David Sylvester, Interviews With Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact
If you have any artistic obsession,it's wonderful to know there are other people like you with an exhausted dedication to something. In that book he dispels all these notions about his work being symbolic, all those questions seem to just miss the point. The first time I read that book was maybe five years ago. I was having breakfast with Mary Ann Hobbs, the DJ on Radio One. She was really supportive of dubstep, and I listened to her show every week. She started playing some of my music. I was feeling shit about the state of things, and she said to read that book, that it was her favourite. I was a fan but not to the extent that I am now. My mum’s an artist and she always hated Francis Bacon. She found his work to be vulgar, and angry. But now I find it beautiful. In the Deleuze book on Bacon, Deleuze talks about “attendant figures,” the way that placing a figure in this painting can set off the rest of the picture. it’s not like it means something symbolic. He creates movement across the images. I actually called it “one track attendant rhythm”. Music is made more interesting by what follows it. Bacon gave me a different way of thinking about a composition. The placement of things as a creation of things.