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Simultaneous Translation Through a Mouth Without Organs -

Folie à Deux: Bacon and Deleuze

This lecture was delivered as part of ‘Folie à Deux: Bacon and Deleuze’ at Tate Britain in December 2008. Gluzberg’s lecture concerned the relationships between artist and philosopher and between the conceptual archaeology of words and the motor of visual-material production. She discussed this idea of production and how Deleuze (and significantly Guattari, who was a ‘practitioner’ in his psychoanalyst role) are able, so successfully, to establish channels of possible translation between the two modes through their anatomy of matter. Gluzberg proposed the existence of a shared common project within the works of Deleuze, his collaborator Guattari, and the artist Francis Bacon – believing it to be a project to which Gluzberg herself has long been committed to as a ‘matter-manufacturer’.

As the Tate press release (2008) commented: ‘Francis Bacon's isolated figures and distorted faces were analysed by Gilles Deleuze and from this he developed a series of philosophical concepts that have produced some of the most creative and challenging approaches to painting and aesthetics. Dr Simon O'Sullivan, Dr Darren Ambrose, Margarita Gluzberg and Andrew Conio discussed how this entanglement has fashioned new ways of understanding painting and writing, producing ideas that have had an impact far beyond the domains of aesthetics and philosophy.’

The lecture placed specific emphasis on its being delivered by an artist rather than a philosopher, and integrated the artist’s own practice into its narrative structure. It examined why Deleuze and Guattari are so ‘useful’ to artists for their understanding of ‘matter’. The mode of the lecture itself was experimental, and used visual material in a way that wove the theoretical together with the preoccupations of contemporary art.

The lecture can be streamed from Tate Britain’s website: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/folie-deux-bacon-and-deleuze-part-2.