INSIDE THE ARTIST’S STUDIO
essay by Professor Patrick E. Healy
MIA FUNK
Funk has created from the ground up a direct means of story telling - on the other side of this immediacy is an intricate even witty matrix of menace - where what initially might seem a homage to great artistic personalities - Bacon,and Freud - contains elements of Grand Guignol, morbid sensitivity, demonic decay and atmospheres of surreal mutation which all underscore the layered reference and pointed compositions by which she communicates as much horror as delight.
In one sense the picture plane has become the 4th wall of a traditional space; the black box of this space which we look into from our illuminated view-point also acts as a magnet drawing us into places which have often been only available to the artist and their secrets - secrets of process and inertia - but predominantly in this narrative of Funk, scopic cruelty.
This cruelty belongs to the first moment of sensation, and becomes distributed in every decision made by the artist. Pain is said to have no representational possibility - Funk makes of representation in fact the essence not only of pain but of suffering. The large canvas of Bacon and his studio captures perfectly her strategy one wing of her triptych - art as a scene of a crime, a laboratory and theatre where the vivisection of the gaze is the active wrenching from reality of the artist’s precise concerns; the first extraction and reduction. The second wing of Bacon in a suit is an almost emblematic figuring of the artist: as public salesman, a prostitute, the purveyor from his or her will of blue chip investment - and the central panel becomes the slaughterhouse - becomes the knacker’s yard of auction and sales pitch; a flawless theatre of the grotesque where the apotheosis of art and the artist is translated to the great abstraction - the great leveler, money which takes all of life, suffering, beauty, joy and soul, and says “how much”?
Karel Teige* states this latter situation perfectly in his Le Marché de l’Art, where the liberty of artists to deepen the question of human-existence in all its forms and where the artist is not simply to be considered in terms only of sales. In one sense the question of the artist's will and creation was not possible where the middle classes took control of style, production, evaluation and ultimately pushed artists to equate art = business.
Turning to one part of the triptych of Funk’s narration it is helpful to see where this excoriating satire is heading. The parting is a phantasmagoria of the studio of Francis Bacon. This is no longer the studio of the romantic artist’s fantasy - a ‘cave of making’ in Auden’s words - full of memento mori - a private wunderkammer of the studious artist / collector / connoisseur - rather it is the exploded shell behind the fourth wall of a stage on which the fantasies and life of the artist have been projected. Funk creates literally a scene of pandemonium
*
THE PRICE OF ART IS MURDER
oil on canvas
109 x 155 cm / 42.9 x 61 in
"...in looking at this painting, a fierce kind of empathy can arise. This is not the kind of empathy that stays on pause until we feel that we've understood the being that this meat belongs or once belonged to...”
– Maggie Nelson
extract from
The Art of Cruelty - a Reckoning
courtesy of Maggie Nelson
PAINTINGS ON ARTISAN PAPER