Choice Cuts

Against the odds I made it to the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain this morning.

His work is immediate, bold and casts a brutal eye over the human form. The vast majority of paintings contain figures, very often transformed beyond recognition into a gory mess.

It’s the faces that are most striking. Skulls protrude; teeth jut out at grotesque angles; sometimes, figures have a set of teeth in place of a head.

But I don’t think we’re supposed to be scared or horrified. My overriding feeling was sympathy for the figures. I pitied their disfigurations, which, by extension are our own.

The Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 triptych was particularly impressive. It reminded me of one of my recent poems:

The Man

Thrown together flesh on a stick
Kebab arms,
Meaty legs,
Laid out on a plate.
White membranes,
Web of bile-ways and tracts
Tear ducts like blunt labyrinths.

Brain in the middle, like a silly pig
Waiting for the Minotaur.

Hair shoved into pores
At awkward angles,
Or locked brutishly across the brows.

Two hammy hands,
Alive with fingers
Glisten-fisted,
Slam and slam down.

The tongue, pegged back behind white gates
Squirms round a squeak –
Wheezed and squeezed from the sponge-lungs
The squeak squirms,
Wriggles out,
Dives beyond the teeth,
Takes flight,
And blooms into a scream.

Nose – a little upturned snail,
Ears like flat pebbles
Clinging to a river bed,
Frog leg lips,
Eyes like two soft moans.

Heart – a rubber wing
Pink, inflated,
Flapping, slopping
Stopping, starting.

Churning blood, not air.

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‘Well, of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses' – Francis Bacon

Thanks to http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.3.ARTVIEWS.%206%20PIECES.htm for the image.