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Francis Bacon (Sounding Out The Museum Part II)

‘Sounding Out The Museum II’ is one of series of works that explored performance practices within gallery settings and built upon the performance of Gleeson’s ‘Invisible Targets’ in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nimes in June 2008. In this case the performance site is the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, now home to the Francis Bacon Studio. In 1998 John Edwards, Francis Bacon’s sole heir, donated the entire contents of Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews to the Hugh Lane Gallery. These were subsequently transported and reassembled in the gallery.

In his book ‘Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space’ (2000), Brian O’ Doherty considers the ‘real life of the world against the sterilized operating room of the white cube – [it] defends time and change against the myth of the eternality and transcendence of pure form’. The Francis Bacon Studio is a significant example of the changing landscape of museums and galleries in which the chaotic, the banal, and the ad hoc take their place amongst the permanent, the stable and the fixed. Consequently, the studio raises questions for museology. The artist’s studio is a place of trial and error, a place for testing new materials, a place of discarded projects.

It was into this context that ensemble Scratch the Surface, directed by Gleeson, was invited to curate a performance that explored, through sound and movement, questions of hybrid practices in terms of site and genres in gallery spaces assigned to the Francis Bacon Studio. The performance of Gleeson’s ‘Viola Pulse’ examined the role of ‘preparation’ in the production of sound, investigating the process by which sound is recorded prior to its performance and manipulated alongside the production of new sound during the performance itself. SEE DIGITAL OUTPUT.