Putrefying
flesh; the spirit of an age
and the life of Bacon’s Man
Poor, mean, ugly, British and short
With a nod to Hobbes’
Leviathan
My work is not violent
Reality does that so much
better
Fifty years ago
Bacon was
elevated to the status of a God
while showing us
everything most vile
about sex between
man and man
“You are born,
you fuck, you die.”
It made me mad,
it made me want to cry.
Fifty years from
now
I want to see these
pictures
on the walls of Auschwitz
a lasting,
memorable tribute
to man’s inhumanity
to man
his flesh so pink
not cooked
just melting
in the pan.
The subject is
subjected
pinned
he squirms,
twists, turns
to not be seen
obscene.
He took the
perfect order
beauty in the
images he found
and “messed” with
them
distorted them
disturbed them
till the goodness
oozed
like blood and
puss
upon the ground.
His crucifixions
are self
portraits
they stare back
at us
not in
transcendence
but to condemn
the ones who dare
to gaze upon
man’s violence
perpetrated
on his fellow man.
We are voyeurs,
not viewers
holding on to what
would not be held
within our
looking, in our gaze
his victims
desire escape
they try to
vanish
seeking to be lost
in a haze.
He gives us
antidote to beauty
a kind of porn
that is not porn
for everything
that could be beautiful
is smudged or torn.
He tells us we
are born
just to fuck
and die
yet this is what
our galleries
and muse-eums
are keen to buy
I wonder, why?
©Nick Owen
December 2013
