Installation of the Bacon Studio at the Municipal Gallery Dublin

Peter Cody

A small converted carriage house in South Kensington, London became Bacon's studio in the late 1950s. The simple brick exterior indistinguishable from that of iiistinguishable from that of its neighbours veiled two low-ceilinged spaces that acted as a living / bedroom and studio respectively. The former languished in a state of some privation while the latter offered a hallowed secret retreat, a private place. Seldom was anyone let enter the studio.

The floor and walls were strewn with the paint splattered residue of his exertions. The books, images and press cuttings that formed his lexicon littered the floor. Bacon preferred to paint from memory, referring time and again to photographs, escchewing the original, so that, 'the appearance would move towards the image.'

Among the many works that littered the floor were Eadweard Muybridge's volumes of sequential photographic frames published in 1885. Depictions of athletes and animals walking, jumping and wrestling which were the forerunners of modern cinematic experience. Fragmentary moments were represented as a chain of continuous motion. Bacon's fascination with the sequential juxtaposition of images was explored in the series of triptychs, which he painted throughout his career.

One of the most influential painters in Bacon's work is Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) an exponent of 'Realism'. An affinity exemplified by the series of studies after the portrait of Pope Innocent X that remained one of the constant themes of his work. In this sequence of variations a continuous attempt is made to create the greatest possible tension between the original and the recreated experience. Here Bacon first employs the space frame, as an architectural inscription of the body to concentrate the image, he said 'I use the frame to see the image.' In 'Las Meninas' and 'Christ in the House of Mary and Martha' Velasquez extends the space of the painting beyond the frame. The spectator achieves a new involvement and intimacy with the assembly of figures.

In 1882 the Muse Grvin opened on the Boulevard Monmartre in Paris a museum dedicated to a trade in likenesses. The wax museum represented the principle events of the day with scrupulous fidelity. The arrangementss of the tableaux sought to expose the private life of the city. Its greatest innovation lay in the manner in which the movement of the spectator became infused with the display itself. A new relationship was established between the viewer and the subject. The visitor could sequentially inhabit a series of panoramic, panoptic and peephole views. The peephole display rendered for the masses a privileged view of a privileged view.

In the grounds of the great exhibitions of late nineteenth-century Paris the paanoramas emerged as the new site of public entertainment. A tamed nature was offered by these technical imitations that pervaded the city. An observation of the changing time of day in the landscape was provided in the form of a cinematic experience before the apparatus. To improve the effect of realism the scene painters worked from photographs and incorporated three-dimensional material. With the arrival of the panoramas spectatorship became the new paradigm of investigation.

The Bacon studio no longer has a body, it has been extricated from its space frame. As such it can no longer be seen. The divested contents have become the authentic accessories of a fabricated tableau. The private realm of ceased production is interspersed with the interloper of fiction. An inverted panorama, established from photographs, is restructured around its three-dimensionality and the spectators' mobility, the viewer becomes a voyeur. Just as with nature the studio is tamed, its dynamism now deleted only the movement of the crowds can reanimate a stagnant facsimile. The space of the studio, distorted by the lens, is re-rendered through a series of framed sequential views allowing the visitor to inhabit multiple perspectives, while the resultant set of images replaces the lost original cultural experience.

Peter Cody architect.