APM Welcome, APM North West Network Conference, Synergies Across Sectors
Navigating the body
1. Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Study from the Human Body 1949
Oil on canvas, 147.5 x 131 cm
http://www.queer-
arts.org/bacon/bacon.html
2. - This term, we’re examining Navigating the Body.
- Each week we’ll be looking at some of the conventions and traditions of
painting, drawing, performance and body art and artists have used the body to
represent some issues.
Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 1912
Oil on canvas 147 cm x 89.2cm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descendin
g_a_Staircase,_No._2
3. An investigation of the representation and use of the body in traditional and
contemporary art practices from the point of view of the subjective and
postmodern frames. Students explore the conventions and traditions of painting
and concepts such as classicism, expressionism, abstraction, appropriation, and
performance and body art to make artworks based on the body. In critical and
historical studies students investigate how artists have used the body to
represent ideas about beauty, death, changing values, identity, transformation
and their world.
Willem de Kooning (1907–1997)
Seated Nude (Portrait of Elaine), 1947–49
Pencil 29.2 x 22.2 cm
http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhi
bPast00.asp?id=101
4. http://www.alexalienart.com/Bacon
%20News%20Archive.htm
1909-1992
• Born in Dublin Ireland 1909. Second of five children.
• Father was an authoritarian and violent man. His mother was sociable and had
a bubbly spirit.
• Grew up continuously moving between England and Ireland and was plagued with
chronic asthma. These and other factors stunned him from receiving a complete
and regular education.
• 1925; During adolescence, acknowledged his homosexuality.
• 1927; Edward sends his son to Berlin, Germany with an uncle to try and straighten
him out. Two months later, he travels to Paris alone.
• Visits exhibition of Pablo Picasso and this was the catalyst in his decision to
become an artist.
Francis Bacon
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3558531/Francis-
Bacon-behind-the-myth.html
Pablo Picasso
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1352242/Picassos-18m-painting-Marie-
Therese-Walter-unveiled.html#ixzz1CiNkGgiq
5. • Figures; bestial mutations of the human form.
• Interpretation of the Furies: the three goddesses
of vengeance (Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone)
from Greek Mythology. Their task was to punish
crimes that were beyond human justice.
• Painted work at the end of WWII, as reports of
Nazi death camps were beginning to emerge.
• The three deformed ‘Figures’ were a metaphor
for the corruption of the human spirit and the
artist’s disgust at mans’ cruelty to man.
• Attention to the practice of embodying a figure;
distorting by breaking its body.
• Early work; violently contorted, sweaty, bloody
Francis Bacon bodies isolated in vast spaces. Bacon wanted to
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, address the viewer's "nervous system directly, to
Oil on Sundeala boards, 1944 unlock the valves of feeling," using distorted forms
94 x 73.7 cm (each) derived from chance and accident.
http://www.thecityreview.com/bacon.html
Francis Bacon
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,
(detailed) Oil on Sundeala boards, 1944
94 x 73.7 cm (each)
http://tomsworkingtitle.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/
1197105656.jpg
6. http://anamsh13.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/joseph-beuys-body-and-fat.html
1921-1986
• Born in Krefeld, Germany, 1921. Only child of a strong Catholic middle class family.
• Pursued interests in natural science and art, but chose a career in medicine.
• 1940; joined the military as a volunteer. Trained as an aircraft radio operator and combat pilot. Often
wounded during duty and was held in a British POW camp. 1945, he returns to Kleve, Germany.
• Returning from war, Beuys discards plans for medicine and enrols to study sculpture.
• Caroline Tisdall, personal friend of Beuys stated “Beuys cared very much about the damage he
sustained to his face and head during the Second World War, particularly the injuries suffered when the
Stucka plane in which he was the radio operator was shot down over the Crimea”. According to the
legend, Beuys was rescued by the Tartars. “Their intervention with fat and felt, to save him from his
burns”, says Tisdall, “led to his recognition of the healing properties of such materials and their
potential as revolutionary materials in sculpture”.
http://ulrich-baatz.de/album2/
Joseph Beuys, 1972
Joseph Beuys's Action (performance) Piece,
26-6 February 1972;
http://suebellyank.com/tag/multiples/
7. Image from Joseph Beuys's “Coyote: I Like America and
America Likes Me" a performance piece from 1974
http://luminer.org/art/joesph-beuys-i-like-america-and-
america-likes-me/
• Beuy’s work deals with the notions of his own body.
• Body was used an artistic tool, in addition to bodies of dead animals (How to
Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965) and live animals (Coyote: I Like America and
America Likes Me 1974), where he uses coyotes.
• The war was important for Beuys; facilitated his experimentation with new
materials. The plane crash shed light on Beuys’ perception about his own body, the
fine line between life and death and the physicality of the bodily experience.
• ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ 1965: Cradled a dead hare lovingly in his
arms for three hours. Walking it around and showing his drawings and explaining his
work to the dead hare in an inaudible manner. Beuys locked the gallery doors from
inside, and only allowed visitors to observe the scene through windows.
• Hare symbolises birth; it is born and burrows underground and later unearths
itself.
• Beuy’s body in action is important, the presence of a human being is hard to
ignore especially with his head covered in honey and gold leaf.
• The performance is not so much about Beuys and the hare, it’s more about our
own bodies, how we physically find ourselves in the world and we relate to it.
Image from Joseph Beuys's "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" a performance piece from 1965.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/09/01/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20070902_RARTS_SLIDESHO
W_5.html