Jon D. Rutter - Dismantling the Face: Toward a Phenomenology of Boxing

Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, Volume 7 Number 3, 2007 281-293.

Jon D. Rutter's article provided another intriguing if somewhat disturbing conclusion to our Wednesday discussions yesterday. As its title suggests, Rutter's article explores the phenomenology of boxing with the assistance of the heavy philosophies of Derrida and Heidegger. Though this was an intense read I found elements of it fascinating such as Rutter's speculation about whether the present moment is in fact a lingering moment or a passing moment. Rutter goes on to explain ontology as something that "leaves us with a sense of the uncanny, a sense that we are always not quite at home in the world". This along with the suggestion that the human face is an "opening into fathomlessness" not only struck a cord with me but caused me to think of Francis Bacon.

I believe that these sublime elements are directly related to this thing that Bacon spent his entire career as a painter hoping to achieve. His success in achieving this "fathomlessness" or that strange recurring sense of uncanny homesickness is what made him such an exceptional painter in my view. It is possible that on a subconscious level this is the very thing that all artists strive to articulate - this sense of alienation or aloneness that is such a frequent visitor of the human condition. I refer to that idea Danny explained yesterday about how it is impossible to encapsulate a person when looking them in the eyes due to this constant shifting of emotions.

I attempted to relate our conversation to the ugly and unbearably personal sensations that one feels in the moment before a fist fight or during a stand-off. Never is this sense of the uncanny more prominent than when two strangers attempt to strong arm the other by peering into the other's bottomless uncertainty of this thing we call a soul. If anyone wishes to explore the experience of this shifting uncertainty in greater depth I suggest magic mushrooms. Never in my life have I felt such stark terror and sensory-overloaded confusion as when on that vile hallucinogen. The faces of both friends and strangers alike contorted into the most appalling animalistic abominations. Their entire beings took on sinister undertones as they suddenly presented as conflicted and lost creatures who raced towards death in a state of unaware and hysterical madness. If wondering whether you have completely lost your mind or have simply descended straight into hell whilst cowering from former friends who are talking backwards appeals to you then this drug will be right up your ally.

I was unknowingly ruminating on the uncertainty of the "present moment" whilst walking to university this morning. During my trek I began to feel bothered by this yearning we sometimes feel for the past, this sense that it was easier or grander a few years ago or that the answers to one's life were a whole lot clearer back when...  It occurred to me that living in the present moment, or what some refer to as the power of now, must be one hell of an acquired skill. Given our entire experience is based on memory or what has already happened how is one able to live in the moment without relating it back to experiences of the past. And given the problematic "vanishing" nature of the so-called present how is one ever able to truly live in it. By the time a person registers the present it has already become a Goddamn memory.

Francis Bacon famously stated that he wanted his paintings to look as though the human presence had passed through them leaving a snail's trail of this presence behind (disturbing, yeah?). This remark illustrates Bacon's desire to capture the unstable nature of this "present moment" which we discussed. This desire is elaborated upon in a description of Bacon's Blue Man series as "flickering shadows of light that emerge briefly from the black.. only to be swallowed up once more by the obscurity from which they have come" (Schmied, 2006, p64).

I apologize for my getting carried away and revealing too much of my inner psyche. I suppose what the reading got me thinking about was aloneness and misunderstanding. This idea that we can never be truly understood even in art. Sean left a comment on a previous blog of mine yesterday. It reiterated that question of how an artist should approach the issue of their work being misread or overanalyzed. That this is going to happen seems inevitable. To fight it or to just go with it, that is the question.

References:


Schmied, W. (2006). Francis Bacon. Munich: Prestel Verlag.