All Too Human: Recontextualizing Deleuze and Levinas on Art

Although they elaborate it differently, both Levinas and Deleuze appeal to the notion of rhythm as decisive for understanding art. Drawing on their analyses I discuss the work of several artists featured in a current exhibit showing at the Tate Britain, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life. In addition to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, I discuss the work of Paula Rego and Lynette Lydiam-Boakye. Vlad Ionescu suggests that a productive approach to writing about art after Deleuze and Guattari would be to inquire into ‘how constellations of sensation modify our perceptions of the world’ (2017, p. 22). I take up Ionescu’s suggestion, but also recontexutalize it in order to offer a politicized account of how the exhibit is framed. At the same time I draw on feminist and race theory to discuss the work of Rego and Lydiam-Boakye, thus also recontextualizing Levinas’s and Deleuze’s analyses of art. The questions this paper addresses include: What makes these paintings work, and how do they function? How do their aspects and rubrics operate? What creates their rhythms? How do they operate as an assemblage?