Abstract
Prompted by the exhibition Francis Bacon: Man and Beast (January–April 2022), this article takes a cultural studies and historical poetics approach to the significance of skin in Bacon’s nudes. Drawing upon Michel Serres’s philosophy and the work of prominent figures within skin studies, this article argues that Bacon’s paintings intuitively embody the significance of skin as a dynamic site/sight of sensory, lived, experience shaped by socio-historical context. Bacon’s nudes are considered in relation to the dermalogical turn; the topological body; Didier Anzieu’s skin ego and skin as our ‘deepest surface’; and the importance of movement in Bacon’s imagery, which correlates with Serres’s notion that learning occurs through bodily motion. Serres recognises that cultural works – including painting and other creative practices – can convey complex multiplicities of knowledge synthesised into new and distinct forms.
Introduction: Skin as Milieu
In the catalogue for Francis Bacon: Man and Beast (2021), co-curator Michael Peppiatt discusses Bacon’s openly acknowledged yet critically underexplored interest in painting animals and the animalistic qualities of humans, which ‘runs through his entire oeuvre’ (p. 14). Experiencing the curated works on display, which explicitly emphasise the presence of these themes across Bacon’s lifetime, the Royal Academy exhibition implicitly draws attention to another overlooked aspect of Bacon’s paintings: the significance of skin. Inspired by Man and Beast and influenced by the rise of skin studies as a discipline, including what sensory anthropologist David Howes (2018) has referred to as a ‘dermalogical turn’ within body studies, this article focuses upon the importance of skin in Bacon’s paintings. 1 Drawing upon the work of philosopher Michel Serres, this article considers the topological qualities of skin as a milieu (a medium) for sensation and examines how thinking through Bacon’s painted skins – particularly his nudes – contributes to scholarly discourse about bodily artworks and the vicissitudes of embodiment they convey. Serres’s philosophical process embraces the multiplicities inherent within knowing and being, advocating sensorial openness to contingencies, possibilities, and originality (in thought and being) through bodily and material interactions. The skin, for Serres, is essential for mediating the sensory networks through which we understand relations between ourselves, others, and the environments we exist within. By extension, presentations and representations of the body can be considered through Serres’s philosophy as a way of engaging with, and re-evaluating, cultural works in and through the sensoriality of skin studies (using a Serresian lens).
In terms of embodiment, the skin ‘filters, mediates, and communicates what it means to be in/a body, cultivating self-reflexive encounters with one’s own skin by looking at another’s’ (Kellet, 2015: 239). In relation to Bacon, focusing upon skin suggests new and distinct possibilities about how to interpret his paintings as well as how the concept of the topological body – dependent upon skin as a sensory medium – might further add to skin studies concerned with the body in art. Rethinking and revisiting the significance of skin in art, as shown by Mechthild Fend’s Fleshing Out Surfaces (2016), has the potential to retrospectively inform historical, perhaps well-known, bodily representations – like Bacon’s 20th century nudes – while engaging with the critical context within which contemporary creative practices about the body are developed and discussed. As works like Julia Skelly’s Skin Crafts (2022) suggest, skin as an area of study – considered both literally and metaphorically – offers ways of accessing and understanding previously overlooked and/or historically excluded bodies of knowledge. The aim of this article is to show the value of topological thinking within cultural studies informed by Serres’s critically undervalued philosophy, including Serres’s intersensorial consideration of skin as a form of sixth sense. The article suggests the potential for wider application of Serresian thinking through a selective case study of Bacon’s work focusing specifically upon the importance of skin.
This article was prompted by the exhibition Francis Bacon: Man and Beast in early 2022 and is organised into three sections and a conclusion, which situate the discussion in relation to body and society. Methodologically, this research takes a cultural studies and historical poetics approach informed by Steven Connor’s The Book of Skin (2004), which is a ‘canonical’ work within skin studies (Lafrance, 2018: 10–13). The article draws upon a range of sources that includes but is not limited to: Serres’s philosophy of the body and the senses, which develops the idea of skin as ‘milieu’, expressed most comprehensively in The Five Senses (2016 [1985]) and Variations on the Body (2011 [1999]); cultural theory relating to skin and embodiment, shaped by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s influential collection Thinking through the Skin (2001); art historical insights about Bacon, including from the Man and Beast exhibition and catalogue (Peppiatt et al., 2021), various perspectives on Bacon’s sexual identity as a white queer man in 20th century Britain (Salter, 2017), and Bacon’s use of photographic sources of human and animal locomotion (Günther, 2022; Harrison, 2005); the significance of skin as a surface, with insights about images, canvas, and paint that can each operate as a form of (potentially layered) skin, discussed by scholars such as Fend and Ernst van Alphen (2016); and other texts relevant to skin studies, many of which reflect upon psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s (1989 [1985]) theory of the ‘skin ego’ (Lafrance, 2013), including Body and Society’s special edition on skin edited and introduced by Marc Lafrance (2018).
A brief overview of the sections and conclusion is as follows. The first section contextualises the dermalogical turn and the topological body. Topological thinking about the body draws upon Serres’s philosophy, which significantly influenced Connor’s The Book of Skin. Connor’s approach to ‘making sense’ of both human sensuous culture and the new knowledge created by thinking through the skin is shaped by Serres’s notion of skin as a milieu, or medium, that mingles the body with the world (and vice versa). The second section considers Lafrance’s introductory overview of Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of skin ego and discusses van Alphen’s use of skin ego to theorise the abject in Bacon’s work. This section identifies similarities and distinctions in how Serres and Anzieu theorise the skin as a medium for knowledge. The third section applies Serres’s philosophy of embodied learning to Bacon’s paintings whereby humans intuitively adopt animal-type movements, including violent propensities. Bacon explores the animalistic as inherent within the (godless) human condition, revealing tensions between natural instincts and social conventions. This section reflects upon Bacon’s identity as a gay man and the ways homoerotic and sado-masochistic imagery becomes integrated with his painterly treatment of skin. Bacon’s use of movement, sensation, and chaotic elements provides a visual correlate to Serres’s notion of life being dynamically situated through a stable–instability. The conclusion summarises core themes of the article, with reference to Antonin Artaud’s notion of ‘a skin that walks’ (Artaud, 1976 [1947]: 38). Bacon’s paintings intuitively embody the significance of skin as a dynamic site/sight of sensory experience, which can be enhanced – or seen more clearly – through Serres’s philosophy. Serres recognises creative expression as a means of synthesising and embodying multiplicities of knowledge, thereby offering an immediacy that opposes or prefigures cognitive analysis as an abstract intellectual process.
The Dermalogical Turn and the Topological Body
In Body and Society’s special issue on skin, Howes (2018) proposes that a ‘dermalogical turn’ (p. 225) has been consolidated within skin studies (as a companion discipline to sensory studies and a subfield of body studies). Not to be confused with dermatology, which considers medical approaches to the skin, dermalogical research refers to ‘the emergence of a subfield that takes up the skin as an object in its own right and, in doing so, allows us to critically think and rethink our deepest surface’ (Lafrance, 2018: 26). Skin studies is a ‘transdisciplinary project’ that focuses upon ‘how the body’s surface is made liveable, intelligible and meaningful’ (Lafrance, 2018: 3), approached from a range of (often interrelated) perspectives that engage with embodied knowledge and knowledge of the other (those knowledges that historically stand outside the Western philosophical canon) formulated through all types of skins. Due to the literal and metaphorical aspects of what constitutes a skin, which will be discussed in relation to Bacon’s work throughout the article, it is a discipline inclusive of skins that are ‘human and non-human, material and immaterial, indeterminate and multiple’ (Lafrance, 2018: 4). The social, cultural, and political importance of skin studies is increasingly evident, including its potential to help invoke a necessary shift towards ecocentric and ecoethological thinking. Within the limited focus of this article, it is important to acknowledge that Bacon’s 20th century nudes – as part of the Western historical tradition – appear to predominantly represent white-skinned bodies. The apparent absence of racial diversity within Bacon’s subjects potentially reflects his privileged social position as a British white male artist from a wealthy background. However, as will be considered, Bacon’s situation is complicated by his identity as a gay man and his focus upon conveying sensations through his painterly skins. A significant context through which Bacon’s nudes should be understood is that each image is, in part, a form of self-portrait.
For humans, and most other creatures and lifeforms, skin (or a membrane of some kind) is a necessity for life. In biological terms, if a human loses one-seventh of their skin that person typically dies (Anzieu, 1990: 64). While we can live without the other sense organs, skin – as the main sensory organ for touch – is fundamental to our existence. Skin studies has progressed far beyond consideration of skin as a mere biological container. Conceptualising the skin as a frontier for knowledge and experience – as a form of permeable boundary – is crucial to skin studies in myriad ways. In Thinking through the Skin, Ahmed and Stacey (2001) emphasise critical engagement with skin to develop ‘new and different ways of thinking about lived and imagined embodiment’ and the potential of this approach ‘to break down the dichotomous elaborations of inside/outside, surface/depth and self/other that often permeate accounts of embodied subjectivity’ (p. 1). Our skins are not just something we live in, but something we work on, work through, and work towards (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001: 2) as an ever-present, ever-changing, feature of our subjective experiences of embodiment (Lafrance, 2018: 6). As Lafrance (2018) explains, with reference to Anzieu, because skin can be understood as the body’s frontier between ‘inside and outside, self and other, subject and object’, it is characterised by an inherent ‘in-betweenness’ (p. 6); what Anzieu (1989 [1985]) terms ‘a “half-way”, indeterminate, transitional status’ (p. 17). Skin is a boundary, a shield, and a defensive, supportive, container; it is also constantly in flux as a fluid, or, more properly, porous interface that is consistently being configured and reconfigured through affective relations, sensory transactions, and social interactions (Lafrance, 2018: 6). The skin is in a near constant state of sensory activity and awareness. Even when not being touched by others it regularly touches itself and, by definition, is always in contact with a body, surface, material, and/or force from the world around us.
The ‘reversibility’ of skin, whereby it can fold in on itself, and its ability to feel a paradoxically reflexive ‘double sensation’ of touch – as simultaneously both inside and outside and/or as subject and object – are explored within Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1965 [1945], 1968 [1964]) phenomenology. However, Serres takes the relational qualities of the senses and the body, especially the skin, even further (Brown, 2011: 164). Influenced by his thesis on the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, topological thinking became integral to Serres’s philosophy. As a mathematical principle, topology (from the Greek, meaning ‘study’ of ‘space, location’) refers to the way the properties of an object can be maintained across continual transformations, which include stretching, twisting, extending, and bending, but not tearing, gluing, closing or opening holes. Serres routinely opposes the logic of geometry with topology, on the basis that ‘[w]hilst the former rests upon clear notions of identity and distinction, topology, and the mathematics that underpins it, is concerned with transformation and connection’ (Brown, 2011: 164). In effect, topology ‘generalizes mathematical reasoning beyond the Euclidean space of purely quantitative relations between sets of points’ in favour of ‘prior qualitative invariants’ (Brown, 2011: 165).
In more visual terms, a classic topological example is that a ring doughnut shape with one hole is equivalent (or homeomorphic) to a coffee cup shape, whereby a transformation from one form to the other would retain the hole in the doughnut (albeit expanded in size) as the hole in the coffee cup’s handle. One could perhaps imagine a doughnut-shaped ring of clay being skilfully manipulated by a crafts person into a coffee cup shape, or vice versa, without tearing, gluing, opening, or closing holes. Any form the clay can be manipulated into (without tearing or gluing) that retains the single hole (in whatever size or shape) presents a potential topological transformation, and the diverse series of forms that might emerge are all topologically related. Serres’s philosophy operationalises topological reasoning, often in opposition to the structures of Cartesian thought, to show how seemingly unrelated bodies of thought or apparently opposed positions can be connected through an exchange of the same invariant properties (Brown, 2011: 165). It is a way of thinking that can map, and thereby connect, similarities in patterns of thought and being across space and time. In relation to the body and the senses, Serres uses topological thinking to blur the boundaries between inside and outside, subject and object, mind and body. In other words, relational similarities between these apparent dualities can dissolve their distinctions through sensorial, lived, experiences mediated through the skin.
To provide further context, topology involves thinking relationally and provides an ‘account of transformations’ (Watkin, 2020: 100), connections, and open-ended possibilities. Serres draws upon the principle of contingency to apply topological thinking to his intersensorial ‘philosophy of mingled bodies’, emphasising the skin as a milieu or medium through which the world and the body mixes together: The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. [. . .] I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between [and mediates] several things in the world and makes them mingle. (Serres, 2016 [1985]: 80)
As our sense of touch shifts topologically through the skin (in terms of how we feel ourselves connecting with our environment), it moves to provide an embodied sense of our interactions with the world. Aware of how we are constantly moving our bodily form, Serres recognises that through our skins we become mingled with the environment around us. This (often overlooked) sense of shifting relations exists in a state of continual flux. Bodies become relationally situated within the world through the sensorial fluidity or fabric-like quality of our skins as a source of knowledge (Serres, 2016 [1985]: 80–83). The skin is the blurred meeting point where internal and external experiences dissolve into one.
Serres’s topological approach to the bodily sensorium, presented most emphatically in The Five Senses, draws upon Aristotle’s notion of ‘the common sense’ (sensus communis) to explain the intersensorial qualities of skin. Understood ‘as an inward form of touch, according to a certain reading of Aristotle’ (Howes, 2018: 227), the common sense operates intermodally and crossmodally to sort and coordinate sensory knowledge. For Serres (2016), this faculty occurs primarily through the skin, within which the senses combine in ‘gestures of weaving, knitting or knot-tying [that] have been ours since body and time immemorial’ (p. 304). Serres (2016) reflects upon how the interwoven senses of the body reveal ‘the buried origins of topology [. . . as] beginnings where sight disappears into touch, where touch, sensitive and delicate, sees contours [. . .]’ (p. 304). Crudely put, human senses evolved through adaptations of the skin and remain interlinked as a result: light-sensitive skin cells helped formulate the eye (with other forms of skin cells developing into the lens and so on), and the tympanic membrane (as a layer of skin) vibrates to enable hearing through the ear; the olfactory mucosa in the nose facilitates the ability to smell, and receptors in the skin of the tongue allow us to taste. As the ground against which the other senses figure, the skin is their mediator or milieu: ‘a place of minglings, a mingling of places’ (Connor, 2004: 26).
In Serres’s philosophy, skin provides a topological meeting point where the sensations of life occur. Connor (2004) builds upon this topological (relational) thinking through his ‘historical poetics of the skin’ (p. 48), showing how skin provides a milieu through which to explore the sensuous experiences created by human culture as well as the kinds of sociocultural understanding developed by thinking through skin. These interrelated ideas of bodily sensations experienced through skin and different conceptions/presentations of skin provide a medium for embodied knowledge, expressed through cultural artefacts, which come together in Bacon’s paintings. As a quintessential Bacon series, Triptych – Studies of the Human Body (1970) explores the plasticity of human form as if it is being moulded out of putty. Bulges, folds, and inversions appear beyond the traditional forms of the body; fleshy orbs and contained musculature emerge from a mass of tissue; and multiple perspectives of the limbs, suggestive of movement and/or cubistic perspective, can be inferred within a single figure. Distinct lines in darker colours demarcate the edges of the single body in each painting, set against a flat lilac background. These lines are vital to the integrity of the bodily mass, giving definition to the essential membrane of skin that envelops each stretched, folded, and contorted figure. The notion of a conventional human body shape being treated like a lump of putty, modelled into a variety of forms, is inherently topological. Bacon’s approach to the body intuitively aligns with topological thinking in its conceptual sense – which is to say, relational thinking in the manner advocated by Serres – rather than his images following a precise mathematical model. Bacon expresses an instinctive fascination with relational thinking when he talks about seeing in series and focusing on moments that take the body ‘more or less [from] what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point’ (Bacon [1962] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 21).
Bacon is known for depicting viscera and seemingly open wounds or extreme contortions of the skin and body, such as the disturbing Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Blue Couch (1965) that feels eerily reminiscent of (although not directly related to) a crime scene photograph from the murder of Mary Jane Kelly. 2 However, in many instances, the biological morphology of the painted figures appears to have been turned inside out to topologically bring internal organs and skeletal structures to the surface – integrated with (or becoming) the skin – rather than the figure being split apart. One example from Man and Beast is the exposed spine of George Dyer (Bacon’s lover for much of the 1960s) as one of the dynamically twisting bodies in Three Figures and Portrait (1975). Even in instances when a body appears to be missing sections, often due to the figure becoming partially viscous and leaking into a pool on the floor – as seen in Triptych August 1972 (1972), which can be understood as a response to Dyer’s death in 1971 (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 115) – the body remains relationally intact as a topological figure. In other words, Bacon does not typically represent a body in separate pieces; his figures, however distorted, tend to remain topologically whole. Topology engages the potential for ongoing adaptions in form – including moving beyond standard geometrical and, in Bacon’s case, figurative conventions – and topological thinking invites unconventional relational thought.
In his treatment of painted bodies, these principles resonate with Bacon’s way of seeing ‘images in series’ (Bacon [1971–3] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 84) and seeing ‘every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences’ (Bacon [1962] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 21). In the David Sylvester interviews, undertaken between 1962 and 1986, Bacon repeatedly discusses how he uses painting to try and ‘catch the fact at its most living point’ in the dynamic flow (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 54), with the aim of trapping the image on canvas at just the right moment to embody a heightened ‘sensation and the feeling of life’ (p. 43). Bacon’s nudes, energised through his treatment of their skins, map an ongoing series of rich (though also dark) sensorial moments and experiences. The distortions within Bacon’s unconventional figurative imagery and implied thought processes are often disturbing. However, within a full realm of human emotions and experiences – as the relational field that encompasses all that might be considered human – Bacon’s imagery moves towards areas where being inhuman folds back into the spectrum of humanity. Bacon challenges the idea that his painted bodies look damaged, although he acknowledges they appear distorted if compared to conventional illustrative imagery: Whether the distortions which l think sometimes bring the image over more violently are damage is a very questionable idea. I don’t think it is damage. You may say it’s damaging if you take it on the level of illustration. But not if you take it on the level of what l think of as art. (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 43)
Bacon appears to be thinking relationally, rather than illustratively or literally about anatomical accuracy, and seems to consider the bodily forms he is capturing on canvas as complete and integral as an expression of bodily sensations and energies at a specific moment in time. Bacon’s approach to the body as a changeable sensorial form – overflowing beyond the conventions of the anatomical nude – therefore seems to align with aspects of Serres’s philosophy, which considers the senses as ‘the mixing of the body, the principle means whereby the body mingles with the world and with itself, [so that the sensoriality of the body] overflows its [conventional figurative] borders’ (Connor in Serres, 2016 [1985]: 3). Approached in this way, Bacon’s paintings appear to visualise certain dynamic qualities implicit within Serres’s topological and sensorial notion of the body, whereby the skin of the body mediates and conveys the immediacy of the sensations being experienced. To think relationally, which is to think topologically, is to engage qualitatively with the constantly shifting relations between the body, sensation, and the material experiences of that body in relation to the world; this idea can be mapped onto what Bacon expresses, in his own words, by seeking to embody in paint particular sensory moments that capture ‘the feeling of life’ (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 43).
Put another way, Bacon’s images might be considered through Serres’s philosophy as sensorial experiences being explored and expressed through the immediacy of the skin, which Bacon evokes by taking his imagery beyond the conventional notion of human bodiliness. Serres’s philosophy, therefore, offers an alternate way of thinking about these images in opposition to the conventions of the psychoanalytical approach that considers the body to be representative of a state of mind. Serres prioritises an embodied and experiential approach to knowing, a synthesis of sensoriality, above a cognitive and analytical approach to knowing. Perhaps because of the sensorial complexity Bacon’s nudes engage with, attempts to describe these images often rely upon variegated language – themed around malleability – to convey something of the visual energy within the stretched, twisted, anamorphic, and otherwise distorted figures. 3 In combination with creating the imagery of these bodies as distorted human forms, the paint operates as a kind of material skin (Fend, 2016: 6–10; van Alphen, 2016: 123) through which sensoriality is mediated. The next section will reflect upon the skin and its representation as a psychoanalytic medium through Anzieu’s notion of the skin ego.
Psychoanalysis through Skin Ego
This section will selectively draw upon Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of skin ego; consider van Alphen’s use of skin ego to theorise the abject in Bacon’s work; then move beyond the pathologising aspects of psychoanalysis while retaining the insight that skin is a medium for both physical and psychological sensations. Anzieu understands the ego as the projection onto the psyche by the skin of the body (Anzieu, 1990: 63). This is a significant reversal of conventional psychoanalytical models, whereby the influence of the mind typically manifests itself through the body. Connor references anthropologist Ashley Montagu to give context to this inversion (Connor, 2004: 49). Montagu suggests ‘the psychosomatic approach to the study of skin may be regarded as centrifugal; that is, it proceeds from the mind outwards to the skin’ and he then recommends taking the opposite approach, ‘namely from the skin to the mind; in other words, the centripetal approach’ (Montagu, 1986 [1971]: 19). As Anzieu’s (1989) psychoanalytic model explains, the skin and the psyche are integrated through a diverse range of functions – maintenance, containment, protection, individuation, intersensoriality, sexualisation, recharging, and inscription – connected through the principle of ‘anaclisis’ (p. 96). Anaclisis is not straightforward to define but, according to Lafrance (2013), can be thought of as the ‘propping’, ‘supporting’, or, as a skin metaphor, ‘grafting’ of psychic functions onto somatic functions (pp. 26–27). With reference to Serres, ‘mingling’ might also serve as a possible metaphor for the way the ego (in Anzieu’s model) is formed and informed through the experiences of the skin shaping the psyche, indicating a way to combine aspects of skin ego with Serres’s topological approach to the skin as milieu.
In ‘Skin, Body, Self: The Question of the Abject in the Work of Francis Bacon’ (2016), van Alphen discusses how the representation of skin helps to communicate a sense of the abject in Bacon’s art. Suggesting Bacon’s approach to skin is ‘grounded in [but not limited to] a phenomenological and psychoanalytic view’ (p. 123), van Alphen draws upon skin ego to theorise the impact of Bacon’s work upon the viewer. Bacon’s images of distorted bodies are regarded by some as ‘abject’ simply because his work presents beleaguered human forms, provoking abjection through feelings of ‘discomfort, repulsion or even nausea’ (van Alphen, 2016: 119). Because the skin ego determines that ‘the ego, the sense of self, derives from the experience of the material skin’ (Prosser, 1998: 65), it is suggested the way skin is represented on canvas can also have an affective impact upon the viewer, mediating their own sense of self through the provocation of embodied thoughts and feelings. The painterliness of Bacon’s brush marks, combined with various indentations made into the paint as a material, and other processes of mixing paint with additional substances, like dust, contribute to the paint embodying a material form of skin as well as producing a representation of skin. Van Alphen (2016) considers the belaboured surfaces of Bacon’s paintings as a whole – whereby the canvas is also a form of skin, often worked upon with ‘all kinds of tools’ (p. 120) – and how the skin of the paint and the skin of the figures become ambiguous in relation to one another: ‘The materialities of paint and of the represented body are undifferentiable’ (p. 120). For van Alphen (2016), crossing this boundary between ‘matter and representation’ can produce a feeling of abjection because, as the viewer tries to subjectively relate their personal sense of bodiliness to the painted subjects, the figures seem to ‘dissolve into the space that surrounds them’ (p. 119), thereby losing their sense of dignity and identity.
Van Alphen develops this analysis of abjection further, suggesting that Bacon’s imagery dissolves skin, body, and environment together, or, at least, blurs them far enough to infer any sense of individual self is always fragmented or ill-defined. Referencing Anzieu’s notion of skin as a container, van Alphen (2016) argues that ‘[w]hen the skin is not the body’s envelop, then skin and body can no longer adequately be distinguished from each other. Body and skin permeate and sink into each other’ (p. 124). In psychoanalytic terms, the health of the psyche is therefore impacted because the skin ego cannot define the individual as a contained and independent body. For van Alphen (2016), ‘[t]his seems to be the condition of most of Bacon’s figures’ (p. 124). By inhibiting the skin ego in this way, van Alphen suggests that Bacon’s figures connect primarily to the notion of the inner self. The inner self relates to how an individual perceives themselves in fragments because it is not possible for someone to step outside their body to conceive of the self as an external whole. For van Alphen (2016), Bacon’s paintings can invoke this notion of inner self in the viewer because the intermingled skins, bodies, and environments convey a sense of ‘fragmentation and shatteredness’ (p. 129). When the viewer engages with one of Bacon’s paintings, their own already fragmented sense of inner self is ‘re-shattered’ because the imagery before them invites embodied self-reflection of the inner self depicted on canvas, evoking a sense of incompleteness and personal feelings of abjection.
Van Alphen’s analysis uses skin ego to suggest why people can be disturbed by the skins in Bacon’s work, viewing them (contrary to Bacon’s statements) as damaged. This approach is compelling in the way it draws upon self-reflective considerations in the viewer, aligned with Skelly’s (2022) observation that thinking about damaged skin (or being prompted to do so) ‘demands an empathetic response’ (p. 4). In Empathic Vision (2005), Jill Bennett proposes that trauma-related art is best understood as transactive rather than communicative, which is to say the viewer is affected by the experience even though it does not necessarily communicate the ‘secret’ of personal trauma (p. 7). Bacon’s work can provoke feelings of abjection and unease, but this could occur through the embodied sensations of instability and ephemerality inherent within the paintings rather than through unconscious self-awareness of the fragmented inner self. Instability and ephemerality are prevalent themes within Bacon’s lifestyle, often submerging himself within the underbelly of London’s Soho culture, and through the broader social context in which he was working, during two world wars and their fallout. Bacon’s turbulent nudes remind us that, however vital, energetic, dominant, or compliant our actions may be, our sensory skins are always transient: no matter how loud the scream, the ultimate result is always silence. Van Alphen’s approach also raises questions due to certain pathologising aspects within the psychoanalysis. The logic of van Alphen’s position, for example, leads to the problematic argument that Bacon’s Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) (1961) and Portrait of a Dwarf (1975) represent bodies that are, respectively, ‘already fragmented by nature’ and ‘already “not whole”’, because the rationale requires that ‘[e]very figure, deformed or not, is [regarded as] disfigured’ (van Alphen, 2016: 130). Van Alphen’s interpretation, which combines skin ego with other theoretical frameworks, requires a predetermined notion of what constitutes a ‘normal’ body and then frames bodily representation in relation to that version of ‘normality’. While skin ego focuses upon the individual body in its own right, Lafrance (2013) acknowledges there are ‘pathologizing propensities’ within its ‘structures and functions’ that are problematic, including the tendency to draw a straight line between ‘so-called deficient care in infancy and so-called deviant behaviour in later life’ (p. 12).
An example worth noting, due to its implications for Bacon, is Anzieu’s suggestion that an underdeveloped containment feature within the skin ego (caused by failures in infancy care) can cause an individual to feel they might ‘fall apart’ at certain moments in later life (Lafrance, 2013: 12). This can lead to an individual acting aggressively towards their own skin as they attempt to ‘reclaim and re-territorialize it’, forcing the physical skin to reaffirm that it can contain the individual when the skin ego fails to do so (Lafrance, 2013: 12). Anzieu identifies ‘cutting, piercing, tattooing, and, above all, sado-masochistic sex [. . . as] prime examples of these aggressive acts – acts that he sees as defensive “second skins”’ (Bick in Lafrance, 2013: 30). Given Bacon’s well-documented propensity for sado-masochistic sex (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 56–57), this line of reasoning could propose a connection between the contorted skins in Bacon’s mature works – as indicative of his feelings towards the self – and his earliest years in Ireland. Bacon suffered from chronic asthma as a child and this continued into his adult life (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 16), suggesting asthma may also have been present in infancy. Bacon suffered debilitating asthmatic attacks triggered by the animals (mainly dogs and horses) on his parents’ estate. If his breathing was repeatedly impaired as an infant, Bacon’s ability to relax and feel secure contained in his own skin may also have been impaired. In the theory of skin ego, Bacon’s sensorial representations of aggressively contorted nudes, defined by their tense and distorted skins – which sometimes infer sado-masochistic sexual energy, such as Two Figures (1953) – could be a visualisation of his psychological second skin. Skin ego theory might then suggest the attempt to reaffirm a sense of self is being played out across Bacon’s mature paintings, which reflect a compulsion to keep re-engaging with his second skin across multiple formulations. The idea is intriguing and uses the adaptability of skin ego to inform cultural analysis but (in this short exploration) also feels reductive, inferring Bacon’s creative impulses and core aspects of his identity could be traced to one underlying concept. Nevertheless, it offers a psychoanalytic model that focuses upon the surface of the body – reproduced through paint – rather than assuming the acquisition of knowledge relies upon ‘a process of breaking through an outer shell to reach an inner core’ (Anzieu, 1989 [1985]: 9).
Lafrance (2013) encourages appreciation of the many positive attributes of skin ego as an expansion of bodily understanding, including various ways Anzieu’s work has been used to critically reread and rethink through cultural theory that avoids the propensity to pathologise (p. 13). There are compelling synergies between aspects of Serres’s topological approach to skin and Anzieu’s skin ego. Notably, a connection through intersensoriality and the ‘common sense’ integration of the senses (Lafrance, 2013: 28); the related movement beyond mind/body dualism; and the skin being theorised as the mediator for embodied knowledge that mingles the physical and the psychological. However, Serres’s philosophical process uses synthesis rather than analysis to relationally situate the self within the world through a constant flow of contingencies and sensations. Rather than defining the self through contrast with our environment and others, Serres advocates for humans to embrace our origins more openly and to (re)integrate with the natural environment. His position – which is highly relevant to our contemporary political, ecological, and economic crises – is to move away from an anthropocentric mode of being towards an ecocentric one, where humans accept their place as part of the ecology of the planet (rather than trying to dominate nature, which is otherwise typically reduced to the role of a material and economic resource). Serres’s philosophy is positive about humanity while proposing a de-anthropocentric position recognising our shared roots with animals and all other natural life. The next section examines Bacon’s intuitive visualisation of Serres’s model of human bodily learning, including the significance of movement and imitating humans and other animals, offering an alternative approach through which to understand Bacon’s painterly skins.
Metamorphosis, Embodied Knowledge, and Stable-Instability
[T]here is nothing in knowledge which has not been first in the entire body, whose gestural metamorphoses, mobile postures, very evolution imitate all that surrounds it. (Serres, 2011 [1999]: 70)
In Variations of the Body, Serres proposes that human knowledge accumulates through the adaptable physiology of the body, mediated through our sensory skins. He discusses bodily learning from infancy onwards through the imitation of others (until bodily movement typically becomes limited by old age), including the ways a human body can figuratively ‘metamorphose’ into animals. 4 The process of metamorphosis is based upon the body imitating the movement of animals, including other humans, to learn about its own bodily potential and limitations. The Man and Beast exhibition focuses upon the ‘animal lurking under our human skin’ (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 15), showcasing work that provides a visual correlate to Serres’s ideas of metamorphosis. In Two Studies from the Human Body (1974–5), for example, a standing male nude with an elongated animalistic face, akin to a camel or mandrill, walks in front and to the side of a second nude, seated with their back towards the viewer, whose head – sunk down into their shoulders, condensing the body into an amorphous fleshy sack of skin – is configured like a ‘cormorant’ (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 107). In Portrait of George Dyer Crouching (1966), Dyer is given the appearance of a dog-like creature poised on the edge of a table as though ready to pounce. The overlapping forms of the body convey the feeling of pent-up energy and compacted muscle pulled tight against the skin, bristling with the potential for sudden movement.
For Serres (2011), the body in motion ‘federates the senses and unifies them within itself’ (p. 10). This notion of federating the senses through awareness of the body engaging with its environment – including interactions with other bodies, material objects, and energies – is fundamental to Serres’s philosophy. It belies the profound influence of Leibniz upon Serres’s thought from his topological approach to thinking, through his desire to combine and synthesise (rather than to draw distinctions through analysis). To federate is to bring things together, such as recognising that bodily sensations are interwoven, intertwined, and fundamentally intersensorial, which offers a metaphorical image for knowledge formation more generally. For Serres, the role of philosophy is to federate by finding connections and networks of knowing such that ‘the foundation of philosophy is the encyclopaedic, and its goal is synthesis’ (Serres in Mortley, 1991: 53). To know the sensory body is to be aware of its topological qualities in relation to the material world, whereby we know ourselves by mingling our senses with the immediate environment through which we move and live. In The Five Senses, Serres develops an eloquent and urgent plea for heightened awareness of the myriad sensations that our bodies constantly experience. Through anthropocentric pre-occupations and distractions, we tend to filter out a vast range of information offered by nature and the world around us, dismissed as background noise. If, instead of these sensations being largely filtered out, this information was ‘listened’ to – which is to say, sensed more profoundly – it would contribute to greater awareness of our sensoriality (as the means by which humans connect to the material world) and could open up expanded possibilities for more ecologically evolved sensibilities, greater empathy, more collaboration, and an increasingly inclusive (less anthropocentric and divisive) understanding of human and non-human ecologies through symbiosis with nature.
The idea of movement as the primary cause of sensation resonates with Bacon’s intuition that certain moments of action convey powerful sensations, and that such moments can be distilled – through the texture of paint on canvas – to capture a fundamental essence, or fact, of reality (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 53–54). It also aligns with the idea that Bacon was perhaps more sensorially attuned to his own sense of bodiliness and what it means to be alive to the sensations of the world; more able, from time to time, to ‘clear away one or two of the veils or screens’ of social convention that he felt we ‘always live through’ (Bacon [1971–3] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 82). Focusing upon a wide range of bodily actions, Bacon’s underlying source materials (see Günther, 2022) include imagery such as photographs of wrestlers, footballers, and ‘especially boxers’ (Bacon [1974] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 116); his well-known use of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of human and animal locomotion (which align with Bacon’s comments about seeing in shifting sequences) (Harrison, 2005); stills from cinema, like ‘the screaming nanny from (The Battleship) Potemkin [1925]’ (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 34); and images of wildlife in nature, indicative of Bacon’s desire to ‘look at animal photographs all the time’ (Bacon [1974] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 116). For Bacon, the texture of paint is essential because it offers additional sensation that the smoothness of a photograph cannot necessarily convey. He even commented on wanting to ‘paint like Velaquez, but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin’ (Bacon in Peppiattet al.,2021: 21) and told Sylvester that, earlier in his career, he considered how his ‘[skin] textures shouId be very much thicker, and therefore the texture of, for instance, a rhinoceros skin would help me to think about the texture of the human skin’ (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 32). As Fend (2016) suggests, the quality of skin as both human surface and our outer appearance makes it comparable to an image (regardless of the media) and it is the ‘shared quality of skin and the visual image that gives imitations or reproductions of skin a self-referential quality’ (p. 9). It is interesting to consider Serres’s notion of bodily imitation within the realm of reproductions, whereby the imaging of another’s body (defined by their skin) takes on a self-referential quality that leads back to the body of the artist (and/or the viewer through embodied self-reflection).
Bacon commented on the self-referential aspect of creating images: ‘When you paint anything [. . .] you are also painting not only the subject [. . .] you are painting yourself’ (Bacon [c.1966] in Smith, 2017). In keeping with this notion, Sylvester suggests that Bacon’s androgynous or female nudes could be representations of himself, including referencing his ‘build, all plump and soft’ (Sylvester [2001] in Peppiatt et al., 2021: 61). In a more direct way, the content of works like Two Figures, Two Figures in the Grass (1954), and Man Kneeling in Grass (1952) engage with homoerotic and sado-masochistic sexual imagery, alluding to Bacon’s personal life, prompting Sylvester to summarise Two Figures as ‘a conflation of autobiography and photography (due to its source material of two wrestlers from a Muybridge series)’ (Sylvester in Salter, 2017: 86). The presence of the long grass in some of these paintings places the human figures in a context associated with animals, such as in Bacon’s contemporaneous Study of a Baboon (1953). It has been suggested that Bacon’s self-perception of being gay ‘was to occupy an interface between human and animal’ (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 54), or, at the very least, that he was profoundly aware of anal intercourse being ‘deemed an unnatural sex act, historically considered on a par with bestiality’ (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 56). Bacon’s paintings frequently feature images of his lovers, adding a further sense of personal connection to his treatment of skin as a sensual surface, mediating energetic vitality and raw animality. There is a roughness to how Bacon handles skin through the application of brushwork and the mixing of paint with coarsening materials such as sand, dust, and cotton wool (Bacon [1984–6] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 191–192; Estate of Francis Bacon, 2023); this blurs the metaphorical with the literal, whereby the physical roughness in the handling of another’s skin – especially in a painting like Two Figures – also infers Bacon’s pleasure in sado-masochistic (sexual) imagery. The social context in which Bacon was living and working provides further insight into the importance of how Bacon treats skin within his paintings, which will be discussed below in relation to Serres’s notions of imitation, copying, and metamorphosis, before considering the visual correlation between Bacon’s paintings and Serres’s belief that life requires a dynamic balance of stable–instability.
Gregory Salter’s (2017) ‘Francis Bacon and Queer Intimacy in Post-War London’ situates Bacon’s work of the 1940s and 1950s in relation to the ‘strict boundaries around [. . .] queer sexuality in post-war Britain’ (p. 86), including their inevitable transgression, leading up to the ‘partial decriminalization’ (p. 86) of homosexuality in the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Bacon’s sexual identity and relationships, driven by his natural instincts, placed him outside the repressive and restrictive laws of British society. In addition to his own inclination towards sado-masochism, and the post-war context of a society ravaged by the horrors of two world wars, the brooding violence within Bacon’s paintings can be understood as a reaction against destructive and repressive socio-political structures. To be denigrated as an animal, based upon sexual orientation, might reasonably result in throwing the insult back at the culture and society that produced it, including embracing animality as a more true and honest representation of human instincts. Such feelings might also be heightened by war and the immediate post-war context, which required processing widespread inhuman atrocities and systematic destruction of innocents as one of the defining activities of so-called civilised societies in the early 20th century.
Serres is inherently pacifist, but he recognises violence as a product of bodily competition through copying, mimicking, or otherwise assuming the role and position of another as a threat to their power, status, and territory. In relation to humans copying animals, Bacon’s triptych of bullfighter paintings – Study for Bullfight, No.1 (1969), Second Version of Study for Bullfight, No.1 (1969), and Study for Bullfight, No.2 (1969) – capture a sense of mirroring between the matadors and the bulls, whereby their bodily forms and sensory skins start to blur together as part of their aggressive and doom-laden dance of opposing motions. The first and third paintings both include vertical background panels within the depicted scene, curving with the delineation of the bullring, which display packed crowds clamouring beneath a flag resembling the Parteiadler, the eagle and swastika motif of the Nazi party. One interpretation is that these additional details suggest the barbarity of the crowd, depicted as a mass of intermingled bodies, in which so-called ‘civilised behaviour can so rapidly deteriorate’ (Peppiatt et al., 2021: 127). In the context of Serres’s philosophy – which states we ‘don’t know anyone or anything until the body takes on its form, its appearance, its movement, its habitus, until the body joins in a dance with its demeanor’ (Serres, 2011 [1999]: 71) – we see the matador adopting the demeanour of the bull, as one melds into the other in a ritualised spectacle of death. In the background, the crowd unifies into a dark force beneath a Nazi banner. Serres reflects upon the violence that can emerge when bodily learning turns towards forms of dominance, especially when influenced by ‘social Darwinism’ and similar patterns of thought that cultivate immorality and ‘spread fascism’ (Serres, 2011 [1999]: 35). Such uses of bodily knowledge tend towards repetition and forms of obedience and banality, recalling the images of Nazi Germany (and other regimes) that promote syncopated movement as a form of groupthink and as a representation of fascistic power.
Serres’s philosophy is ontologically concerned with the relationship between chaos and stasis, which he revisits in various topological patterns of thought including the relationships between noise and information, open and closed systems, and nature and culture. Thinking topologically, each of his mature works uses relational thinking to approach these themes from different perspectives; in other words, his thoughts are interwoven across his publications rather than discretely bracketed into neat monographs. In Genesis, Serres (1995a [1982]) focuses upon the paradox of Western culture’s desire to understand the world through unified theories despite relying upon the inherent multiplicity of our existence: ‘We want a principle, a system, an integration, and we want elements, atoms, numbers. We want them, and we make them. A single God, and identifiable individuals’ (Serres, 1995a [1982]: 2–3). While Serres leaves room for religious beliefs within his philosophy, he also recognises the limitations of structures of thought (including religion) that promote anthropocentrism. In Serres’s view, Western rationalism places humans at the centre of our thought-processes in a way that filters knowledge through very particular definitions of human needs, excluding other, more inclusive, ways of knowing and being that include the non-human. Serres’s proposition is to think relationally (with no centre), without seeking to reduce our understanding to a single unity (that will not hold) or expanding it to a form of multiplicity so vast and differentiated it becomes chaos. He advocates an ontology somewhere in-between – as an aggregate or mixture – that embraces multiplicities ‘without [those multiplicities] necessarily being sorted through some unitary wicket [a smaller door, or point of entry, often within a larger door]’ (Serres, 1995a [1982]: 103).
One of the problems is how to think outside of unifying concepts and the difficulty of explaining the virtues of multiplicity in a way that embodies multiplicity (Serres, 1995a [1982]: 4). Creative practices, including the poetic use of language and the production of images, provide ways of communicating aspects of the multiplicity Serres (1995a [1982]) proposes, because these forms of expression often embrace a protean way of thinking and being. Serres metaphorically compares this kind of creativity to the sea: ‘full of noise, murmurings, and images’ (p. 4). Serres writes in a poetic style, frequently alluding to stories, images, and anecdotes to help embody the principles he expounds. In The Five Senses, and elsewhere, he recognises that artistic expression can convey sensibilities – modes of being – that move beyond, challenge, reframe, rethink, and otherwise embody knowledge that the limited conventions of modern society typically overlooks or excludes (Serres, 2016 [1985]: 118, 336–347). 5 In Variations of the Body, Serres (2011) frames our bodily understanding of the world – formulated through movement, which he proposes is the basis of all life – as a way of being made ‘stable through variations, balanced through instabilities’ (p. 131). Too much stability is stasis, entropy, and death; too much motion is instability, destabilisation, and the destructive qualities of chaos. Life, ideally, exists somewhere between as a ‘stable instability’: ‘organized through disorders, ordered through disruptions, invariant and inconstant [. . .] the living being goes toward [life]’ (p. 131). Through engagement with multiplicity, including paradoxes within knowledge, creative practices have the capability to present new and different ways of being by embodying sensibilities at different points in the various dynamic equilibriums of chaos and stasis, information and noise, stability and instability, and so on.
Serres’s topological approach proposes ways of thinking and being that embrace the multiplicities of being without seeking to impose a top-down, universal, structure. His philosophy places us ‘in the midst’ of things (Serres and Latour, 1995 [1990]: 146), always connected to the larger picture of being through networks of knowledge. Serres opposes the organisational structures of Cartesian rationality and is open to knowledges that are embodied, more-than-rational, de-anthropocentric, and more-than-human. What Serres’s philosophy adds to contemporary discourse is not simply the means to take a new or different approach to the work of an artist as significant as Bacon; Serres offers a way of engaging with the importance of our cultural endeavours as fundamental to exploring, communicating, and understanding our relationship with the world. Serres opposes binary thinking, seeking instead a dynamic nexus of understanding between and across the ‘hardness’ of material science (quantitative analysis of the material world) and the ‘softness’ of the arts and humanities as (predominantly qualitative) explorations of cultural and social ways of being. One of the problems Serres identifies in the contemporary world is an over-emphasis on an anthropocentric desire (driven by belief in the dominant power of abstract human rationality) to impose humanity’s needs and wants upon the natural world. Humanity thinks primarily in terms of using the material world as a resource for human purposes, rather than recognising that homo sapiens is part of nature (not above or beyond nature). Our future survival is dependent upon humanity moving towards a symbiotic and collaborative relationship with nature. In paintings like Bacon’s, the animalistic aspects of humanity are laid bare, inviting consideration of where humans come from and the impulses and energies that connect us to the material world through our bodies and, most immediately, through our skins.
Serres’s relational way of thinking and being can be applied to Bacon’s paintings, both in terms of his figurative imagery that relies so strongly upon the movement of skin – captured in motion, including cubistically from multiple perspectives – and in terms of situating Bacon within a network of socio-historical discourses. As suggested above, Bacon’s sensibilities were likely shaped by his identity as a gay man – whose existence and bodily pleasures were classified illegal and equated to being animalistic – alongside the lived experience and barbarity of repeated wars, culminating in the newly destructive power of the atomic bomb. Bacon’s atheism is an outright rejection of any overarching unity structuring human existence; his dismissal of the existence of God places humans at the mercy of anthropocentric systems capable of exacting inhuman levels of suffering on one another (and upon animals and nature more generally). Bacon appears to apply this kind of thinking from the local to the global level, referring to humans as ‘meat’ and ‘potential carcasses’ (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 46) and provocatively equating the crucifixion to being in a butcher’s shop. At the same time, he relates his use of bodily imagery back to the self. When discussing his approach to crucifixion paintings, for example, Bacon states: ‘you’re working then about your own feelings and sensations, really. You might say it’s almost nearer to a self-portrait. You are working on all sorts of very private feelings about behaviour and about the way life is’ (Bacon [1966] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 46). This statement, which indirectly reflects upon Christian morality, aligns with Bacon’s complex existence as a gay man, strongly attuned to his natural instincts, living within a system of bureaucratic social repression (supported by religious beliefs) that identifies fundamental aspects of his being as illegal, immoral, and less than human. Within the relational structures Serres identifies, at least some of Bacon’s sensibility of suffering is potentially caused by a repressive social structure that fails to recognise the multiplicities of human existence, including the fluidities of gender and sexual orientation.
One of Serres’s proposals is for humanity to move towards a de-anthropocentric position that embraces ecocentrism, while drawing upon multiplicities of knowledge (including technology and science) to integrate ongoing human existence within a stable ecological environment. Across works that include The Five Senses, The Natural Contract (1995b [1990]) and The Troubadour of Knowledge (1997 [1991]), he develops a sustained plea for humans to move away from our over-rationalised anthropocentric systems – which means our current socio-cultural models determined by the global forces of late capitalism – and to more fully embrace the other forms of knowledge in the world, especially knowledges transmitted by nature. To do so requires stepping back from our culturated ways of interpreting information, which filter understanding through existing conventions of Western rationalism, and to instead embrace – or, at least, integrate – the ‘noise’ of other forms of knowledge (Serres and Schehr, 1983). It is an approach that opposes the exacting restrictions of Cartesian rationalism, which promotes definition and precision, in favour of relational thinking and openness to transformation. Bacon’s paintings similarly oppose the underlying principles of Cartesian order, where each point in space is clearly defined, and instead embrace the visual ‘noise’ of bodies captured in motion. 6 Bacon paints the blurred and inexact qualities of skin in the process of moving, made more visible (initially) by Muybridge’s photographic series, with additional texture through paint on canvas. What Bacon takes from a moment of enthused personal vision – experiences that unlock the ‘valves of sensation’ (Bacon [1975] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 141) – he then speaks of emboldening upon canvas ‘in order to return the onlooker to life more violently’ (Bacon [1962] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 17).
In Henrietta Moraes (1966), Bacon depicts the subject lying nude on a bed, configured through energetic brushstrokes and other applications of paint using cloths or similar tools. In various places, her skin appears to have been scrubbed, wiped, or swiped onto the canvas. There are dark ellipses around the knees and below her buttocks and the chin area, suggestive of blackened pressure points or welts on the surface of the skin. A mixture of colours creates a predominantly pink fleshy body with uneven streaks of white combined with mauve, red, blue, black, green, and yellow in a sort of fluid patchwork of painterly gestures. The texture of her skin, built up through layers of paint with scumbled highlights and energetic markings, retains its painterly characteristics, bringing to mind Serres’s (2016) observation that our sensory skins can be ‘tattooed, striped, striated, coloured, beaded, studded, layered chaotically with tones and shades, wounds and lumps’ (p. 37). It is difficult to see the definition of the figure in places, due to the motion of the skin blurred with the motion of the paintwork, but there is a distinct sense of its tactile and sensuous presence. Henrietta Moraes shows a typically Baconian topological blur of the body presented through its skin, reliant upon figurative mutability over an exact sense of form. As with many of Bacon’s nudes, the body can be sensed relationally rather than clearly seen; through the formulation of skin, there is an almost haptic form of visuality (Marks, 2000: 162), whereby optical clarity gives way to a more material and textured approach to viewing. The bodies in Two Figures are treated in a similar way, albeit with a more limited and darker palette of colours. The vertical swipes of paint in the top half of the image add to a sense of the bodies pressing together, their skins touching as the two men blur into one. The viewer is presented with a sensorial experience where the inexact qualities of the images, in an optical sense, contributes to the vitality of their impact.
Where Serres’s work proposes the virtues of a dynamic balance between instability and stability, nature and culture, chaos and stasis, noise and information, and other modes of being, Bacon pushes his imagery towards the out of kilter aspects of unstable bodily forms. Social conventions, shaped by the anthropocentrism of Cartesian rationalism, historically defined cultural values – including what constitutes information, learning, and knowledge – in comparatively narrow ways. What can be thought of as Western patriarchal values, intertwined with capitalism, exclude other value systems and knowledges as ‘noise’. Bacon’s sensibility, conveyed through his paintings, is de-anthropocentric – seeing humans on par with animals, without clear purpose, motivated primarily by natural instincts in a godless world – and, as a challenge to conventional knowledge, value systems, and social morality, he paints humans with as much visual ‘noise’ as possible without pushing so far that the sense of human form is lost altogether. By embracing elements of chaos in his imagery Bacon appears to reject the existing social orders, pushing back against the repressive social constructs that he sees around him. Bacon’s paintings are both a rejection of social conventions and a mirror that he holds up to the inhumanity inherent within Western culture. At the same time, Bacon’s paintings are intimate and highly personal; he always comes back to the sensoriality of the skin, while simultaneously tapping into the bigger picture of suffering and exclusion that so heavily marks much of the early 20th century. Within the relational positions advocated by Serres, Bacon tips the balance towards instability and chaos in a more extreme way than other figurative painters of the 20th (and perhaps any) century. His images provoke unease because they take the viewer into a sensibility that actively embraces a controlled form of chaos, embodying something inhuman and destabilising within humanity: I think my sensibility is radically different, and, if I work as closely as I can to my own sensibility, there is a possibility that the image will have a greater reality. (Bacon [1971–3] in Sylvester, 1987 [1982]: 107)
Conclusion: A Skin that Walks
And the skeleton is not of bone but of skin, like a skin that walks. And one walks from the equinox to the solstice, buckling on one’s own humanity. (Artaud, 1976 [1947]: 37–38)
Reflecting on his experiences with peyote with the Tarahumara people of Mexico in 1936, Antonin Artaud recalled a sense of the skin feeling so integral to a sense of self that it becomes the supporting structure. His imagery presents ‘an unthinkable body, at once flayed and reskinned’ (Connor, 2004: 72) with a skeleton exterior and skin interior. The idea resonates with Bacon’s topological bodies and the notion of relational thinking proposed throughout this article. Serres also discusses the idea of flayed skins, using the example of the six tapestries collectively known as The Lady and the Unicorn (c.1500) in the Musée de Cluny, which each represent one of the traditional five senses of the body, including speculation about the sixth sense relating to the ‘common sense’ organisation of the senses through the skin. In Serres’s (2016) metaphor, the front of the tapestries present the outwards-facing images showing the senses interacting with the world, musing that the ‘skin hangs from the wall as if it were a flayed man’ (p. 59), while the ‘secrets of the tapestry are knotted behind it’ (p. 59). Turning the tapestries over they reveal a tactile metaphor for intersensoriality, whereby ‘the nerve threads and knots [. . . of the] five or six senses are entwined and attached’ (p. 59). Elsewhere in The Five Senses, Serres (2016) also draws upon the notion of flayed skins in relation to painting, discussing the need for painters (perhaps especially of nudes) to fully engage their sensibilities by throwing themselves ‘naked into the ocean of the world’ (p. 36). For Serres, it is no good for anyone, least of all a painter, to simply observe the world at a distance, without experiencing life actively through their own skin, because the individual needs to ‘[f]eel this membrane, this fabric [of sensation] forming [. . .] this invisible veil’ (p. 36). These veils of experience – based upon the rich sensations of moving, being, and feeling with the world – can then be impressed upon a canvas as ‘cast-off skins and flayed tunics’ (p. 37). As such, images of nudes are formulated through the artist’s dermalogical sensoriality and can then be presented – perhaps as ‘fine, sensitive skins’ – in an exhibition of ‘trophies and scalps, hanging on the wall’ (p. 37).
As this article has argued, Serres’s topological thinking about the body, formulated through the medium of skin, is insightful for cultural analysis and thinking about artistic representations of bodies and the depth, and range, of meaning they convey. The potential within this way of thinking, as a means of influencing and informing our sensibilities – our cultures – is potentially profound. Serres’s philosophy is deliberately without centre. It is more akin to aspects of quantum physics in its relationality 7 and is actively opposed to top-down philosophical theories that impose a universal structure upon knowing. The arguments presented in this article focus upon Bacon’s paintings with the aim of approaching his nudes in a new, or at least distinctive, way, while also suggesting the value of thinking through Serres in relation to cultural works and their capacity to convey multiplicities of knowledge. In particular, creative practices are capable of sharing, evoking, empathising, reviewing, reflecting, and/or otherwise engaging an audience with sensibilities – ways of thinking and being – that may be radically different to their existing view of the world, which might typically be culturated through the expectations and rationality of Western culture. More than this, art works – like Bacon’s paintings – can provoke strong responses in a perceiver by communicating, arousing, eliciting, recalling, imagining, or otherwise invoking a sensorial experience and/or increasing sensory awareness. For Serres, our sensibilities relate to our ways of knowing and being – our ontological and epistemological understanding – such that engagement with the world through the senses goes beyond the impact of affect; it speaks more directly of what it means to be human and how humanity might more fully recognise, and accept, our place within the ecological complexities of the natural world.
Within this bigger picture, Bacon’s nudes have been selected as a case study due to the immediacy of their topological forms; the sensorial impact of the imagery; and the significance of skin throughout Bacon’s work. Drawing upon Serres’s belief that skin mediates our understanding of the world – including through other bodies – as our primary source of learning and knowledge, we find in Bacon’s paintings an intuitive embodiment of the significance of skin as the dynamic site/sight of sensory experience, situated within the early to mid-20th century and filtered through his personal experiences and sensibility. Serres’s insights suggest applications of topological thinking beyond the examples considered here, including pressing relevance for contemporary thought about the body and society in relation to our current crises. Embracing a wider range of knowledges will be crucial to the societal changes required on a global scale in response to climate change and the related inequalities of global capitalism. As a final reflection, it is interesting to revisit Bacon’s early notable work Crucifixion (1933). Influenced by Picasso, Crucifixion depicts an abstracted skeletal form partially covered by an ephemeral cloak of skin. Thematically, this is perhaps a parallel image to Artaud’s notion of flayed skin and its significance in formulating a sense of self. Relative to Bacon’s life and experiences, it feels like the skeletal form that provides the cross structure of the crucifixion – and therefore the symbolic embodiment of Christianity within the image – is dead and lifeless, while the cloak of skin detaches from the crucified form to become the self-reflexive, godless, human figure that Bacon topologically explores with such sensation throughout his later work.
