Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane 7 Reece Mews, London
7 Reece Mews, London Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane Elena Palacios Carral MA History and Critical Thinking Architecture Knowledge and Writing Marina Lathouri 02/03/2015 Architectural Association School of Architecture London
7 Reece Mews, London
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
7 Reece Mews, London
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane Baudrillard says that, “The artist… is always close to committing the perfect crime: saying nothing. But he turns away from it, and his work is the trace of that criminal imperfection…”1 One could argue that an artist studio is even a stronger physical manifestation of this idea in that it contains the tools that the artist used to commit the ‘crime’ but with one big difference, that within you might even have the criminal. When archeologists and conservationists happened upon the studio of Francis Bacon, shortly after his death in 1992 , they found around seven and a half thousand items. Like crime scene investigators, they engaged in an almost forensic process in which each item was carefully sorted, catalogued and photographed. The interior of the building, the space that we conventionally understand as the most ephemeral aspect of architecture, became the building itself. The team involved in the study of the studio began to draw architectural drawings, plans, elevations and sections to uncover the embedded architecture of the traces left by inhabitation. These drawings record the position of each and every single object that was found within the interior of the space, at once freezing the space as historical monument and forming a new architectural project. What for Bacon was a space of constant transformation and order amongst chaos, the studio became a sort of image and object that could no longer be physically inhabited but one to be inhabited through imagination. 1
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Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 1
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7 Reece Mews, London
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
The interior was to be transported from London to Dublin, the native town of the artist. The outer shell of the building was almost completely ignored, it was only the moments of conflict between the inhabitant and its architecture that began to shape the scale of the project. A kind of inversion began to occur, the architecture began to be thought as a portable object whilst the interior as something to keep fixed and untouched. The floors, ceilings, windows and doors were absorbed by Bacon during the time he lived and worked there, transforming each of them from functional components or elements of the interior so that they became elements of his manufactured and completely individualised environment — his space of production. The walls where used as cloth and colour palette for his paintings, as were the door and the floor. The investigation group began to study how to move the interior walls of the studio to Dublin which began to uncover not only the life of the artist through the multiple layers of the brushes of oil paint, but the life of the building itself. The most visible layer of the interior, the thin surface in the walls, floors and ceilings that map the 30 years of Bacon’s life within the space, began to uncover the depth beyond, one of a century and a half years beyond. In other to preserve the marks of paint left by the artist in the walls archeologists and conservators needed to look at the layers underneath, first a layer of plaster from 1930, to finally get to the building’s construction frame from 1850. The walls needed to be dropped down from the floor and added a new layer that could keep the three ‘eras’ tied together. _03_
Women adding protective layer to the walls of the studio. _04_
7 Reece Mews, London
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
The project itself began to transform Bacon’s studio into a completely different object, one that is divorced entirely from its original context but also one that now exists in various forms; that of a catalogue, drawing, photograph,archive and exhibition. There is no longer any object left unknown, nothing is ambiguous. Each object is a manifestation of an aspect of the space and together they contribute to a reading of the artist’s mind. The studio is now encased within the interior of The Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, one that the team involved in the transportation of the space argue is “extremely faithful to the original”. However, half of the objects and books found underneath the most visible surface layer of the studio has been physically archived and stored in other rooms within the Gallery, leaving exposed to public view a new building and as a result a different form of architecture. The space, no longer subject to the vagaries of time, has become managed in a way Bacon could never have imagined. The space and associated forms of documentation produced by the gallery have served to freeze one day out of thousands in the life of the artist, whilst so much of how we understand space and architecture is lost. The approach to the room, the climb up the stairs, the light from the windows, the sound of London outside, the smell of the paint or the neighbours cooking-all these died with Bacon.
Exterior view of 7 Reece Mews in London after Francis Bacon’s death.
Francis Bacon’s studio at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane _05_
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7 Reece Mews, London
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
Bibliography: Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime. London: Verso, 1996. Print. Cappock, Margarita. Francis Bacon’s Studio. London: Merrell, 2005. Print. Images: Cover: Top image. photograph of Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews Bottom: photograpf of Francis Bacon’s studio at Dublin. Back Cover: Fragment of the elevation drawn by archeologists and conservationists of Francis Bacon’s studio Page 01: Image underneathe: Interior view of Francis Bacon’s Studio Image on top: Dublin’s team documenting the table found inside Banoc’s Studio
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Elena Palacios Carral MA History and Critical Thinking Architecture Knowledge and Writing Marina Lathouri 02/03/2015 Architectural Association School of Architecture London