Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Wolverhampton
Deleuze Bacon and the Challenge of the Contemporary
Brief Description
Conio organised a Study Day (Sept 2008) at Tate Britain to coincide with Francis Bacon’s centenary retrospective (speakers included Simon O’Sullivan, Darren Ambrose, and Margarita Gluzberg). The day was sold out and attended by scholars, writers and artists. The editor of Deleuze Studies, the world’s premier Deleuzian peer-reviewed journal, invited Conio to submit these papers, and edit a special Forum in the issue. Conio also contributed an essay, Folie a Deux.
Research Rationale
The Forum provided an opportunity for the contributors to critically examine Deleuze’s writings on Bacon and his potential contribution to wider Bacon scholarship. This involved establishing new ways in which Deleuze’s concepts might be understood and deployed in the context of a major retrospective of Bacon’s work and in relation to contemporary art practices and criticism.
Conio’s paper situates Deleuze’s book Frances Bacon: the Logic of Sensation, in relation to Deleuze’s other conceptual ideas on aesthetics as formulated in A Thousand Plateaus and The Logic of Sense and contemporary, politically engaged, art practices. In this respect Conio addressed the relations between the food production industry and the presentation of meat and between the implicit theories of nature and the impact of technology in Bacon’s paintings.
Strategies Undertaken
Conio critiqued certain features of Deleuze’s work in an attempt to update his avowed Modernism. He did this through establishing relationships between Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze’s book on Bacon and Deleuze’s other aesthetic theories outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. Conio placed these types of thinking in the context of contemporary art practice and contemporary food production in order to test the efficacy of each in the production of meaning. This strategy of placing different types of thinking into adjunctive and disjunctive relations asks whether these writings have value beyond the specific circumstances of their production.
