eye lids were half closed and light china blue eyes glazed in silence. My brother and I were with her when she died and I closed her eyes. Her teeth were so refined and tiny; as if she became a fragile miniature china alien doll. I have an image in my body of how she looked when she went which suggested The Predator and The Alien in feeling and form.  Her skin suggested Lucretia's flesh in Titian's  Tarquin & Lucretia (1568-76) which is currently at the National Gallery, London,and is on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Titian is the greatest painter of flesh, so subtle and always already in decay. Shirley had Bacon's obsession with what he called the: 'roughness of texture' in her film costumes which looked well worn in, well worn out, broken down and creased by the city, body and time where clothes record the wear and tear of time. On her death bed she was the most beautiful woman that I had never known. Her eyes had an eternal shine of china blue."

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                                           Tarquin & Lucretia 1568-76  Titian

 

LP:  "So the flesh, froth, foam and form of Lucretia in Titian's image of  Tarquin & Lucretia will be mutated and melted with images of The Predator & The Alien to make your mother's memorial portrait?"

AA: "Yes. Images always already suggest other images as echoes, memory traces; images mutate and breed off other images; one merely makes the marriages between one image and another in the hope of breeding another image, another alien form; like a form of species hybridisation."

LP: "Does the mourning movement of the Incorporation of the Mother  come about by your refusal to accept her loss?"

 

                                                                                 

                                                                                     Alien throwing the Ashes of an alien Mother all away

 

AA: " I did not lose her because I never found her to lose her so it was not a loss but a gain. I did not lose a loved one but incorporated a loved alien. Incorporation is always already the failure to digest the alien mother totally; she is never either totally on the inside or totally hovering on the outside but hanging on the interstices.  Incorporation is often wrongly interpreted as the refusal to acknowledge the full import of the loss, But death is not loss but becoming through incorporation as embodied encryptment where one's body, as crypt, may house many hoverers.  I cannot 'unhitch' or 'unstitch' my incorporation or identification with the dead mother because I am always already her alien offspring, her 'imprint', her 'mould', her 'trace', her 'cast'. I do not exist (in-myself) just like the 'Image' does not exist (in-itself); the 'I' and the 'Image' are always already serial signs parasitic off of former identifications and images and incorporations. 'I' do not exist. The 'Image' does not exist. The gained dead alien mother is rescued and recovered by the reality of incorporation and she is set up inside my 'crypt'. She resides inside me as an alien body that remains alien within my alien body. One becomes hijacked by the dead mother becoming a mortuary mood memorial. I kept some of her remains as a reminder as after I threw her ashes I held a handful back in order to incorporate into a sculpture head or her or a painting head of her, so some remains remain embodied in an art thing like a crypt thing."

 

                                                                          

                                                                                            Pencil Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2003       

 

LP: "Bacon's Popes, being encrypted phantoms, become the Symbolic Incorporation of his father."

AA: "For Maria Torok:  '...the phantom is not at all the product of the subject’s self-creation by means of the interplay between repressions and interjections. The phantom is alien to the subject who harbors it. Moreover, the diverse manifestations of the phantom, which we call haunting, are not directly related to instinctual life and are not to be confused with the return of the repressed.'...  My dead mother becomes the living alien phantom alien to my alien crypt which houses her and feeds her. Which in turn hoses, houses, feels and feeds me."

LP: "According to The Times, The Tate is said to be accepting the fake Bacon Barry Joule Archive."

AA: "Even if it is blindingly obvious to the most casual observer that Mr Joule's Bacon Brick-A-Brac  Bacon Scraps have been tampered with by another hand, why has Sir Nicholas Serota apparently fallen for this crude con trick?  What has Mr Serota done to authenticate this absurd archive? I've just read that Tate asked The Times to make it clear that it has not yet received, or accepted, a formal offer. A retard child could tell that the Joule Bacon Archive is crude crass fake fraud."

LP: "Auerbach allegedly spent seven years - on and off - creating his self portrait; a labour of love?"

AA: "As I stated on Channel 4's Forum Page, it should not have taken Frank Auerbach seven years to create his self portrait and it is certainly not worth £17,500. I have done far superior self portraits in charcoal and pencil in seven seconds or seven minutes but never seven hours, seven months or seven years. The length of time Auerbach spent creating his slack self portrait is perverse affectation and not a measure of genius; his self portrait looks over worked.  Picasso and Matisse did greater portraits in seven seconds. Auerbach said on Channel 4 News: 'I still think it's finished'. No: Auerbach's self portrait has not yet begun. Auerbach should try and create a drawing in seven seconds. I saw Picasso's ink drawing of Sarah Murphy at Christie's which was probably executed in seven minutes and says more through less than any of Auerbach's or Freud's overdetermined mannered drawings - which are far too drawn out..."

EP: "Painting has two major illusions. It fakes space and time. If it has this set up inherently, how can it still be truthful?"

AA: "Time and Space are always already necessary illusions as form faked by nature so art is the only truth which in turn distorts the lie  illusions of nature back into the truth of reality, the reality of truth. Art is a truth that helps us to all realize the lie. Time is a lie as Space is a lie. Art gives truth to time and space as being out of time and out of space." 

 

                                                                               

                                                                                                           Ontological Ooze  Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2002

 

EP: "Do you sometimes experience rapture when painting? A sort of feeling of pure unadulterated joy while painting. Also when are you happiest, at the commencement of the painting, While doing it or when it is completed?"

AA: " Yes, when painting or drawing I do experience a sensation of tranced tantalizing ritual rapture and dazed dizzy  jouissance giddiness while painting and drawing. In painting and drawing I am in a state of dying bliss; a captivating passing out; an exhilarating anxiety; a kind of dazed malaise of nervous nailing jouissance. So I am never happy when working because one is in such a state of nervous non comprehension of nothingness. When the art work is complete -  'in itself'  - I feel relieved it's all over and I am often happy with the outcome because it has has the illusion of the subconscious sensation I desired and the image also remakes me; reforms me. It lives. I have given birth to a bastard alien child thing. As Ripley said: 'I'm the monster's mother!' The art work lives on its own and haunts and taunts me."

 

                                                                                

                                                                                    Ontological Ooze  Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2002-7

 

EP: "Do you make preparatory drawings before painting? And don't lie about it like Bacon did. We know now Bacon made small sketches from his imagination even if he did't draw directly from life - that is directly from the model."

AA: " Very rarely. The Goat Woman painting  - which I did at Chelsea School of Art in 1979  - was based upon some life class drawings I did of a beautiful blonde model who had a severe case of  acne. And now I am working on a charcoal head and torso self portrait study to serve as the structure for a portrait of my mother -  incorporating her lines through my lines.  This will be further mutated with Titian's  Tarquin & Lucretia (1568-76). So the final oil painting of my mother will be well removed from any preparatory drawing. But life drawing is essential for rehearsing figural structure,  subconscious structure. The reason why so many of Bacon's body forms are so weak and sloppy is his lack of draughtsmanship and it always shows. While I make many self portrait drawings these are not preparatory sketches for my self portrait oil paintings. Like Bacon, I work very directly and blindly so any preparatory drawing would be always already rendered redundant. But drawing is essential - for the understanding form and volume and contour."

               

                                                                     

                                                                                  Ontological Ooze  Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002-7

                           

EP: "With your portraits, what are you saying to us, what are you sticking into our faces? Is it possible to answer as a general question? If so please proceed."  

 AA: " I am saying nothing. What is there to say? At has nothing to say. Authentic Art is always already outside commonsense conceptualisation which is why conceptual art does not exist. Art has nothing to do with narrative or illustration as Bacon and Lynch  demonstrate. It is the critics and consumers who want words, want a story, to fill in, to justify the banality of their being and words."

 

                                                               

                                      Alex Alien with Jawlnesky at the Louvre                                                                       Alex Alien with Picasso  at the Louvre

 

EP: "You want to avoid narrative yet the moment you invent a face you're initiating narrative."

 AA: "Not if that face is painted outside illustration.  The viewing-subject has to take in the defected  incomprehensibility of the object-no-face which is outside illustration and narrative. One wants to reinvent the face without filling it in like Lucien Freud does. Freud 's fill-in faces are empirical; I want to try and tap and trap the extra-empirical sensation which aspires to the extra-visual sensation in classical music; and music moves perception in time and space. Lucien Freud is stasis, soundless; paint marks in Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Cezanne, Jawlensky and Bacon are musical sensation in movement. Klee had musical parents and he played the violin when he was very young but his images are ironically unmusical. Yet Bacon had no instinct for music at all but his paint is profoundly musical. Deleuze makes the connections between  rhythm-sensation and sound-paint: 'The power is Rhythm, deeper than vision, hearing, etc. And rhythm appears to be musical when it impacts the level of hearing, as when paintings impacts the visual level. A 'logic of the senses', Cezanne said, not rational, not cerebral. In the final analysis, it is the relationship of rhythm and sensation which creates the levels and domains of sensation. And this rhythm runs through a painting as it runs through a piece of music.'  The musical rhythm of sensation runs through Bacon's spots, spunks, stabs, screams, streaks, slashes, slivers and slithers, splatters..."

 

                                                                          

                                    Ontological Ooze  Self Portrait  Alien 2002                                                             Ontological Ooze  Self Portrait  Alien 2007   

 

EP: "Which composers aspire to the alien animal condition of Baconian slime scream sensation?"

AA:  "Wolfgang Rhim and Edgar Varese. Varese's Integrales and Wolfgang Rhim's Tutuguri 2, which was influenced by the abimagery of Antonin Artaud, are the closest scores to the grunting sound bites in Bacon's stabbing paint marks."

EP: "Regarding myth, Bacon used Greek myth to initiate image making; do you use post-modern myths for images?"

AA: "Yes: myths from so-called 'contemporary commercial cinema' like The Alien and The Predator which are beautifully-ugly constructs which I strongly identify with and aspire to in alienual-image making; especially the dripping drool jouissance juices oozing from the Alien's open mouth and the wetness of the Alien's body. I always find portraiture far too dry, especially Freud. Rembrandt and Velasquez got near to ontic slime wetness."

 

 

                                                            

                                Alien Resurrection  Self Portrait 1    Alien 3003                                                       Alien Resurrection  Self Portrait 2    Alien 3003

 

                                                                                                                              

 

EP:  "What alien heads struck you most in the Pompidou Centre when we were there late December, 2002?"

AA:  "The primordial alien heads by Jawlensky and Picasso, and Bacon's eggo-heads of Leiris reinvent realism.."

 

 

                                                                                 

                                                                                  Sliver Shape Shifting Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "How do they reinvent realism? Is there really such a thing as realism in portraiture today; isn't it all illustration?"

AA:  "Picasso, Jawlensky and Bacon reinvent realism by going beyond the banality of empirical realism; inane illustration."

 

                                                         

                                             Altered Aura Self Portrait 2002  Alex Alien                                          Oval Ovoid Self Portrait  2001  Alex Alien  

 

EP:  "I don't think Eric Fischl  images are empirical realism or illustrational; whereas David Hockney and Lucien Freud's images are..."

AA:  "Fischl is more concerned with the sensation of a shimmering  suburban realism rather than recording empirical reality. Freud and Hockney are trapped in empirical realism and inane illustration in that they work too consciously; they know what they are doing.  I was appalled by Hockney's recent show; Adrian Searle stated in The Guardian: 'In his landscapes, Hockney stops bothering about what is and is not possible, and goes ahead anyway. In the portraits, he tries to wed the medium to a subject that it really cannot handle at any great depth. The portraits are irksome. But depth, in Hockney, is not really what one looks for, or expects.'  Not only is there no depth in Hockney; there's no surface...poof...cunt."

 

                                          

                        East Boldre, Hampshire  1980  Alex Alien                                    East Boldre, Hampshire  1980  Alex Alien  

 

EP:  "Were David Hockney's watercolour landscapes or portraits influenced by anyone in particular; were they illustrational and decorative?"

 AA:   "There were what seemed like traces of Raoul Dufy  but without his lightness of touch  and invention. Hockney entirely misses the organic orgasmic primordial pulse wetness of watercolour  treating it like poster-paints o acrylics. with a clumsy clotted heavy hardness: he clearly learnt nothing from Turner or Nolde.  Hockney's weak watercolours have no translucency or sparkle like one finds in Turner, Cezanne and Nolde..."

                                                                   

                                                

                                   East Boldre, Hampshire  1980  Alex Alien                                                        East Boldre, Hampshire  1980  Alex Alien   

 

 

EP:  "You don't seem all that interested in landscape painting but your early landscape watercolours  were derivative of Turner and Nolde. "     

AA:   "Yes, there were too much like watered down Turners and Noldes. I need to find a new way of using watercolour outside decoration!"

 

            

                                                 

                                     East Boldre, Hampshire  1980  Alex Alien                                                   East Boldre, Hampshire  1980  Alex Alien   

 

 

EP:  "One could argue that Freud and Hockney work on the conscious plane whereas Picasso, Jawlensky, Duchamp, Bacon and you, do not..."

AA:  "Duchamp stated that the creative act 'cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane' ; the moment thought enters it becomes non-art like so-called 'Conceptual Art'; art is anterior to the conceptual and the conscious plane;  - that's its essential alien condition: alien art is subconscious sensation.  Non-illustrational form first works upon sensation because it is the essence of sensation itself; there is no 'sensatioism' in Hockney or Freud because they always already remain on the level of illustration, of the conscious plane where there is simply no sensation because there is no leaked form; no involuntary arbitrary accidental marks; no oredered-chance, it's always so tight, held in, to dry: they simply cannot let go and leak lamellage or exorcise the eggo.  David Hockney and Lucien Freud have not learnt a thing from Degas or Cezanne who were the masters at filtering, flooding, flaying, fraying form froth in their shimmering, shuddering, slivering, slithering pastels and paints. Hockney and Freud always remain locked in illustration and fear shattering and shuttering the body and also have learnt nothing at all from Bacon. So in a certain sense both Degas and Cezanne are the major master father figures of the School of Francis Bacon..."

 

                                                              

                                                                                       After The Bath   Charcoal   1885      Edgar Degas 

 

                                          

                                                         

                                                                                                  Head & Torso  Shape Shifting  Self Portrait    2001  Alex Alien      

 

EP: "But Hockney and Freud are,  -  or  - at least were -  very fine draughtsmen  -  while Bacon could  not draw at all; only doodle....."

AA:  "It could be argued that Titian, Cezanne, Soutine and Bacon were not really draughtsmen  - but drew in paint, as it were; a kind of painterly draughtsmanship."

 

                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                           War Wound Self Portrait    Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "Did you attend the John Edwards Memorial Service at St. Augustine of Canterbury, South Kensington, on March 14th, 2003? Did you ever meet John Edwards or his partner for 27 years, Phil Mordue?"  

AA:  "No, I did not attend the Service as I never knew John Edwards but I received a couple of e-mails from Philip Mordue some months ago concerning the Barry Joule Bacon Archive merely reiterating  and confirming my comments on the Internet regarding this blatant fraud, this hideous hoax.  Now Edwards and Bacon are dead, and Bacon's studio is buried in Dublin, 7 Reece Mews could be converted back into a studio for the School of Francis Bacon with the aid of grant from the John Edwards Charitable Foundation. Conversely, John Edwards Charitable Foundation should now commission Michael Peppiatt to initiate the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné or set up the Francis Bacon Prize: I actually mentioned these two ideas to Brian Clarke's assistant, Mark, in The French House  -  who turned up there after Edwards' Service. Apart from the Hugh Lane Gallery Bacon Studio project, to date, I see not public evidence of the John Edwards Charitable Foundation funding public projects: but there was a recent report of the possibility of a  book being commissioned on the relationship between Bacon and photography but this is a banal and tired cliche; but Bacon found photography very boring. The Independent On Sunday, 9.3. 2003 reported: 'Clarke always insisted his overriding aim in bringing the lawsuit was not financial but to establish Bacon's legacy for future scholars. When the suit was dropped a year ago, Clarke said work would begin on a catalogue raisonné and setting up a John Edwards Charitable Foundation to advance Bacon studies. As yet, there's no public evidence either development took place.'  Maybe Mordue will work in collaboration with Clarke to get some stimulating Bacon projects going."

 

                                                                           

                                                                                 Nailed Nerves Neurosis  Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2003 

 

EP:  "What will happen to the Bacon Legacy, the alleged Bacon millions, now that John Edwards is no longer with us (but back with Bacon)?"  

 

                                                               

                                                                    Alex  Alien  drawing  Eddie  Gray  playing   by  Alyson Hunter  2003

 

AA:  "A slice of the Bacon Legacy was obscenely wasted on huge legal fees in the Bacon Estate's court case against the Marlborough Fine Art: Marlborough director, Mr Gilbert Lloyd, commented in The Art Newspaper: 'We are pleased that the Estate has finally accepted that the entire case is completely without foundation. The case was totally unsustainable. Contrary to the Estate’s claims, no paintings are missing, no fraud took place and there was no attempt at blackmail. The result of the action is that the Estate has needlessly wasted millions of pounds on legal costs....'   And Clarke told  The Daily Telegraph, 19.2. 2002: 'Francis left John very well looked after. And John was prepared to spend every penny he had in the prosecution of this litigation, win or lose.'   This is not what I heard; John Edwards was very streetwise and very astute; -  not a gambler. Those 'millions of pounds'  could have been invested in setting up an annual  Francis Bacon Prize or opening up an 'official'  Francis Bacon School for our art students.  I recently wrote to the Bacon Estate: 'To Whom It May Concern: Please could you forward me any relevant application forms for grant funding in accordance with The John Edwards Charitable Foundation.'  -  and received the following automatic e-mail response: 'Thank you for your recent message.  Your enquiry/comments will be dealt with in due course.  Thank you for your interest.  Sincerely, The Estate of Francis Bacon.'   Professor Clarke told The Art Newspaper: 'We now intend to focus all the Estate’s resources in creative enterprises relating to Bacon rather than the time-consuming investigation of the relationship between artist and Marlborough.'  Let us hope this is so."

                                 

                                                              

                                   Portrait of Eddie Gray   Alex Alien 2002                                   Portrait of Eddie Gray   Alex Alien 2002

 

EP:   "Project manager of the Bacon Studio Archive, Dr Margarita Cappock, said of the re-constructed studio (BBC 22.5,2001): 'This is exactly the mess that he left behind....What you see here is most of the source material used by Bacon throughout his life.....It's unique in the art world to have such a complete archive..'  The Reece Mews studio was pilfered from 1992 onwards so will  the missing material ever be returned to the resurrected Bacon burial site? The Independent On Sunday (Bacon: A mystery in the East, 9.3.2003) stated regarding the Bacon versus Marlborough court case: 'There are stories of subpoenas being threatened and of lawyers arriving on people's doorsteps to search their private archives.'........"

                                                   

                                                                            

                                                                                  Reptilian Self   Portrait   Alex Alien   2002

 

AA:  "Obviously the Bacon Studio Archive at Hugh Lane is not a 'complete archive' as Dr. Cappock stated. The contents of Bacon's studio were left to Edwards and he had the right to give away what he wanted to whom he wanted; Valerie Beston and Barry Joule also had access to the studio. Other micro-memorabilia Bacon archives abound; the Bacon Studio Archive is by no means complete or unique.  But it would be naive to imagine people queuing up to return Bacon rinds and relics that were given to them by Edwards or even pilfered. Bacon wouldn't have cared less anyway."

 

                                                                      

                                                                                  Reptilian Self Portrait   May 2001 Alex Alien            

 

EP:   "In his article, A messy end (The Evening Standard, 18 March 2003), Andrew Renton reiterates your point: 'If museums want to bid, then bid they must, but don't turn the collection into a Bacon museum. Bacon himself would have been horrified by the idea. Throughout his life he went out of his way to subvert any kind of archival authority attached to his work....... Perhaps most horrifying for Bacon would have been the transplanting of his Kensington studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. A team of archaeologists spent 12 months taking the studio apart, documenting it item by item, to rebuild it in the museum. It has been a hugely popular attraction since opening two years ago, with almost a third of the museum's 100,000 annual visitors paying a premium for a gawp at the holy sanctum. Yet it feels all wrong...the life of the artist should not be cast in stone buildings. If the Bacon or Breton legacies are still to be meaningful, let them find many homes. They will be enlivened by strange environments, rather than by introspection. The legacy is not about preserving artefacts in a still life of the moment of the artist's death, but should provide new perspectives for the work before rigor mortis sets in...'...."

AA:  "Yes: Bacon's rinds and relics should be shared and used critically and creatively and not fetishised as objets d' art kept locked up in a vault."

 

 

                                                                          

                                                                                     Rancid Rainbow Self Portrait    Alex Alien   2003                                                                   

 

EP:   "I hear Damien Hirst is to suspend three pickled preserved cows from crosses made of steel girders and lowered into formaldehyde-filled tanks.  Does this construction of crucified cows constitute art? Does it work on the level of sensationism or the media level of the sensational?"

 

                                                                        

                                                                            

                                                                                                   Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2004

 

AA:  "No. This crass construction of crucified cows constitutes crap as it works on the level of media-spin sensation and not spilling sensationism. Why doesn't Hirst kidnap and crucify those serial-killer war criminal profiteers Tony Blair, Jack Straw, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Pearl and suspend them all alive on hooks into gigantic glass tanks of boiling Iraqi oil? That would be a real Turner Prize winning 'blood for oil sacrifice' rather than Hirst's petty-bourgeois crap of crucified cows which the cunt hasn't even had the balls to slaughter himself. Hirst should do a video installation of Condoleezza Rice, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and George Bush being beheaded..."

 

 

                                                                                

                                                                                       Endogenous Eggo Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:   "Does anyone still buy Bush's shit regarding 'weapons of mass destruction' and 'security'...and 'liberation'...?"

AA:  "Only Blair: as Blair and Bush are devout Christians maybe born again Christian Hirst could crucify them and dip the crosses in boiling Iraq oil.  I read Israel's Proxy War?  by  M. Shahid Alam and it's worth quoting:  'I am aware that the notion of an Israeli proxy war against Iraq will be greeted with skepticism by not a few. I hope to have established that Israel possess in abundance both the motive and capability for such a war...This may not be America’s war at all, much less a war of the West against Islam or Islamists. Instead, could this be Israel’s war against the Arabs fought through a proxy, the only proxy that can take on the Arabs?  This will most likely provoke derisive skepticism. Could the world’s only superpower be persuaded to fight Israel’s war? Is it even possible? Could the tail wag this great dog? Consider first Israel’s motives. Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Pakistan do not threaten the United States; but they are a threat to Israel’s hegemonic ambitions over the region. This conflict between Israel and her neighbors was written into the Zionist script. A Jewish state could only be inserted into Palestine by resort to a massive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. After such inauspicious beginnings, Israel could only sustain itself by keeping its neighbors weak, divided, and disoriented. It has since waged wars against Egypt in 1956; against Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967; against Iraq in 1981; against Lebanon, since 1982; and against Palestinians continuously since 1948....'   This Jewocracy  critique is worth pondering; it's not conspiracy theory...Pat Buchanan alleged that it is Israel who is driving this rush to war in Iraq.  He goes on to say that:  'Israel and a powerful 'cabal' of its American supporters who have manufactured the present crisis with Iraq has become canonical', and that: 'George Bush has become a 'client' of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon'.  It's pathetic that Blair is so naive and effete; very much in the mould of Saatchi; all spin and no substance: hollow men in hollow times."

 

                                                                              

                                                                                          Bin Laden Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2002

 

EP:  "The Israel Hebrew radio, Kol Yisrael, on the 3rd of October, 2001, reported that Sharon told Peres: 'Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do this. I want to tell you something very clearly: don't worry about American pressure on the Zionist state, we, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it'.  Talking of spin and hollowness, have you seen Charles Saatchi's new gallery in what used to be County Hall?"

 

                                                                               

                                                                                       Self Portrait after Jawlensky  Alex Alien 2002

 

AA:  "Only on a sneak preview on television and Saatchi's stuff is so tame and already passe.  Charles Saatchi is a typical by-product of the new petty-bourgeoisie who sells over determined cultural merchandise at inflated prices;  like his colleagues in advertising, it's all about selling lucrative lies, bullshitting and coning...and he's an expert at it.  Being an advertising agent, Saatchi is a 'need merchant' who sells ‘house-hold names’   -  puerile products like 'Emin' and 'Hirst'  - in the hope to ‘reach a wide audience’ (which includes both the petit-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie but failing to 'con'  the working class and upper class who do not 'buy-into it' and who can 'see through it').  The profitable Conceptual Art Culture Industry is largely marketed by these new petit-bourgeois empire-builders like Jay Jopling and Charles Saatchi; it's not at all surprising that the new petit-bourgeoisie are found in the occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, fashion); so called 'Conceptual Art', as a form of  'fashion', is essentially a way of  'marketing' and 'advertising' and 'selling' money: creating a (false) 'needs' for a naff 'product' through the tatty thrills, tasteless tricks, senile sensations of crass crude advertising techniques.  If you scan the field of the Conceptual Art Culture Industry  you will see that it is dominated by these boring bureaucrats like Gagosian, Jopling and Saatchi; like all those in advertising, they can never 'deliver' what they 'sell' as Adorno stated: 'The ungenuineness of the genuine stems from its need to claim, in a society dominated by exchange, to be what it stands for yet is never able to be'.  Beck's Futures (The ICA) and The Turner Prize (The Tate), as politically correct  institutions of the new petty bourgeoisie, authorise, legitimate, promote the pernicious ideology of Conceptual Art."

 

                                                                            

                                                                                    Exogenous Eggo Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002

 

EP:   "In his article, 'The trophy room', Adrian Searle (The Guardian, Tuesday April 15, 2003) stated on the Saatchi Gallery: 'It won't do. I can't make light of the Saatchi Gallery at County Hall...It has become a hall of the living dead. It is not a gallery, but a trophy room...It was Saatchi & Saatchi ad campaigns that told us Labour wasn't working, and there is still something disturbing about the Saatchi Gallery's presence here...The master criminal has struck again, buying the works, flogging the art down the river.'   It seems Conceptual Art wasn't working as well..."

AA:   "So-called 'conceptual art', as being so 'contemporary', ironically,  always already appears dated the day it's done because it does not address the being of time as the time of being.  Which is why Whiteread's art is not 'conceptual' and, ironically, not  at all  'contemporary'  because she does address the issues of time, space and alien (non) being outside contemporary conception. In a sense there is no such thing as 'contemporary art' because art is the not-now."

 

                                                                         

                                                                                     Portrait of Evert Potgieter      Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "Well, many may view your art work as not 'contemporary', but rather dated and old fashioned in a quasi-expressionist mode as it were."

AA:  "Oh, absolutely. I can see that from the view point of the no now, when my work would be compared to that dead conceptual stuff which is nominated as 'contemporary art'; but by its very definition, being called  'contemporary', it has always already past its sell by date the moment it has been media made - just like Saatchi styled advertising art and haute couture  -  it is designed to have a very short shelf life...As Serota said in an interview with Paul Josefowitz, Publisher of Apollo Magazine, on the ephemeral nature of 'contemporary art': 'I would not say that every work we acquire will be by an artist who in twenty or thirty years' time is going to be valued for having had a long career. There will be occasions when we buy an early wok by an artist, who fails either to mature or his other work is regarded as being of less value.'  (Personality of the Year, An interview with Sir Nicholas Serota, Apollo Magazine, December 2000).  Maybe the whole point or rather polemic of so called 'contemporary art' is precisely its ephemeral dissolving nature where it is designed to be quickly consumed or self-implode: why should things art exist eternally?"  

 

                                                                           

                                                                                      Portrait of  Evert  Potgieter      Alex Alien 2003

 

EP: "Can a 'Contemporary Art' exist?"

AA:  " No.  As Egon Schiele said: 'Art cannot be modern; Art is primordially eternal.' An authentic alien art is always already primordial and post-contemporary and does not know nowness.  Alien art always already comes too early, comes too late, and never arrives or departs on time in time.  What you call 'contemporary art' is 'advertising art'  which is media made for the no now and has no memory of the past, has no memory of the future: it operates in the non-presence of the now which never is.  An Institute of Contemporary Art is an oxymoron: art is not contemporary; art is always already ahead and behind time coming too late and too early: what is nominated as  is 'contemporary art', is merely 'media making' like the bromide and bland  Days Like These show at  Tate Britain: the brochure stated: 'Days Like These is the second Tate Triennial exhibition of contemporary British art...The aim is to show something of the vitality of art made in Britain today.'  Vitality?  Who are they kidding?  This blurb sounds like Blairite spin; the show typifies the crass lie-culture of  Blairite Britain: bland, bogus, depressing, dumbing down and served up as spin."

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                           Spliced Self  Portrait    Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "Are there any so-called contemporary artists that could be exhibited and juxtaposed with Bacon's paintings or your own works?"

AA:  "Certainly Rachel Whiteread's inverted images and Antony Gormley's explosive nervous system steel rod frenzied figures would work well with Bacon's images. Also Bacon with Matthew Smith and Smith also  with Jawlensky since they have many similarities. Talking of juxtapositions, Ken took me with his wife to the Saatchi Gallery which was surprisingly stimulating and hideously humorous with well juggled  juxtapositions in a slick use of spaces  though Hirst's clinical Disneyesque Showcases seemed out-of-space and really belonged  in the Natural History Museum."

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                       Severed-Self  Self  Portrait    Alex Alien 2003   

 

EP:  "Did you see Alan Yentob's BBC1 arts documentary 'Imagine: The Saatchi Phenomenon'...?"

AA:  "Yes  - deeply embarrassing with all those inarticulate slobs eulogising Saatchi: only one artist criticised Saatchi as 'vulgar': most artists seem too scared to criticise Saatchi. At least Peter Fuller used to.  I remember in Modern Painters (Winter 1989/1990Volume 2, Number 4) Fuller wrote in his Editorial:  '...the Saatchis'  low tastes were increasingly reflected in exhibitions and purchasing policies of national art institutions.......The shallowness of Saatchi's appreciation of art is evidenced in the vacuity of those whom he employs to write-up his acquisitions.'   Remember Saatchi was a product of the rising new petty-bourgeoisie and his 'low tastes' in art merely mimic the vulgar and crass culture of his class reflected in Emin and Hirst who are simulacrums of the slob Saatchi syndrome. Unfortunately the bourgeoisie no longer have any hold over the arts anymore. In Bacon's last interview with the photographer, Francis Giacobetti his statement on David Sylvester could just as well apply to Saatchi:  'I think David Sylvester is a very intelligent man, but I don’t think he has a genuine feel for painting because in the book he wrote with me he mentioned all sorts of frightful people, all these painters whom he loved and admired. I think he has no critical sense.'  Saatchi has no critical sense. I wish theorists like Mark Cousins told Saatchi what a crass cunt he is.."

                                     

                                                                    

                                                                                    Mute Mutant Self Portrait    Alex Alien 2003   

 

EP:  "What about the National Portrait Gallery BP Award for 2003?  I admired Graham Flack's Elliott II."

AA:  "It was  better than last year but all the portraits were still stuck in the warn tired grooves of illustration and  photo realism in both its hyper and haze habits. There was no reinvention of the face lifting it outside of illustration. But the winner of the BP Portrait Award - Charlotte Harris - painted an illuminating and a luminous portrait of her 83 year old grandmother which was ageless in its freshness: it was technically tight  flawless flesh with the haze halo shimmer that glowed greater than that of Gerhard Richter and it was even tighter and tauter that anything Lucien Freud has ever done.  But her introspective portrait  needed a frame and glass to give it greater intensity by removing it further from the spectator: art is not real flesh and the frame and glass helps to echo its real  artificiality - we have this absurd  politically correct fashion to display paintings without frames and glass as if there is an embarrassment about the artificiality of the alien art object.  Bacon argued to David Sylvester: '...the glass helps to unify the picture. I also like the distance between what has been done to the onlooker that the glass creates; I like, as it were, he removal of the object as far as possible...It's the distance - that this thing is shut away from the spectator...It's the fashion to see paintings without glass nowadays...'  The vast majority of the BP portraits were both without glass and  frames but ironically they still remained distant, clinical, sterile and surprisingly totally unreal. Paradoxically, the trouble with photo-realism, hyper-realism, is that it never looks real as Bacon stated to Michael Peppiatt: 'After all, it's not the so-called 'realist' painters who manage to convey reality best.'  And  Bacon  said to Sylvester: 'The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you've got of its looking real.'   Portraiture has to break with tired illustrational photo realism which is historically retarded. Photo realism is best dealt with by the camera. Charlotte Harris has a great technical ability but painting is not all about slick and pristine technique or easy and inane illustration...."

 

                                           

                                                                        

                                                                                         Splinter Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2003         

 

EP:  "But surely doesn't  the removal of the glass and frame bring the intensity of the image over more directly, more poignantly?"

AA:  "Not necessarily. If anything, the glass and frame lift and transport the image outside of the glazed-frame of the artificial art gallery space which always already constitutes a conservative closure. The frame in fact de-frames the image removing it  from the gallery space while the glass  incorporates the shadow reflection glaze of the spectator's gaze. The glazed framed painted image sets up a closer-distance between spectator subject and alien art object.  As Adorno stated: 'Distance is not a safety-zone but a field of tension.'  I strongly feel Harris and Flack should have their portraits framed under glass to create a closer-distance, a field of tension.  As Bacon said to Michel Archibaud on his feelings about the frame: 'I always prefer my canvases to be in a frame and under glass. There is a current vogue for not framing pictures any more, but I feel that is wrong, bearing in mind what a painting is. The frame is artificial and that's precisely why it's there; to reinforce the artificial nature of the painting. The more the artificiality of the painting is apparent, the better, and the more chance the painting has of working or of showing something.'  There is a commonsense 'contemporary' conception that if you remove the glass and frame you bring the spectator closer to the image but the reverse is true; the art object merely blends in with the art gallery walls as mere decoration.  Removing the glass and frame is an attempt to 'democratise' and 'naturalise' the artificial nature of the art object.  Paradoxically Rothko, Natkin and Pollock work well without frames because their 'abstractions' are decorative murals sutured into the walls of the bank lobby or art gallery: being decor they blend-in well with their enclosed environments."

 

                                                                          

                                                                                          Portrait of Eddie Gray   Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "Why are the BP portraitists still trapped in illustration, in literal likeness; there's no re-invention of realism or use of chance, accident?"

AA:  "Due to conditioning by photography: people still naively believe that they look like colour photographs of themselves as Bacon stated to Sylvester: 'Most people go to the most academic painters when they want to have their portraits made because for some reason they prefer a sort of colour photograph of themselves instead of thinking of having themselves trapped and caught.'   The BP portratists, like Freud and Saville, are trapped in a quasi nineteenth century naturalism which it meaningless; Bacon mentioned this to Sylvester in 1979:  'I'm very interested always today to watch young painters going back to what seems really very much like nineteenth-century naturalism It seems to be so strange now; how they can even be bothered to do it.'  Also a  lack of primordial instinct about the image and a subconscious fear of paint in-itself : they can't let the stuff leak, let the paint be-in-itself.  Bacon and Auerbach let-paint-be by painting semi-subconsciously letting the image leak through the pushed paint flooding froth form freshly and wetly while Freud, De Kooning and Saville have no instinctive feel for paint but  hate the abjectness of the stuff and it comes across in their heavy handedness.  In 1979 Bacon was  illuminating about paint to Sylvester: 'One thing that nobody can explain is why the way one person puts the paint on has got fifty times more sensitivity than another person's application of paint. Why some people's paint seems to have all sorts of implications in it and others' doesn't, one does not know.'   It is having some sort of subconscious identification with the stuff, with the paint,  where the oil paint becomes the direct materialisation of the psyche or where the paint becomes a direct raw register for the sensation of the  nervous system. Most people hate touching their paint, their shit, their psyche.."

 

                                                                  

                                                                                 Portrait of  Evert  Potgieter      Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "So to get the pulsation, potency and poignancy of the person you have to use primordial pushed paint in a semi-subconscious state?"

AA:  "Exactly: it has to be subconscious as the moment you know what you are doing you are just imposing another form of illustration. To trap emanations and energies of a person one has to make a sensation of them as an eruption, as an ejaculation, to ooze out their eggo essence that slurps and spills out over from their shape-shifting swelling subjectivity. One has to forget how to do it; forget how to paint by using chance and accident to activate the aura of oozed abject alienation that leaks through from the subconscious stuff inside us. We need to re-invent realism which negates the commonsense assumptions about what appearance is anyway. There cannot be any poignancy or potency in painting a portrait just like a coloured-in photograph because literal likeness never leaks subconscious sensation.  It is essential for Harris and Flack (and  Freud and Saville) to hear what Bacon say on this: 'I believe that realism has to be re-invented.  It has to be constantly re-invented. In one of his letters Van Gogh speaks of the need to make changes in reality, which become lies that are truer than literal truth. This is the only possible way the painter can bring back the intensity of the reality which he is trying to capture. I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and it has to be re-invented. Otherwise it will be just an illustration of something  -  which will be very second hand...He has to re-invent realism. He has to wash the realism back onto the nervous system by his invention, because there isn't such a thing in painting any longer as natural realism...'   Harris, Flack, Freud and  Saville are still tired to a quasi-nineteenth century natural realism and have learnt nothing from Picasso or Bacon..."

 

                                                                           

                                                                               Flayed Frisson  Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "How do you re-invent reality in painting a portrait? How do you paint in eyes, nose, mouth, ears without illustrating them? Putting them in without putting them in?"

AA: "By not drawing in, filling in, the facial forms but by treating the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears as sensation spots made out of arbitrary accidents which give over the sensation of the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears in a more poignant and suggestive way which paradoxically always feels more real than literal likeness which always looks so unreal. To paint an eye or a mouth, I vibrate the house-brush  - (which is always loaded with two or three colours at once) - in a quivering  sensation on the canvas and hen lift the brush off to see the resulting marks rather than paint them in with lines. So I do not have a drawn-in eye or mouth but a vibrated sensation of the eye or mouth which is not literal but  which is nearer to the sensation of the being of an eye, or the being of a mouth which is its nervous, quivering, shimmering, shape-shifting force. To quote Bacon to Sylvester again: 'Of course one does put in such things as ears and eyes. But then one would like to put them in as irrationally as possible. And the only reason for this irrationality is that, if it does come about, it brings the force of the image over very much more strongly than if one just sat down and illustrated the appearance, which of course millions of students all over the world can do.'  And which of course all the BP Award portraitists do relentlessly."

 

                                                                             

                                                                                  Frayed Fragment Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002

 

EP:  "In your School of Bacon texts you tend to use rather arcane and abstract and arbitrary language. Why?"

AA:  "The language  is not arcane, abstract or arbitrary but a kind of primordial poetics more concerned by the sound and sensation of words negating narrative and meaning and contrary to the commonsense conception that 'language is about communication': it isn't; it's about sound sensation. Authentic alien language is a linguistic leakage as a spat sensationism outside concepts and communication and has nothing to say in itself. Human language is an accident of consciousness. We need to leak language from the sea of unconscious inside us and let it lose flooding forth froth."

 

                                                                           

                                                                                      Sliver Slither Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2003

 

EP:  "I saw this spin on the Internet: 'As the official charity of Fresh Art 2003, Terrence Higgins Trust are proud to present INSPIRATION, an exclusive show of specially created works from artists and designers such as Tracey Emin, Vivienne Westwood, Julian Opie, Paula Rego, Rankin, Betty Jackson and Ben de Lisi. Fresh Art is one of London’s most innovative annual art fairs with over 350 new and emerging artists exhibiting. INSPIRATION is the name of the special THT area and all the pieces on display will be auctioned at a preview evening to raise vital funds for our work'. Why not support Terrence Higgins Trust by coming along to the special preview evening on 17 July....?'...."  

 

                                                                            

                                                                                             Pencil Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2003

 

AA:  "Because HIV does not exist and because there is no heterosexual 'AIDS' epidemic in the UK.  'HIV' has never been isolated; this has been admitted by Professor Luc Montagnier.  Virologist, Dr. Stefan Lanka, stated as far back as 1998: 'I realized that the whole group of viruses to which HIV is said to belong, retroviruses ...in fact do not exist at all. I was wondering what viruses are for... in evolutionary biology and found that ...every one of our genomes, and that of higher plants and animals, is the product of so-called reverse transcription: RNA transcribed into DNA...'   Remember that the hypothetical 'HIV'  is not a 'retrovirus' and thus any treatment designed to eradicate this non-viral material  is inappropriate and harmful.  Moreover,  there are no such things as 'anti-retroviral' drugs.  The THT gravy-train's insipid  'Inspiration' seems very apt because the 'inauthentic' art being auctioned is as 'inauthentic' as the failed - but profitable - HIV paradigm; they're promoting a pseudo science to promote their pseudo aesthetics and vice versa. It  seems that Emin, Westwood, Opie, Rego, Rankin, Jackson,  de Lisi  and  the THT have all been duped by the HIV Myth."

 

                                                          

 

EP:  "Have you ever thought making a portrait of some one's face as they're being violently fucked by a twelve inch cock up their arse or while they're being slowly tortured ?  That is  -  to unlock the sensation of extreme stress, anxiety, pain with the face thrown outside its public face?"

AA:  "Yes I have, after seeing certain hard-core porn images and news reels where the face undoes itself as the human and becomes animal again; one longs to get away from those petty-bourgeois poofy portraits like you get at the deeply reactionary and conservative RA Summer Show and all that bullshit BP Awards stuff...so boringly petty-bourgeois."

                                      

                                                                             

                                                                                           Razor Realism Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2003     

 

EP:  "Now the Proms 2003 season is over which of the contemporary composers had the greatest sense of Baconian sensationism on your body, through your nervous system?"

AA:  "Heiner Goebbels’s  'Aus einem Tagebuch';  Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 'Insomnia';  Matthias Pintsscher’s ‘en sourdine’;  Giya Kancheli’s 'Warzone'; and Kalevi Aho’s Symphony Number Nine for trombone and orchestra all attacked the nervous system, nailing the nerves, shuddering the spine, shattering the body and by passing the brain."

 

                                                                                  

                                                                                      Shuttering Sensation Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2004

 

EP:  "What of this years Turner Prize 2003...who should win it? Doherty, Gallacio, Perry or the Chapman Brothers?"

AA:  "The Chapman Brothers or else it should go to the toppling of a gold papier mache effigy of evil President Bush holding a missile and with Blair in his pocket in Trafalgar Square - great performance art!  The Turner Prize should go to the first one to assassinate terrorists Bush or Blair or Sharon  -  being the psychotic serial-killer terrorists that they are. We need a counter-terrorism to annihilate Bush, Blair and Sharon's state sanctioned terrorism. Sharon is a war criminal who should be tried and slowly executed. Sharon's ethnic cleansing war crimes span more than 50 years.

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                         Thomson &  Alien at the Tate  Stuckist Demo  7.12.2003

 

EP:  "And speaking of mass media events, what about Mandela's claim that 'AIDS' is now a 'global emergency'....?"

AA:  "Mandela is being disingenuous and misleading. He said: '46664 is a vital campaign to help fight a tragedy of unprecedented proportions, which is greater than the sum total of all wars, famines and other diseases. It affects people of all ages, but particularly young people. For their sakes we must act and act now. 46664 was my number for the years I was on Robben Island. I was meant to be reduced to that number. Millions of people with HIV/Aids are in danger of being reduced to mere numbers unless we act. They too are serving a life sentence.'   Poor Mandela fails to register that 'AIDS' in Africa is the cynical remarketing and revamping of long established, indigenous diseases, such as TB, malaria, chronic fevers, malnutrition weight loss and illnesses associated with poverty and nothing to do with the non-existent 'HIV'.  Why is it that the putative 'HIV' should spread like wildfire in Africa, Russia or China but not in the USA or Europe? How can you have an alleged STD that restricts itself rigidly to specific groups of people? It's all racist rubbish. We must ask ourselves what are the specific illnesses people are really dying from in Africa and China: TB, malaria, conditions relating to poverty, recreational drug use  -  or what?   When someone is allegedly dying from 'AIDS' we must ask: what are the real terminal presenting illness  - and forget 'HIV'  - which obfuscates the origins."

 

                                                                                    

                                                                                  Shuddering Sensation Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2004

 

EP:  "Talking of AIDS in Africa, here is Etienne De Harven's report from the European Parliament Conference on 'AIDS in Africa', (Brussels, December 8, 2003); here's what he said: 'Current policies for helping Africa in what has been described as the AIDS crisis, are entirely based on the validity of the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. However, this hypothesis must be completely reappraised because HIV has never been isolated nor purified, directly from AIDS patients, in a way that would satisfy the classic requirements of virology. More specifically: 1) HIV particles have never been demonstrated by electron microscopy in the blood stream of AIDS patients allegedly presenting with high ' viral load '. 2) Alleged HIV isolations have been reported, based on the identification of molecular 'markers'. These markers are of physical, biological or genetic nature. Their HIV specificity could never be rigorously demonstrated because such demonstration would have necessitated HIV purification that has never been achieved. 3) Serological tests for so-called 'HIV seropositivity', being based on the same non specific markers, also lack specificity and do not demonstrate any HIV infectious process. 4) Public credulity is abused by the constant publication of HIV images that all derive from electron microscopy of laboratory cell cultures, and never derive directly from AIDS patients. In view of these major uncertainties concerning HIV isolation directly from AIDS patients, priorities should be drastically revised. Suspending all HIV sero-testing, and suspending administration of anti-retroviral toxic medications should make budgets available to combat malnutrition, extend drinking water distribution, and improve hygiene and sanitation for the African people.'  (Problems with isolating HIV, Etienne De Harven, MD, Emeritus Professor (Pathology), University of Toronto).  What he says is logical and rational."

 

                                                                                      

                                                                                           Sunken Sockets Self Portrait   June 2005   Alex Alien    

 

AA:  "Which cannot be said of the Tate's acquisition of the Barry Joule Archive; Phil Mordue agreed with me that it is a fraud and that Joule is a wanker. I am very surprised that Serota fell for this naive crude crass fakery; and Mordue has material evidence of the Joules' handicraft fraud; and evidence given to him unwittingly by Joule himself...I saw Joule at Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern auction: he gave me a furtive nervous look of a man anticipating denunciation."

EP:  "Did you see Lucien Freud's new shit at the Wallace Collection? Has he broken out of wilful illustration yet?"

 

                                                                                     

                                                                                                Sliding Sensation Self Portrait   Alex Alien 2002

 

AA:  "Yes and Freud seems to have regressed even further into illustrational paint; it's just that the paint has got a lot more muddier, heavier, duller so his shit does not shine like Auerbach's shines. Titian shines, Velázquez  shines, Vermeer shines, Degas shines, Cassatt shines, Sargent shines, Jawlensky shines, even Bacon shines but Freud does not shine. Freud does not shine being. Freud does not have the shine. Freud's dried diarrohea reminds one of a dirty cell protest; I immediately went to look at Fragonard's A Young Scholar to see the opalescent luminosity of skin shine that Freud fails to find; he is certainly not 'our greatest living painter' by a long shot; Auerbach is superior to my mind."

EP:  "Do Auerbach's heads have a shining sensation -  an alien aura  -  whereas Freud's don't have an aura, a shine?"

AA:  "Absolutely. Even Andy Warhol's Marilyns have an alien aura albeit it mechanically made! The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction constitutes not 'a decline of the aura' but its resurrection.  Take the mutant Michael Jackson's face: through his inverted-racism comes an overt-animalism mutating his 'ape face' into an 'alien aura'..."

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                              Metaphysical Mood Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2004

 

EP:  "What did you make of the Bonfire of the Saatchies? Tracey Emin was on the David Frost Show bemoaning how the public 'sniggered' over the loss of her peers' work. Being a shrewd businessman, do you think that Saatchi had a hand in it to make a claim on the insurance;  - realising that his trite trailer trash collection was really worthless rubbish?"

AA:  "Tracey Emin was being very patronising and condescending of the so-called 'public' who are far more critical and cynical than the likes of Emin, Hirst, Jopling, Saatchi  - who totally lack critical and aesthetic judgements. Anyway, as 'conceptual art' is meant to be about the 'idea' and not the material object then does it matter if the matter gets burnt? You can't burn 'ideas'!  Yet Jopling stated: 'These are irreplaceable' whilst David Lee sated: 'These are replaceable.'  I don't think Saatchi has the poetic imagination to arson his own 'conceptual art' collection; - he's not that radical.!" 

EP:  "Why were three 17th century Old Masters rescued from the blaze while all the highly inflammable Brit Art trash burnt?  Was the fire fortuitous 'conceptual art? An apt ending to the Chapman Brother's 'Hell'...?"       

AA: "Well, contrary to Jopling's contention, Brit Art is replaceable because it is mechanically mass produced. If Brit Art is so irreplaceable and priceless why wasn't it placed in a fire-proof  safe room? The irreplaceable Old Masters were obviously seen as more important and valuable and worth protecting against fire. We all privately know that Brit Art and 'conceptual art' are symptomatic of our politically correct Blair-lie-trash con-culture which is sanctioned and legitimated by the new petty-bourgeoisie - Saatchi, Serota, Jopling: a condescending 'dumbling down' of 'culture'; - or what Heidegger termed as a 'levelling down' and an 'averageness' of our moronic media-manipulated 'publicness'...."

 

                                                                                       

                                                                                          Primordial Shudder f Portrait  Alex Alien 2004

 

EP:  "And is this 'dumbing down', this 'levelling down', part of our politically correct liberal fascist lie that 'everyone can make it';  'everyone can be an artist', analogous to 'everyone can get aids'  -  a kind of equal opportunities lie?"

AA: "That's a superb analogy because we all know very well that 'art' and 'aids' are not equal opportunity niceties but strictly available to select sect of society; not everyone is at risk from acquiring 'aids', not everyone is at risk from being an angoisse artist.  The tragedy with this democratic 'dumbing down' of art and artists is that it mass-produces autists, spastics, retards - including  the likes of senile Saatchi and Jopling: a kind of regressive and reactionary aesthetic dementia rules so similar to National Socialist Art in its in inauthenticity and corny conceptualism."

 

                                                  

                                                                                       Study for a Portrait of  Chai Mason I  Alex Alien 2005      

 

EP: "Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine said of  Emin: 'It pisses me off when uneducated people don't understand what she's doing and launch diatribes against her. She's an iconic persona and a terrific artist.'..."

AA: "Emin is an uneducated media manufactured mediocrity from Margate who typifies our dumbed-down culture." 

EP:  "An aesthetic nihilism rules today; nihilism has infected and infested art through this reactionary and regressive 'dumbing down' of our cretin culture where - through the 'democratisation of art' - as you said - retards rule, spastics sell. Nietzsche and Heidegger - both 'anti-democratic' - would have been disgusted and appalled by this 'democratic' de-valuation of all values; aesthetic retardation and regression into nihilism; this inauthentic art, this end of art."

AA: "As Nietzsche sated: 'The real danger lies in our loathing of man and our pity for him. If these two emotions should one day join forces, they would beget the most sinister thing ever witnessed on earth: man's ultimate will, his will to nothingness, nihilism...One who smells not only with his nose but also with his eyes and ears will notice everywhere these days an air of the lunatic asylum or sanatorium...It is the diseased who imperil mankind, and not the 'beasts of prey'...'   Aesthetically diseased and delinquent autists imperil and infect the awful art world today."

EP: "Like all those decadent and delinquent dregs who denigrated the late Jacques Derrida in The Guardian...the worst comment on Derrida was that idiot Ivan Massow's, it was a shock to me as he was THE director of the ICA!"

 

                                      

                                                                                                  Baconian Bust  Alex Alien 2005

 

AA: "Yes: the article 'Deconstructing Derrida' (The Guardian, 12.11.04) does a lot in deconstructing the density of our contemporary cultural cretins like Ivan Massow, Richard Dawkins, Roger Scruton, Michael Holroyd, J.G. Ballard, Paul Bailey, Julie Burchill and Christine Odone. It is deeply disturbing how retarded and reactionary these dunces tend to be to Derridian différance and so-called 'foreign' thought. Derrida deconstructs their xenophobia; that is: those that denounce Derrida are denouncing alien difference and exposing their own petty-bourgeois bigotry and banality. Yet the philosopher Mark C. Taylor, author of Altarity, Disfiguring, Erring, and The Picture in Question, delivered on Derrida's death:  'Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines. Philosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades. And no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood.'  How true! They deride Derrida!" 

 

 

                                                                                                                             

                                                                                   Eye of the Ear Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2005

 

EP: "Or as our cultural critic Terry Eagleton aptly observed in 'Don't deride Derrida' (The Guardian, 15.11.04): 'English philistinism continues to flourish, not least when the words French philosopher are uttered. This week in the Guardian our home-grown intelligentsia gave a set of bemused, bone-headed responses to the death of Jacques Derrida. Either they hadn't read him, or they believed his work was to do with words not meaning what you think they do...Derrida once remarked that he wanted to 'write like a woman'. He was one of a lineage of anti-philosophers, from Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein, who invented a new style of philosophical writing. He understood that official thought turns on rigorously exclusive oppositions: inside/outside, man/woman, good/evil. He loosened up such paranoid antitheses by the flair and brio of his writing, and in doing so spoke up for the voiceless, from whose ranks he had emerged.'....."

AA: "Derrida ducks death by delivering the name Derrida over to the Other to speak and sign on his behalf: 'I don't know what will happen to the name Derrida after this. I'll try to survive. - The theme of responsibility is a very enigmatic one which we cannot unfold here. First, the proper name (which doesn't belong to anyone) names a responsibility, for the name of the other and to the other. Autonomy, Heteronomy. The enigma of responsibility lies in this aporia: that you are applied to...Obeying the dead, that's the problem.' (An Applied Interview).  As fort-da différance defies death..."

EP: "The Eternal Return of différance also makes absolute death absolutely impossible as death is deferred ad infinitum."

 

                                                                         

                                                                                               Dog Boy (Ben Petit)  Alex Alien 2005

 

AA: "Derrida was also always already applied death by becoming lodged in language dislodged from the body of being. Death can be defeated by forgetting, anxiety, boredom where one becomes the Nothing dislodged from embodied being ."

EP: "Derrida's Obituary in The Guardian headline termed him: 'Controversial French philosopher.'  Why controversial?"

 

                                                                           

 

AA: "Anyone they don't understand or see as problematical they call 'controversial'. Professor Peter Duesberg is called 'controversial' because of his dissenting line on 'AIDS'. There's a great quote from Parallels and Paradoxes with Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said on being 'controversial': DB: 'I think that only mediocrity gets an uncontroversial reaction. And controversial has become almost a swear word in today's world, you know, 'He's controversial.'..'  ES: 'They always say that about me.' DB: 'Well, I would take that as a compliment.'  ES:  'Oh, I do, I do. But it's mot meant that way. It's meant that this is a person who troubles the status quo in some way, which we want to preserve at all costs...'   Mbeki is viewed as 'controversial' by The Guardian because he dares to confront the reactionary and regressive status quo line on 'AIDS'.  The Guardian have had a long standing vendetta against Mbeki insinuating that he is deranged and disturbed because of his 'controversial' line on 'AIDS'. The Guardian still uncritically propagates the 'HIV/AIDS' paradigm because it is the politically correct thing to do despite the overt racism implicit in that imperialist ideology of 'AIDS in Africa'.  The Guardian (Mbeki turns Aids row into race issue, 26 October, 2004) reported: ''President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has caused a race row by making a scathing attack on white people who link HIV/Aids to the alleged promiscuous and predatory behaviour of black Africans...The president was asked about his silence on a pandemic which infects 5.6 million South Africans, more than in any other country.."  Where does The Guardian dream up these fantastic fictitious figures from? It's all irrational nonsense yet even our contemporary cultural critics fall into the 'HIV' trap as Alexander Garcia Düttmann does here: 'The virus circulates between cultures without a cultural specificity, a single tradition, a particular identification or allegiance limiting the danger of infection and preventing the continuation of the guerilla war which Luc Montagnier compares the attack on the immune system.'  (Between Cultures, Verso, 2000). The complete opposite it s the truth: 'HIV' as a metaphorical marker for - and not the cause  - of 'AIDS'  does not 'circulate between cultures' because 'HIV' is not an STD. And 'AIDS'  is 'cultural specific' with a 'particular identification' and 'allegiance'.  Critics Jean Baudrillard, Leo Bersani, Douglas Crimp, Winfried Menninghaus, Alan Sinfield, Simon Watney, Slavoj Zizek have fatally fallen for the 'HIV' Myth and still speak of such absurdities as 'HIV infection' believing 'HIV' to be a virus!"

                                                                                                      

                                                                   

                                                                Study for a Portrait of  Chrome Chai Mason III  Alex Alien 2005        

 

EP: "Speaking of our contemporary culturally correct myth making, in introducing the Turner Prize, Sir Nicholas Serota compared the press and the public's cynical celebration of the Momart warehouse fire with Nazi book burning: 'The response of some sections of the press, who saw this as a moment of catharsis or even celebration, was in some ways reminiscent of the response to the book burnings in Nazi Germany in the 1930s...And it tells us just how far behind the British public lags the British press, or at least some sections of the British press.'  (BBC News, 7th December, 2004)..."

 

                                                                               

                                                                               Being Beheaded  Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2004

 

AA: "The analogy is absurd and inept and an insensitive insult to the books, and indeed the art, that was burnt; the press and the public are far ahead of the backward Tuner Prize and see through it; something our con connoisseurs fail to do."

EP: "Serota is a disingenuous fascist dictator of what our taste should and must be. Rather he should be burned at the stake for the stakes are too high. When is his contract running to did they say? He's been in power for far too long!"

 

                    

                                         

                                                              Study for a Portrait of  Chrome Chai Mason III  Alex Alien 2005      

                                                           

 

AA: "The public and the press saw the burning down of Momart as artistic justice; a moment of truth: post modern art as ephemeral trash to be trashed. In the Daily Mirror, Tony Parsons cynically asked:  'Can a fire ever be funny?  Only if all the overpriced, over-discussed trash that we have had rammed down our throats in recent years by these ageing enfant terribles is consumed by the fire. Then the fire is not merely funny ... it is bloody hilarious.'  Serota has no sense of irony."

EP: "Political correctness and cultural correctness are liberal fascist forms of censorship consenting what art should be!"

 

                                                                 

                                                                                                        Tsunami Sensation Self Portrait  Alex Alien 2004

 

AA: "Like the Turner Prize 2004, Miss World 2004 has become boringly politically correct with coy contestants promising all sorts of ostensibly altruistic aspirations espousing socialist sentiments whilst really wanting to marry a millionaire. The winner of the Turner Prize 2004, I forget his name, projected a pernicious pusillanimous persona of  petty-bourgeois political correctness: completely tailor made for the Turner Prize: tame, banal, inane, mediocre and pulverisingly dreary. The 37-year-old Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's exquisitely executed beheading videos should have won the Turner Prize 2004 for their breathtaking cutting-edge...the brute realism of being a lived event... Ereignis as Es gibt."

EP: "Or Erlebnis...as a lived experience...decapitation as the event of disclosure...Aletheia wherein a being can be revealed in its alien being, attaining a presence as part of a gathering that is revealed through Dichtung decapitating Dasein." 

 

                                                        

                                                                                                      Baconian Bust  Alex Alien 2005 

 

MVE: "Regarding your recent sculptures...why do you put in all those holes in these heads? What do they signify?"

AA: "They are sort of punctuations points that let leak a light Dasein darkness influenced by Bacon's dark discs."

MVE: "Regarding the bus bombe we heard yards from our flat, George Galloway said: “We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings....If you go on bombing other people they will go on bombing us.”  (I was right to blame Blair, says Galloway, BBC News, 8.7.05)."

AA: "Yes. This so-called terrorist attack on London was indirectly initiated and instigated by Blair. Sharon, Bush and Blair's state sanctioned terrorism spawns counter-terrorism, spreads counter-terrorism. Yet Blair is blind. So is Gavin Esler who also cannot make the dialectical interplay between state sanctioned terrorism and counter-terrorism and constantly interrupted and cut-off Galloway on BBC 2's Newsnight calling his critique 'crass'. Galloway rightly stated that Esler was living in a 'bubble' - just like the BBC are. Blair should now be impeached for the illegal regime change motivated war in Iraq and arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 for propagating terrorism: - as Noam Chomsky stated: “The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it.” (MIT, 2001). Actually The Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 applies to Blair, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Sharon: “An Act to provide for the making against individuals involved in terrorism-related activity of orders imposing obligations on them for purposes connected with preventing or restricting their further involvement in such activity; to make provision about appeals and other proceedings relating to such orders; and for connected purposes.”...."

 

 

                                                                     

                                                                                     Alluminating Amun Self Portrait  2005   Alex Alien   

 

MVE: "Since the destruction of the career of  Mr. Greg Dyke to placate Downing Street, the BBC dare not criticise war criminal liar Blair and his corrupt Government. As John Pilger so scathingly puts it in Truth Out: '"They are 'Blair's bombs', and he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about 'our way of life', which his own rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled...Indeed, the only reliable warning from British intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was that which predicted a sharp increase in terrorism 'with Britain and Britons a target'. A House of Commons committee has since verified this warning. Had Blair heeded it instead of conspiring to deceive the nation that Iraq offered a threat the Londoners who died on Thursday might be alive today, along with tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis...While the two men responsible for the carnage in Iraq, Bush and Blair, were side by side at Gleneagles, why wasn't the connection of their fraudulent 'war on terror' made with the bombing in London?...Blair will almost certainly use last week's atrocity and tragedy to further deplete basic human rights in Britain, as Bush has done in America. Their goal is not security, but greater control..."  (John Pilger, Lest We Forget; These Were Blair's Bombs, Truth Out, Editorial, Sunday 10 July 2005)."      

 

  v                                                                                                             

                                                                      Suicide Sensation Self Portrait  Alex Alien  August 2005

                                           

AA: "The so-called suicidal terrorist attacks and atrocities are so symptomatic and symbolic of our suicidal system - capitalism - that blows up beings apart as a part of its logic and the longing of its desired death drive. Blair blared we need to 'pull up this evil ideology by its roots'  - but what about Blair rooting out the evil ideology of capitalism...?"

MVE: "Or as Derrida divined: "Those called 'terrorists' are not, in this context, 'others', absolute others whom we, as 'Westerners,' can no longer understand. We must not forget that they were often recruited, trained, and even armed, and for a long time, in various Western ways by a Western world that itself, in the course of its ancient as well as very recent history, invented the word, the techniques, and the 'politics' of 'terrorism'...' (Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press, 2003)...."

 

                                                              

                                                                             Alluminating Amun Self Portrait   October 2005   Alex Alien   

 

AA: "It's worth quoting John Pilger at length: 'The bombs of 7 July were Blair's bombs. Blair brought home to this country his and George W Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East...Before the invasion, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that 'by far the greatest terrorist threat' to this country would be 'heightened by military action against Iraq'. He was warned by 79 per cent of Londoners who, according to a YouGov survey in February 2003, believed that a British attack on Iraq 'would make a terrorist attack on London more likely'...Now, a report by the Chatham House organisation, a 'think-tank' deep within the British establishment, may well beckon Blair's coup de grace. Published on 18 July, it says there is 'no doubt' the invasion of Iraq has 'given a boost to the al-Qaeda network' in 'propaganda, recruitment and fundraising' while providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists. There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until Blair and Bush invaded. What about Palestine? There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power...More than 100,000 Iraqi men, woman and children have been killed not by suicide bombers, but by the Anglo-American 'coalition', says a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet, and largely ignored.' (John Pilger, Blair's bombs, New Statesman, 23rd July 2005)...."

MVE:  "And Andrew Rawnsley argued adroitly:  'Here is the paradox: they blame his war, but they rate him more. Pollsters are reporting that a majority of people think there is a connection between the war in Iraq and terror in London, however stridently and insistently Tony Blair and his ministers refuse to acknowledge a link...They judge him to be good in a crisis even when they think he bears some responsibility for that crisis...On strong ground in saying that this terrorism should not be appeased, where ministers begin to lose the argument is when they rage against any suggestion that the bombings might have something to do with the war...What is absolutely certain is that no one, cabinet ministers included, can be absolutely certain that Iraq has nothing to do with it. It is just not credible. It is also futile. That argument has already been lost with the majority of the public whose common sense tells them that the war probably has made Britain more of a target. Trying to shout down anyone who mentions the war isn't working and doesn't deserve to work for the government...That respect won't be sustained by telling the public that they are idiots to think there can be any link with the war. This simply makes Tony Blair and his ministers look delusional.'  (Andrew Rawnsley, Whatever you do, do mention the war, The Observer, Sunday July 24th, 2005)."

AA: "I find it a bit perverse that psychotic Blair may enact the Treason Act when he himself has committed treason against Crown and Country by inciting terrorism in London through his terrorist attacks on Iraq. Blair and Bush are terrorists and are always 'glorifying terrorism' and 'inciting terrorism'  -  as Galloway stated: 'If it is a question of quantum, there is far more blood on the hands of George Bush and Tony Blair than there is on the hands of the murderers who killed those people in London.'  (Galloway says Blair and Bush 'have blood on their hands', The Guardian, Friday August 5th, 2005). On a video tape Mohammad Sidique Khan clearly confirmed what Rawnsley, Pilger and Galloway have been saying all along in stating: 'Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation...'  Blair is directly responsible. Blair perpetuates terrorism and yet Straw responded by stating that terrorism cannot be justified. Khan's rational statement has a crystal clear logic."

 

                                          

                                                                    Shape Shifting Sunken Sockets Self Portrait   June 2005   Alex Alien   

 

MVE:  "Marc Quinn's sculpture  Alison Lapper Pregnant is uncannily like the offical art of the Third Reich in its neo classical style and larger than life scale - it is politically correct propaganda and as pernisicous as Nazi Propagnda."

AA:  "Quinn's eleven and half tonnes of Alison Lapper Pregnant is pure Nazi Kitsch; politically correct propaganda and therfore not art at all: it is ideology and illlustration and therefore has no tension or sensation: it is bland and boring has no sense of style. It was deeply depressing to see Quinn propagating the 'HIV' myth making machine at his show Chemical Life Support when he stated: “The sculptures are of people who have been kept alive by drugs. Silvia is HIV-positive. Her sculpture is made from wax and anti-retroviral drugs...The work is about dependency.”  If only Quinn were more critical and did his own research he would realises there is no such thing as 'HIV' or 'antiretroviral' drugs. And so sadly Silvia Petretti has also become interpellated in 'HIV' ideology:  “I was very happy when I saw Marc’s sculpture...After eight years of being HIV-positive, I think I have come to terms with my diagnosis; in fact, I am proud of the way that I’m living with a life-threatening condition...And maybe by seeing an artwork of a white, heterosexual woman, people will realise that this condition can affect everyone and anyone."   Then why doesn't this 'condition' affect everyone and anyone? Why is it still restricted to the original high risk groups? Quinn is propagating 'HIV' propaganda; Silvia Petretti is not 'living with a life-threatening condition'..."  (The Times, February 26, 2005).
                             

 

                                              

                                                          Shape Shifting Sunken Sockets Self Portrait   June 2005   Alex Alien   

 

MVE:  "On the subject of the 'HIV' hoax, I was saddened to hear of the death of world renowned Yale mathematician and 'HIV' cynic Professor Serge Lang, who died at the age 0f 78. (Yale Daily News, Friday, 16th September, 2005). Predictably The Guardian did not dare publish Lang's  Obituary and there seems to have been a media black out in reporting his passing - and only The New York Times ran an extensive Obituary: 'Controversially, beginning in the mid-1990's, Dr. Lang sided with skeptics who doubted that AIDS was caused by human immunodeficiency virus, arguing that the scientific evidence connecting them was weak and faulty. He criticized the denial of research money to Peter Duesberg, a skeptic on the H.I.V.- AIDS link. He was never convinced otherwise. A week before his death, he mailed out his latest file, a dozen pages of letters and e-mail messages about two papers he had written about the AIDS debate that had been rejected by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.'  (Serge Lang, 78, a Gadfly and Mathematical Theorist, Dies; New York Times, September 25, 2005). Notice that they use that term: 'controversially' - anyone that challenges the prevailing paradigms is dismissed as 'controversial' just like Serge Lang, Stefan Lanka, Peter Duesberg, Eleni Eleopulos, Thabo Mbeki, as well as Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger..."

AA:  "I suggest Quinn and the contemporary conceptual myth makers all read Professor Serge Lang's 'Challenges', (Springer Verlag 1998, ISBN 0-387-94861-9). 'Challenges' is worth quoting for Quin: 'To an extent that undermines classical standards of science, some purported scientific results concerning 'HIV' and 'AIDS' have been handled by press releases, by disinformation, by low-quality studies, and by some suppression of information, manipulating the media and people at large. When the official scientific press does not report correctly, or obstructs views dissenting from those of the scientific establishment, it loses credibility and leaves no alternative but to find information elsewhere...Thus the scientific questions which have been raised about the established view concerning HIV as 'the cause of AIDS' set the stage to study how misinformation is spread and accepted uncritically, which is a major issue in its own right. The mainstream and official scientific press have promoted the official view about AIDS, mostly uncritically...Hodgkinson also gave the more general evaluation: 'A kind of collective insanity over HIV and AIDS has gripped leaders of the scientific and medical profession. They have stopped behaving as scientists, and instead are working as propagandists, trying desperately to keep alive a failed theory.'  Thus the scientific community, and especially the leaders of science, have exposed themselves to a loss of trust in the community at large.'  Contemporary conceptualists (they're not artists) propagate contemporary misconceptions making postmodern mythologies: even Emin stated: 'The HIV virus should never have existed in the first place, I always thought it was planted.'  (Tracey Emin, Interview, Pressureworks, Christian Aid, 9th August 2005). Well - 'it' never existed: 'HIV' is a misconception."

MVE: "Cocaine, ketamine, crystal methamphetamine, amyl and butyl nitrites are known to make the non-specific 'HIV' tests run 'positive': no one is 'HIV' positive but recreational 'drug positive': what we are wrongly nominating as 'HIV' is merely a marker for drug addiction and malnutrition. Recreational drug use and 'AIDS' appear to claim the lives of the same risk groups and the same age groups: 25 to 45. Recreational drugs exactly predict the epidemiology of 'AIDS' where we have recreational drug epidemics: about 200 die a year of cocaine use in the UK: these are our 'AIDS' cases."

AA: "Cocaine acts as an in vivo mitogen in exactly the same way that other plant derived substances have a mitogenic effect on cell-cultures in vitro. Indeed, experiments have shown that when cocaine is added to cell-cultures, the cells are activated and show a typical mitogenic response. Cocaine is the most obvious example but add to this the full repertoire of recreational drugs used by many homosexuals and it is no wonder that their constantly activated cells permit the putative 'HIV' tests to dredge up something endogenous. There is this 'denial' that drugs cause 'AIDS'..."

 

                                                

                            Elongated Eddie Gray   Alex Alien 2006                                                                     Elongated Eddie Gray   Alex Alien 2006

 

AA: "Speaking of zombies I've recently been influenced by de Kooning's zombie-styled sculpture hideous heads; whilst de Kooning was a sloppy senile painter who couldn't paint, his sculptures have such an ordered chaos akin to Bacon."

MVE: "So what type of clay did you use for the Slipping Slime Self Portrait and the Arab-esque- Angst Self Portrait?"

 

 

                                              

                           Slipping Slime Self Portrait  2005   Alex Alien                                                    Slipping Slime Self Portrait  2005   Alex Alien 

 

 

AA: "Crank - it  is a gritty, grainy, coarsely textured clay - I used it for Arab-esque- Angst Self Portrait  and  Slipping Slime Self Portrait  - it requires very little manipulation and almost makes the image in itself - this malleable material dictates the flow of the form."

MVE: "Talking of flowing of form I found Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech was far more dramatic and rivetting than anything he wrote for the stage; no artificial pauses; no over contrived menace - just the brute truth."

 

 

                                                                              

                                                                                         Arab-esque- Angst Self Portrait   2006  Alex Alien

 

AA: "Exactly, as - Pinter states: 'The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them...The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.'  (Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture; Art, Truth & Politics, The Nobel Foundation, 2005). It is hardly surprising the BBC censored Pinter's speech and the press lambasted Pinter just like they attacked Mbeki, Said, Pilger, Chomsky, Fiske, Le Carré, declaring them to be deluded or deranged: anyone who thinks is denounced as mad."

MVE: "As Medialens reported: 'It is a brutal fact of modern media and politics that honesty and sincerity are not rewarded, but instead heavily punished, by powerful interests with plenty at stake. It does not matter how often the likes of Pinter, Le Carré, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are shown to be right. It does not matter how often the likes of Bush and Blair are shown to have lied in the cause of power and profits. The job of mainstream journalism is to learn nothing from the past, to treat rare individuals motivated by compassion as rare fools deserving contempt. The benefits are clear enough: if even high-profile dissidents can be painted as wretched, sickly fools, then which reader or viewer would want to be associated with dissent? ...The great task of propaganda is to make dissent seem unrealistic, embarrassing, and absurd.'  (Media Alert: Brilliant Fools: Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media, Medialens, 19.12.05). Just like The Guardian's ad hominem attack on Mbeki for his 'deranged' views on 'AIDS'..."

                                                                                  

                                                                           

                                                                                         Arab-esque- Angst Self Portrait   2006  Alex Alien

 

AA: "From the allegedly deranged to the allegedly drunk I was saddened to read about the death of Sandy Fawkes who I used to drink with in The French House until I was barred for life. Sandy said she always wanted Ken to film her book Killing Time on the serial killer Paul Knowles but could never raise the money. She always insisted to me that her book was not a sensational best seller but a sociological study where she took the form of a detached and disinterested eye."

 

 

                                                         

                                                                                       The Tollund Man   Bog Body   4th Century BC

                                                      

MVE: "Were your recent sculptures of crushed heads at all influenced by images of the Bog Bodies preserved in peat?"

AA: "No...I had already started these sculptures just before seeing a recent television documentary on the Bog Bodies and found that the peat preserved heads had an uncannily striking resemblance in sensation to my sculptures - a raw revealing realism - and a shiny sliminess - and a clammy coldness - and a dank dasein - a kind of living dead leftover."

MVE: "On the subject of distorted heads, it's interesting also to look at the distorted values and the distorted prices of  contemporary art compared with the old masters market. Rembrandt's sensitive, serene Study of an Elderly Woman in a White Cap recently went for a mere £4,272,000 whilst just after that, Francis Bacon's grotesque Self Portrait 1969 achieved £5,160,000."

 

                                                                          

                                                                                               Self Portrait 1969   Francis Bacon    £5,160,000

 

AA: "Obviously dealers are not buying the Bacon because they love it as an image but as an investment. This self portrait is abysmal and appalling even by Bacon's sub-standards: a grotesque, grand guignol gargoyle gone gaga."

 

 

                                                                                          

                                                                              Elderly Woman in a White Cap  Rembrandt   £4,272,000

 

EP: "What's your views on freedom of expression and freedom of speech as an artist? Currently should David Irving, Ken Livingstone and the Mohamed cartoons be censored?" 

 
AA: "The question of freedom of speech and censorship contain contextual complexities and there is not a simple either or, black and white, answer to this; what is freedom of speech - the freedom of speech is being eroded all the time; freedom of speech stems from responsibility of action - action after the act of speech since words are wounding weapons - words can kill: freedom of speech is the responsibility of action: action does to speak louder than words as words are always already actions - no one has a god given right to speak or act without the responsibility of language - of having  an ontological understanding of the responsibility of language and aware of the violence and death that language can cause as words wound as actions. Freedom of speech is a necessary illusion as Chomsky says: freedom of speech is a safety valve and a form of social control when words serve the state as giving us the feeling of freedom: the state silences speech - silence the action of speech and the speech of action all the time. David Irving should not be censored but allowed to rant and rave revealing his reactionary racism and allowing us then to argue against his racist rubbish. The Mohamed Cartoons are a different context and were irresponsible and created to cause controversy so it is not at all an issue of so-called censorship of the freedom of speech because - as I have just said - freedom comes with responsibility - the responsibility of language - for the being of language - freedom of speech cannot exist on its own."

EP: "But it does exist - for David Irving - who was sentenced to 3 years in prison for denying a holocaust - 17 years ago and Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from office four for weeks for his Nazi jibe: The mayor said: 'This decision strikes at the heart of democracy.'  This is really worrying if not absurd. A new thought and speech police is arising...."

 

                                                                         

                                                                                                                                  Anointed Amun Self Portrait  November 2005   Alex Alien

 

AA: "The trial and sentence merely make a martyr out of Irving propagating neo nazi propaganda and over-determins a holocaust amongst other holocausts by putting the price of the life of the jew higher than the life of an ather alien. Irving said: 'I don't like trade marks - millions of jews died.'  It is not the holocaust but one holocaust amongst many."

EP: "Or a tragedy as Irving adds: 'I am not a Holocaust denier. I would call it the Jewish tragedy in World War II.'..."

AA: "By the 'logic' of the Irving sentence both Blair and Bush should have got at least 10 years in prison for lying about the alleged weapons of mass destruction propagating the illegal Iraq War and instigating the 7/7 attacks in London."

EP: "On terrorism, concurring with Stockhausen's thesis that 9/11 was: 'The greatest work of art there has ever been'  Damien Hirst also stated: 'The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right...Of course, it's visually stunning...It was devised visually.'  Is Hirst's art visually stunning - is Hirst's art terroristic - or is it tame and twee?"

AA: "Hirst's dead things are not terroristic or stunning because they have no sensation - no tension - no dread - Hirst's dead things have no invention - no re-invention of realism. Hirst's dead things are tame and twee dreary decoration."

EP: "Yet according to Art Review's 'Power 100' 2005 league table Hirst is the most 'powerful person' in the art world."

AA: "By 'powerful person'  Art Review's 'Power 100' has nothing to do with Hirst as an artist - but as a money maker - where they equate power with money - not art - not the power of art but the power of money. Hirst's art is powerless."

 

                                                   

                                                                                            Inborn Ibis Self Portrait 2006    Alex Alien               

 

EP: "Searle stated: 'Hirst's power, such as it is, lies in a reputation impermeable to criticism, having enough money to live and make art as he wishes...His recent photorealist paintings have sold for reputedly enormous sums, and few museums can afford him. But what recent Hirsts would they want, anyway? His work has looked distinctly wobbly, lost and repetitive for years. He acknowledged as much in a recent interview. All those Biblical allusions in his work have left him with a flagellant, self-confessional streak. This, like all his heavy titles and grim allusions, is just soft-soaping the old human condition con. The shallows of Andy Warhol's art were deeper than Hirst. The dark night of the soul is plumbed more succinctly in a David Shrigley cartoon. Joseph Beuys had better dress sense. Paul Thek put weirder things in boxes, Francis Bacon told funnier jokes, and Jeff Koons had a smarter team of photo realist knock-off artists working for him. The eye-candy dot paintings walked off the walls; the gore sells in buckets. But the spin paintings were always miserable and the big bronzes are boring. Nor has his art been particularly influential, or developed much.'  (Is Damien Hirst the most powerful person in art?, Adrian Searle, The Guardian,  November 1st, 2005). Power in the art world is all about PR , self promotion, media hype and making money: i.e. - being a con-artist."

 

                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                    Alluminating Amun Self Portrait    2005   Alex Alien   

                                                                              

AA: "To be fair on Hirst, when asked by Sean O'Hagan how he felt when Art Review put him at the top of their 'Power 100' above Larry Gagosian and Nicholas Serota, he honestly stated: 'It's bollocks, really. The big dealers are far more powerful than me. I think they just wanted an artist. It's a better story.'  (Damien of the dead, The Observer, Sunday February 19, 2006). The dealers control the cards and cynically deal out who will be the next non-entity investment.

And directors like Serota also act as art dealers - an artful dodger endorsing absolutely awful artists - and artificially inflating art market prices as with the Ofili Fraud where the Tate was involved in insider-trading and art market price manipulation when bidding on Ofili's The Upper Room for an obscene £705,000 - a glaring case of price-rigging and a conflict of interest as Charles Thomson observed: "'Stuckist artists demonstrated about the Ofili acquisition outside the Tate on the occasion of the Turner Prize last December. At one point Serota approached us and I made the point that Ofili should donate the work. Serota looked appalled and said it would cost Ofili '£300,000/£400,000'..... Ofili's auction prices have doubled since the announcement of the Tate's purchase (from 1998-2004 they actually sank by 24%). His auction record is now £550,000 ($1,000,000) for a single painting, achieved at Phillips, de Pury & Co in New York on 12 May 2005. The guaranteed boost to Ofili's career and prices, from the Tate's major endorsement of him, raises another issue. Over half of the purchase price for The Upper Room came from five benefactors. Before you feel a warm glow that there is redeeming altruism in this business, you should know the Tate minutes record that these five (anonymous) individuals were also simultaneously purchasing their own private Ofili work. Were such an activity to be translated into City terms it would be deemed 'insider trading', which is a criminal offence...'   (Charles Thomson, The Ofili Scandal at the Tate: Is Serota Dead in the Water?; Counter Punch, January 14 / 15, 2006)...Enough said!"

EP: "Emin cynically observed: ''It's very British not to talk about money and especially embarrassing to make a fuss if you're quite well-off. I've always thought, 'I'm doing OK, I can't complain', which is a very female attitude. I've never asked my gallerist why so many of his male artists sell their work for more and I've never asked the Tate why they paid so much more for Chris Ofili's work than they did for mine. This isn't about money, it's about the value placed on art; it's about reputation...' ((Tracey Emin's film about institutional sexism in art, The Independent, 12 March 2006). Ofili's The Upper Room was bought for £705,000 to boost the reputation of Ofili as well as the cultural capital of the Tate where economic capital and cultural capital coincide as the value of individual and institution."

 

                                                                                      

                                                                                    Edifying Eddie Gray  Portrait   Alex Alien 2006

 

AA: "By agreeing to pay such an obscene sum of money for such rubbish the Tate have inflated Ofili into the million dollar bracket where his mediocre work simply does not belong - distorting the art market and the true value of art."

EP: "Well I think the real issue is that Ofili was on the board and a customer. This would be serious transgression in the business world, either Ofili would be fired or Serota! That Serota is buying mediocre art at exorbitant prices is a an example of a total lack of taste and aesthetic judgement. If Ofili was non-black would he be considered a great painter or is it not politically correct to ask?  Do you trust Serota and do you think Serota is a positive force for the Tate? " 

 

 

                                                                     

                                                                                                         Nauseous Neanderthal Self  Portrait   Alex Alien 2006

 

 

AA: "The irony is that Ofili is faux-African who fits into the petty-bourgeois misconceptions and media distortions of African arts and African identities: like the middleclass media 'AIDS in Africa' myth making - Ofili is official artfica. As for trusting Serota - it's like saying do you trust a politician - since it's all about politics - that is - self-interest and self-promotion - and reproducing one's power by promoting those who obey and reproduce the rules of the art game.  Letters in The Times illustrate the fraud and inflated price fixing going on at the Tate: 'Sir, Lord Smith of Finbsury’s valiant attempt to defend the purchase by the Tate board of a work by one of its members (letter, Dec 7) suffers one defect. It ignores the law. As any competent adviser will confirm, trust and charity law lays down an absolute rule that a trust cannot enter into a transaction with one of its trustees unless special authority is to be found.'  from Mr. Christopher McCall, QC, Lincoln’s Inn, London WC2;  Taste and trust in the arts; The Times, December 10, 2005 - and another - 'Sir, One may share up to a point Lord Smith’s admiration for The Upper Room, but is it really a bargain? How often over the next 50 years will it be on view in its entirety at the Tate? A conflict of interest is a predictable outcome of the Tate’s recent policy of appointing trustees who are young and have a reputation to make and whose work it wants to acquire...Yet the Tate is apparently unconcerned about this possibility of inflated profit in the Ofili case.'  Dr. Selby Whittingham, London SW5; Taste and trust in the arts; The Times, December 10, 2005. The obscenely high prices paid for Ofili's awful Afrokitsch shit and Hirst's dumbed-down dot and spastic spin paintings is insanity: these perverse prices have been artificially inflated by art racketeers such as Gagosian, Jopling, Saatchi and Serota."

 

                                                          

                                                                          

                                                                                      Edifying Eddie Gray  Portrait   Alex Alien 2006 

                                                                   

EP: "My experiences working at the Tate at Millbank in 1996 was that I worked for brief period as an accountant for the Tate's accounts office. During my time there I had on occasion - I can confirm - I have seen very high personal expenses incurred by Serota. These mainly consisted of very expensive flights, lunches, hosted events and parties, etc. I suggest that there be an inquiry as to his expenses incurred at the Tate, as it did seem very high even as a Director (part of the Directors Group but different from the Tate Board). Aside, I am surprised that Serota has been director at the Tate for such a long time. It can't be healthy for the organisation to have someone so long at its head. Very clearly there is a conflict of interest in purchasing a Tate Board Member's artwork - Ofili's The Upper Room  -  for the Tate."

AA: "The extreme danger and damage done by the dumbing-down of art by Serota, Saatchi, Gagosian, Jopling, Miro is that the standards will become set at that appallingly 'low level' -  as a bench mark of the future for art and artists to aspire to - or rather - to lower to. Their embarrassing endorsement, promotion and patronage of Almond, Billingham, Callery, Collishaw, Coventry, Crag, Creed, Emin, Evans, Francis, Hartley, Harvey, Hatoum, Hirst, Hume, Landy, Lane, Lucas, Mueck, Ofili, Opie, Parsons, Patterson, Pigott, Quinn, Rae, Rielly, Shonibare, Turk, Tyson, Wallinger, Wearing does immense damage to the morale and aspirations of genuinely talented art students and unknown artists who may not have their ruthless pushiness, political correctness or business acumen - they may not want to play the art game."

                                           

                                                                     

                                                                                   Amorous Amun Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

 

EP: "This 'dumbing down' also applies to the proponents of  'HIV' pseudo-science - to Baltimore, Curran, Essex, Fauci, Francis, Gallo, Haseltine, Ho, Jaffe, Levy, Montagnier, Tedder, Weiss - where retrovirology is 'dumbed down' science."

AA: "Absolutely: the 'dumbing down' of aesthetics is absolutely akin to the dumbed down 'HIV' paradigm as Rebecca Culshaw, Ph.D., whose work as a mathematical biologist had largely been built on the 'HIV' paradigm, wrote critically: 'I have since come to realize that there is good evidence that the entire basis for this theory is wrong. AIDS, it seems, is not a disease so much as a sociopolitical construct that few people understand and even fewer question. Why have we as a society been so quick to accept a theory for which so little solid evidence exists? Why do we take proclamations by government institutions like the NIH and the CDC, via newscasters and talk show hosts, entirely on faith? The average citizen has no idea how weak the connection really is between HIV and AIDS, and this is the manner in which scientifically insupportable phrases like 'the AIDS virus' or 'an AIDS test' have become part of the common vernacular despite no evidence for their accuracy...After ten years involved in the academic side of HIV research, as well as in the academic world at large, I truly believe that the blame for the universal, unconditional, faith-based acceptance of such a flawed theory falls squarely on the shoulders of those among us who have actively endorsed a completely unproven hypothesis in the interests of furthering our careers...For over twenty years, the general public has been greatly misled and ill-informed....'  (Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D., Why I Quit HIV;  Lew Rockwell, March 3, 2006).  She blames this 'blind faith' in the 'HIV' Cause on the 'dumbing down' of scientific standards where students are never encouraged to question the status-quo but blindly accept 'HIV' pseudo-science sound-bites:' 'As a final thought, I am often asked, 'How could medicine have made such a big mistake? How could so many people be wrong?.' I believe the answer lies in the disintegration of scientific standards that have resulted, in large part, from the changing expectations of academic scientists...It is clear to me that the pressure to obtain big government grants and to publish as many papers as possible is not necessarily helping the advancement of science. Rather, academics (and in particular, young ones) are pressured to choose projects that can be completed quickly and easily, so as to increase their publication list as fast as possible. As a result, quality suffers. This lowering of scientific standards and critical thinking has been apparent in many aspects of research for some time, and after several generations of students, it is now beginning to infiltrate the classroom – the textbooks and the undergraduate curriculum. It is germane at this point to indicate that many of the common arguments presented in response to the queries of HIV/AIDS sceptics are essentially some form of appeal to the use of low standards. (For example, 'You don’t need a reference that HIV causes AIDS,'  'The fact that HIV and AIDS are so well correlated indicates that it must be the cause,'  'We don’t need to worry about actual infectious virus, viral ‘markers’ should suffice.')...It is this decline in scientific standards that I point to, when I am asked how so many people could be so wrong. Given the current research atmosphere, it was almost inevitable that a really, really big scientific mistake was going to be made. But we can still have hope for the future – hope that institutional and political pressures will no longer continue to cost lives, and hope that we will soon see honest dialogue and debate, free of name-calling and intimidation.'  (Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D, Why I Quit HIV: The Aftermath, Lew Rockwell, March 21, 2006). Yet unfortunately they don't want 'dialogue and debate' because there are too many careers and reputations built upon this profitable paradigm and the media collude in all the lies."

 

 

                                                                      

                                                                                Slither Sensation Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

 

EP: "It's analogous to the 'dumbing down' of education by the Blair government deliberately to conceal the fact that many students are virtually ineducable. This was brought home most strongly by the recent reports in the press of students with degrees who were virtually unemployable due to their lack of basic literacy, numeracy, etc. With this 'dumbing-down' in the arts it is the politically correct ideology that 'anyone can do it' - that  'anyone can make it' and 'anyone can make money out of it' - since art is market-led - not aesthetically-led - it's all about making money - not making art. It's marketing names - making names - brand names - just like like brand name placement advertising."

 

 

                                                                      

                                                                                        Elongated Eddie Gray   Alex Alien 2006                 

 

AA: "Like dumbed-down media-manufactured placement-products Posh & Becks - or Emin & Hirst made for for mass consumption. As Bacon said to Peppiatt:  '...not much that is produced now jolts one. Everything that is made now is made for public consumption and it makes it all so anodyne. It's rather like this ghastly government we have in this country. The whole thing's a kind of anodyne way of making money.. Most of what is called art, your eye just flows over... Once you become what is called an artist, there is nothing more awful, like those awful people who produce those awful images, and you know more or less what they're going to be like...'   (Provoking accidents, prompting chance, Art International, Autumn 1989). The mendacious and criminal Blair government along with sordid Serota, Saatchi, Jopling , are anodyne cultural vandals who propagate trailer-trash like Hirst and Emin - who emanate an uncouth, coarse, common crassness - media manufactured as the 'bad boy' and 'bad girl' of Brit Art. What Bacon said to Barry Joule of David Hockney's work being 'dreary' and 'rubbish' equally applies today to all these non-entities as patronised by Serota, Saatchi, Jopling: their stuff does not 'jolt' one because it has no tension, no tautness: - their so called art is just anodyne, dreary rubbish. (Hockney? He's such rubbish, Bacon said; The Times, January, 30 2006)."

 

                                   

                                                                          

                                                                                        Amorous Amun Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

  

 

EP: "Duchamp saw all this awful anodyne mass marketing of artists far back as 1966: 'The individual is disappearing rapidly. We'll eventually be nothing but numbered ants. The group thing grows. You can already feel the tendency in the arts today.  Speed, money, interest. A hundred years ago there were few artists, few dealers and few collectors. Art was a world by itself. Now it completely exoteric - not my cup of tea. There is something wonderful about the secret society that is lost. You know, an artist only does one or two or three things in his whole life. The rest is merely filling up the whole. It is not desirable to be Pepsi-Cola. It is dangerous.'  (Studio International, June 1966). Exactly. Regarding Duchamp's comment: 'We'll eventually be nothing but numbered ants' - what is your feeling on compulsory ID cards being introduced by the Blair government?  I have both a French and South African ID already and I don't feel under surveillance so a further UK one is not going to bother me at all! As with everything its a good and a bad thing so there's nothing to worry about if we can subvert the ID system...Plus they already have all this information on you and me already...so what does this add to what's not already known? Nothing. Identities are internal and can never be based on mere physiognomy....I'm all for it.....makes for better control of the population...useful for illegal immigrant control, criminals, proof of ID etc...you probably think I've become a reactionary rightwing bastard!.. Only joking!!!"

AA: " I know that ID cards have worked reasonably well to enhance personal and civil liberties in certain Scandinavian countries in the 70s,80s, where all the information on the card could be scrutinised by everyone, a kind of  hegemonic negotiation between citizens and the state. But in the context of the corrupt and criminal Blair government - if it can really be called a government - for Labour are not governing but presiding over a state of chaos, collapse and anarchy. ID cards being made compulsory is just a strategy to increase state surveillance and thus an intrusion into our civil liberties - if they really existed to begin with - ID cards are not about our 'security' but security of the state - and not to counter terrorism as claimed. It is interesting that the first government to use ID systems in a nationally co-ordinated way was in 1934. Hitler and Goering utilised a punch-card data-base to keep track millions of 'jews' and other 'alien' threats to the state.  On an ontological level it is impossible to have an ID card because identity is always already an 'alien' thing - one simply cannot have an identity card as our so-called identity is never our own - but always athers."


                                                                           

                                                                                            Elongated Eddie Gray   Alex Alien 2006           

 

EP: "Nothing wrong or surprising about politicians being criminal or corrupt. I'd be against them if they weren't.

Fuck democracy, who wants the will of the majority anyway but an unthinking majority who hate art, music - and the ather. Democracy is THE slave morality in practise!!! Or don't you see it? The introduction of ID cards is a furtherance of the war on illegal immigration, crime and Islamic fundamentalism. A small price to pay - no?"

 

                                                                           

                                                                                          Edifying Eddie Gray  Portrait   Alex Alien 2006

 

AA: "Nietzsche, Heidegger and Plato argued against democracy since it leads us to being ruled by 'the They' - the 'mob rule' of the slave-heard and this is illustrated by the dumbed-down con-artists spawned by Saatchi and Serota et al. As Plato put it so aptly: 'Democracy leads to rule by the stupid (sophists), who while they may have fine rhetorical skills (that can exert some control over the masses) have no true knowledge itself.' - think of Hirst, Emin, Ofili, Opie, et al. As well as illiterate idiot Wayne Rooney who is to write a minimum of five books for an advance of £5m plus royalties. The introduction of compulsory ID cards is an advancement of surveillance and control as Helena Kennedy QC argues: 'I rush to the Lords to vote against identity cards. I spoke again against the bill and voted against the government, to the consternation of some on my own benches. It amazes me that people do not see how pernicious this legislation is. Encroachments on liberty are justified to the electorate on the basis that they will improve security and law-abiding citizens should have nothing to hide. Yet such measures end up facilitating greater control over the whole of society. ID cards will change the relationship between citizen and state. One of the great things about common-law systems is that they are founded on a healthy scepticism of power; the state has to justify its actions before removing liberty. But this is all old-fashioned stuff to our 'modernising' Prime Minister. It is that inbuilt scepticism which has kept our system relatively stable and corruption-free. We have been able to say to the policeman, 'Why do you want to know who I am and where I am going?'  rather than meekly fumbling for an ID. We should all be reminding the government that the state is there at our behest, not the other way round. Once cards are compulsory, we will be required to carry them at all times, and as night follows day we will be expected to produce them on demand. This idea did not come about by asking for the solution to a problem. It was presented to the government by technology companies explaining what is possible. Because something is possible does not mean it should be done.'  (Helena Kennedy QC, Diary, New Statesman, Monday 20th March 2006).  I - and many more others - would rather go to prison than have an ID card..."

 

 

                                                                       

                                                                                       Amorous Amun Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

 

EP: "Regarding  Rebecca Culshaw's critique of the 'dumbing down'  of the 'AIDS' discourse, Marcel Theroux recently presented more media myths on 'AIDS' in the More 4 documentary Death of a Nation perfectly justifying her points. Theroux ignorantly identifies 'AIDS' as 'this disease' - and uses the trite term 'HIV/AIDS' - to tie the two together..."

AA: "Yes: I saw Death of a Nation - and found Theroux's dreary death-mongering diatribe deeply depressing: he said that if they were not given 'antiretrovirals' they would all die - it never seems to have occurred to Theroux that it's the recreational drugs are the cause of their illness -  so blinkered is he by 'HIV' belief. Theroux's emotionally charged garbage is a typical example of misreporting and a misinterpretation of the real situation in Russia: 'The population is already falling and threatened further by the very real possibility of a million deaths from AIDS by 2020.'  More alarmist rubbish. It is not death from 'AIDS'  - it is death from drug addiction but today it is not politically correct to state that the drugs cause illness - relabelled as  'AIDS'.  Why can't he see the connection - one only find 'AIDS'  in areas that have recreational epidemics - think - they never find 'AIDS' where there is no trace of recreational drug abuse or malnutrition and disease conditions relating to poverty and allegedly a quarter of the Russian population lives below the poverty line; Theroux fails to register that 'HIV' is merely a marker for recreational drug use and poverty. Theroux also fails to fathom that 'HIV' has never been shown to cause illness by any known mechanism, - whereas recreational drugs have been shown - since the beginning of  the 20th century - to cause diseases identical to those that are today indicative of 'AIDS' - as Professor Peter Duesberg has demonstrated.  How much more honest and open it would be for Theroux to admit that they are dying of recreational drug use, malnutrition and poverty in Russia - but then 'HIV' and 'AIDS' sell copy and 'antiretrovirals'.  When recreational drug users come off their drugs their health improves. It is absolutely illogical to give highly cyto-toxic 'antiretrovirals' to recreational drug users - a double dose of poison..."

 

 

                                                                             

                                                                                         Amorous Amun Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

 

 

EP: "The pharmopawns Bono and Bob Geldof are unwittingly doing incredible damage by advocating 'antiretrovirals."

AA: "Yes - Bono and Geldof are totally thick and know fuck all about what so-called 'AIDS' really is in Africa and ape all the usual lies based on ignorance as Bono has recently propagated in editing an emotive issue of The Independent propagating the 'African AIDS' myth machine with 'AIDS' profiteers American Express, Motorola, Gap, Converse and Armani advocating Bono's RED campaign promoting unique products to raise funds for 'antiretroviarls': inflated 'HIV' figures promote inflated profits for pharmaceuticals. Inflated 'HIV' figures are the stock in trade of pharmaceutical profiteers and all these capitalist consumer companies: American Express, Motorola, Gap, Converse and Armani are activating an aidspharmogenocide and advocated by thick fucks like Bono and Geldof backed up by Blair and Bush. Yet Neville Hodgkinson recently reported:  'Meanwhile the Washington Post last month published an investigation headlined How Aids in Africa was overstated, arguing that 'increasingly dire' and inaccurate assessments of HIV infection by UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids) had 'skewed years of policy judgments and decisions on where to spend precious healthcare dollars'. In India, a proposed Red Ribbon Campaign through the national rail network has been abandoned, following a national convention on HIV in Bangalore last October attended by more than 1,500 HIV-positive people where the once-fashionable symbol of Aids awareness was ceremoniously rejected. In front of television cameras, a six-foot red ribbon was cut into pieces as a protest against the 'oppressive and patronising' symbol...In Australia, the idea that anyone can be diagnosed as infected with HIV is to face a court challenge. In a hearing set down for July, the lawyer for a man found guilty of endangering the lives of three women through having unprotected sex (one woman has tested positive, while the other two are negative) is to call evidence from a Perth-based group of scientists...The group will testify that 'HIV' has never been isolated from the tissues of Aids patients; and that in consequence the HIV test has never been validated and there is no proof HIV is transmitted sexually...' ((The circular reasoning scandal of HIV testing; The Business, by Neville Hodgkinson 21/05/2006)..."

EP: "The BBC's Panorama: 'Fingerprints in the Dock' (21/5/2006) was strikingly analogous to the unreliability and uselessness and the non-specificity of 'HIV' tests - as Michael Mansfield, QC stated: 'Fingerprinting is not a science. It's an art, it's subjective. It's in the eye of the beholder.' and as subjective as 'HIV' virtual virology pseudo science."   

 

                                                                        

                                                                                     Amorous Amun Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

 

AA: "Panorama should do an exposé on the 'HIV' testing fraud but there is a government D-Notice on reporting this. We should get Michael Mansfield QC to expose the 'HIV' test fraud in the UK in the high courts as Dr. Val Turner is doing now in Australia. Pat Wertheim, a 'fingerprint expert', stated on Panorama:  'You cannot underestimate the amount of damage done to the science of fingerprints in the world today.'   And the same is also  true of 'HIV' testing as Rebecca V. Culshaw, Ph.D. stated:  'I have come to sincerely believe that these HIV tests do immeasurably more harm than good, due to their astounding lack of specificity and standardization...I do not feel it is going too far to say that these tests ought to be banned for diagnostic purposes.'  (Why I Quit HIV, Lew Rockwell, March 3, 2006 ). Yet the majority of  'finger print' experts - like 'HIV' experts - live in a closed culture like a secret society - where they all close ranks and protect each other's careers and never will admit they have made tragic mistakes costing lives..."

 
 EP: "Curators are also a closed culture craving to appear to be politically correct rather than aesthetically aware as Wullschlager argues regarding the the conservatism of the Tate Modern's cranky curators:  'A  century ago, MoMA gobbled up modern works that Tate was too blind to buy. How Tate curators still hate modernism, the optimistic art of construction derived from Cézanne – also banished to a corner – and essential to understanding the art of deconstruction that came afterwards. While our great living individualist artists who still recall the modernist tradition – Freud, Rego, Ofili – are relegated to Millbank, conceptual, hopelessly dated British dross is showcased here: Sarah Lucas’s urine-yellow toilet bowl, Julian Opie’s non-working ventilation unit. “Incubus”, Gary Hume’s pink house-paint map of hospital doors, is the central work in a section called “Contemporary Painting”, suicidally installed next to late Matisse and Léger, whose vigour makes 1940s and 1950s canvases look by contrast as if the paint had just dried.. Tate Modern has a world-class building and a world-class collection, but the British provincialism of its curators is embarrassing, and their refusal to look history in the eye mauls a potentially dazzling display of art past and present into meaninglessness. (World according to Tate, Jackie Wullschlager, The Financial Times, May 25 2006). Curators are just like our current crop of civil servants with delusions of adequacy."

 

                                                                       

                                                                                     Angoisse Amun  Self  Portrait   Alex Alien 2006   

 

AA: "Remember that the Tate was offered Bacon's 1944 Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion by Eric Hall in 1953 but refused it at first and only reluctantly accepted it; as far as I'm aware, the Tate have no Schiele drawings, no Nolde watercolours, no Campendonck, no Dongen, no Feinninger, no Felixmuller, no Jawlensky; their creepy curators are so desperate to be seen as 'in', 'with it', 'contemporary', 'controversial'  - but it back fires on them and it becomes so boring and predictable and not at all 'provocative' - as they pretend it to be - but profoundly provincial and petit-bourgeois -  like the politically correct aesthetically dreary displays by Creed, Hume, Kapoor, Lucas, Meireles, Opie, Takahashi."

 EP: "Serota is also showcasing works owned by its corporate sponsor UBS which will intern become cultural capital as  an artificially inflated investment as The Sunday Telegraph exposed: ''The Tate Gallery has been accused of cronyism and dubbed 'mercenary' for deciding to display works of art owned by one of its largest corporate sponsors. Critics claim that the decision to hang 150 works from the private collection of UBS, the Swiss bank, will send the value of the art soaring...But Charles Thomson, the founder of the Stuckists group of artists, said that the UBS display raised questions about the artistic value of the gallery's displays. 'I think the Tate has tarnished its reputation so much that visitors have no idea what they are looking at any more. What is the reason for a particular work being there? Is it cronyism? Is it mercenary?   Or does the work actually have any artistic value.'...The controversy follows an earlier row over cronyism which hit the gallery last year. The Sunday Telegraph revealed £700,000 had been spent on The Upper Room, an installation by Chris Ofili, who was a serving trustee at the time....Brian Sewell, the leading art critic and television presenter, likened the UBS arrangements to the 'cash for honours' scandal. He said: 'What does the UBS receive in return for its sponsorship? Three whole rooms in the Tate Modern in which to show a revolving display. When UBS comes to the point of managing this asset - that is, selling it - it will record in the provenance the line 'On long-term loan to Tate Modern', a line that amounts to a guarantee of importance, worth at least another five per cent in price. A pretty good deal for UBS - did it ask for it or was it offered by the Tate?'...The Tate is still sensitive to allegations of cash for access.'  (Tate breaks its own rules by hanging a sponsor's collection, Chris Hastings and Beth Jones, The Sunday Telegraph, 28 May, 2006). Tate Modern curators are corrupt cronies - like Labour's cash cronies."

 

                                                                            

                                                                                                   Lola 1912   Alexej von Jawlensky

 

AA: "The Tate should sell all its conservative conceptual crap and that awful Ofili shit and buy at Sotheby's Alexej von Jawlensky's Lola (1912): £ 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Pablo Picasso's Portrait d' Edith de Beaumont: £200,000 - 300,000; Henri Fantin-Latour's Chrysanthèmes (1875): £600,000 - 800,000; Edgar Degas' La Sortie du Bain (1895): £4,500,000 - 6,500,000; Alexej von Jawlensky's Schräge Augen (1930): £180,000 - 250,000; Emil Nolde's Blumenstrauss: £30,000 - 40,000;  Alexej von Jawlensky's Meditation (1934): £28,000 - 35,000;  Amedeo Modigliani's Jeanne Hébuterne au Chapeau (1919): £8,500,000 -12,000,000;  and  at Christie's buy Kees van Dongen's L'Espagnole - El Mantón (1905): £1,800,000 - 2,500,000; Amedeo Modigliani's Homme assis sur fond orange (1918): £2,000,000 - 3,000,000; and Egon Schiele's Stehendes Mädchen in weissem Unterkleid: £1,800,000 - 2,400,000; Emil Nolde's Sommerblumen: £50,000 - 70,000;  Egon Schiele's  Bildnis eines jungen Mannes (Erich Lederer): £800,000 - 1,200,000;  Alexej von Jawlensky's Mystischer Kopf: £ 250,000 - 350,000; Egon Schiele's Moa: £2,400,000 - 3,200,000; Albert Marquet's Le pont de Triel: (1931) £70,000 - 90,000;;Egon Schiele's Bildnis Rupert Koller: £ 50,000 - 70,000; and at the Post War sale but Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1980): £3,500,000 - 5,500,000. The amount of shit the Tate could sell they could easily afford to buy all these. We should get the Stuckists to go and put big bids on these works on behalf of the Tate an send them the bill. It is high time that the Tate got its priorities right and stopped pandering to the political correctness of contemporary art - which is ironically always already so out dated so outmoded - and so disposable."


                                                                                                  

                                                                                      Angoisse Amun  Self  Portrait   Alex Alien 2006

 

EP: "Jawlensky's Lola and Fantin-Latour's Chrysanthèmes were simply stunning and should be bought by the Tate."

AA: "Yes - I went again to Sotheby's to see Jawlensky's Lola and Fantin-Latour's Chrysanthèmes and they both simply shone out with such a radiance which eclipsed all else there with the exception of Picasso's exquisite drawing Portrait d' Edith de Beaumont. These highly important works should be bought by the Tate but Serota will always say that they simply can't afford it whilst paying an obscene £700,000 for Ofili's The Upper Room. Serota is aesthetically dyslexic."

EP: "From the aesthetically dyslexic to the aesthetically curated - the Gagosian Gallery's Bacon and Hirst exhibition had a wonderful warehouse industrial feel to the gallery including high ceilings which helped to intensify focus on the work's themes of death and modern life and thus resultant alienation as opposed to the more traditional warm gallery 'home' environment. The sheer scale of the works, both work on massive scale, worked so well in this gallery space."

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                       Aliquid Alien Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

                                                                                                            

AA: "Yes. Gagosian Gallery has at last really revealed Bacon to me in a new light. Light is the key here: the natural light coming from overhead fanlights illuminating the paintings and making the paint appear more serene and translucent and evanescent than ever before. This is such an alluring and seductive gallery where the paintings can really begin to breathe and appear to be in their own space and show their true colours.  As the light changes so do the mood and the sensations of the paint (which is the image in itself).  The shifting natural lighting helped shape-shift the mood and the movement of the paintings so they were constantly changing and spatially set out giving them a sense of grandeur."

EP: "Jackie Wullschlager said that the Gagosian Gallery showing of Hirst with Bacon was to sell him as Bacon's heir:  'Caveat emptor: this is a blatant attempt to sell Hirst - top-priced Gagosian artist - as Bacon's successor...'  (Humanity in all its agony and emptiness, The Financial Times, June 29 2006)...So is Hirst Bacon's successor...?"

 

 

                                                 

                                                                                     Alex Alien at the Gagosian Gallery by Evert Potgieter 

                                                    

AA: "Hirst is not Bacon's successor because Hirst is not a painter and cannot paint. Hirst cannot reinvent realism even though Hirst uses real things...Larry Gagosian's high-risk strategy of juxtaposing Hirst with Bacon has backfired and become a cruel and humiliating joke at Hirst's expense and I would like to express my sincere commiserations to Hirst for any hurt or embarrassment caused.  Bacon's richness of image invention merely emphasises the poverty of Hirst's total lacking of re-inventing realism: Hirst's 'things' are vapid and vacuous looking like taxidermy Ikea installations."

 
EP: "But both Bacon and Hirst share the same obsession with death and Hirst is obsessed with Bacon like your are."

 

                                                                                   

                                                                                                     Slither Sensation Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

 

AA: "Bacon like Derrida was indeed obsessed with death but only as the shadow that stalks life not as a thing in itself. It has become a crass cliché to associate Bacon's images with 'death', 'horror', 'terror', and 'violence' - and  yet none of these sensational media-motifs apply to the moods and the sensations of seeing the 'spirit' of  Bacon - 'in the light'  - rather than Bacon 'in the flesh'. Like Martin Heidegger, Bacon never asked himself: 'What is spirit?' and Bacon being a non-believer preferred to use the terms 'pulsation', 'energy' or 'emanation' rather than the soul or the spirit of the sitter. The uncannily calm and cool paintings displayed under the illuminating light of this elegant gallery reveals a serene and spiritual Bacon which radiate with similar meditative moods to Alexej von Jawlensky's Abstract Heads and Meditations. It would have been more apt to juxtapose Bacon with Jawlensky yet few can sensation this just jointing." 

 

                                                   

                                                                            

                                                                                     Slither Sensation Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

                    

EP: "Your sculpture heads would have been a better match with Bacon than Hirst's stuff!  I think you should build up a body of work with your sculptures, you need about 20 heads plus new paintings. You are Bacon's successor not Hirst."

AA: "The question of Bacon's so-called successor is so absurd really since psychic sensation is never the same thing so 'art' is alien all the time; Hirst's 'conceptual' things have nothing to do with 'art' since the 'conceptual' is alien to 'art' which is non-conceptual: Hirst's man-made 'things' are 'conceptual' and therefore 'conscious' but Bacon's alien-aided 'beings' are 'non-conceptual' therefore 'subconscious': Hirst is controlled and conscious and plans ahead all the time and knows the end result and therefore takes no risks and leaves nothing to chance - whilst with Bacon 'art' is all about risk, chance and losing control: 'art' cannot be planned ahead in advance since 'art' is an action ahead of conception."

EP: "Rather like Ron Mueck's carefully planned ahead and consciously controlled clinical photo-realist sculptures?"

AA: "Yes - paradoxically - just like Hirst's 'real things' - Muecks photo realist sculptures simply lack a really realistic realism because appearances are always already artificial and appearances never really appear like that in reality! As Bacon said to Sylvester: 'The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you've got of its looking real.'..."

 

                                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                           Slurping  Self Portrait  2006   Alex Alien

 

EP: "What made you to go back to sculpture - the inability to paint portraits? Has sculpture made painting possible?"

AA: "I only ever went back to sculpture because my painting was far too flat and lacked layering so sculpture may help my painting to be more sculptural. I wish Bacon had actually attempted to do sculpture but he wrongly perceived that the medium was not so fluid as oil paint but contrary to Bacon's claim clay is as fluid as oil paint and the stuff has an inevitability about it since it has a life of its own and needs little manipulation. Bacon said to Sylvester: 'I suppose it's through thinking about sculpture - I would like, quite apart from the attempt to do sculpture, to make the painting itself very much more sculptural... And I would like to make the portraits more sculptural, because I think it is possible to make a thing  both a great image and a great portrait... I mean, appearance is like a continuously floating thing. And of course, in sculpture the problem is perhaps even more poignant because the material which you would be working in is not as fluid as oil paint and it would add another difficulty. But then an added difficulty often is what makes the solving of a thing deeper. Because of the difficulty in doing it.'   (The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987). I want to paint sculptural portraits now."

 

 

                                                      

                                          Bacon by Bacon at the Gagosian Gallery                                                             Alien by Alien at the Gagosian Gallery

 

EP: "In a Guardian interview Hirst comes across as a working class slob. Is Hirst really a common yobbo or merely affecting a working class coarseness aping trash TV chef Jamie Oliver's mockney accent? Charlotte Higgins reported: "Hirst says: 'People like that are just talking shit, they just fucking  ... I don't believe he believes what he says ..'  On Guardian art critic Adrian Searle, he says: 'I got a really bad one from him last year. If he writes something like that then it's very difficult, next time you see him, not to punch his fucking face in.'   Curiously, when I first ask him about his relationship with critical opinion, he takes the question as if it were on celebrity.  'I look at Posh and Becks, and think, 'What do you expect?' If you get a lot from it, you have to give a lot back. If people come up to me in the street I try to give them a drawing or something, rather than a signature or telling them to fuck off. Mind you, if you put that in the paper, I'll be fucking swarmed'. (Charlotte Higgins, 'You can only go down', Guardian, 20 June 2006)."