The Cry of the Ear

Abstract

Copyright © 2022 The Author. The anatomy theatre of human and non-human bodies is the subject of an essay that probes the relations of visual art to performative portraits of painful, often sadomasochistic deformities of figuration. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, exhibited at London’s Royal Academy Art (2022), opens up a vast, and hugely disturbing, spectrum of works by a painter who was fearless in drawing out the contorted and dissolving shapes of subjects—male, female, animal, biomorphic—that might be considered characters in mythic, tragic and melodramatic political or erotic spectacles. Except that Bacon’s characters are brutalized and victimized by love and desire that haunt us like a silent scream, unheard or inaudible in paint, yet still screaming in the face of our embarrassed recognition of distress, of violence endemic in nature and our “empty power, field of death” (Artaud). The essay looks at Bacon as a theatrical impresario, an experimenter and calculating freak-show director down nightmare alley.