The Vitality of the Accident: Francis Bacon’s Metamorphic Figuration

Luke Skrebowski

Origin: Static Issue 05
Content: Text/PDF

Can painting think philosophically? Is it meaningful to ask painting to take up philosophical questions and, if so, can one have any confidence in the answers that might be offered? As Yve-Alain Bois formulates it, “Can one think in painting as one can dream in color?… is painting a theoretical practice? Can one designate the place of the theoretical in painting without doing violence to it, without, that is, disregarding painting’s specificity.” Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin offer an affirmative response: “One can certainly think painting, but one can also paint thought, including the exhilarating and violent form of thought that is painting.” For Badiou and Cassin then, precisely a part of painting’s specificity is its own particular “form of thought.”’

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Contributor:

Luke Skrebowski is a doctoral candidate at Middlesex University where he studies in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and the Department of Visual Culture and Media. His Ph.D. thesis seeks to reconsider Conceptual art's critical legacy.

Luke completed his MRes at the London Consortium in 2005.