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1-7 of 73 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
When Art Speaks, Listen!, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This is a melancholy work about Francis Bacon, the troubled violence artist. I know the blurb denied this but I am unconvinced. The player is in a small, three room museum, examining three triptychs spanning the artist’s career. In a quite literal sense, the game is a dialogue with the works, thematically tied to Bacon’s demons and how those demons impacted his relationship with his longtime muse/model/lover. Ok, yeah it’s nominally about the muse, but Bacon himself is the dominant force over all of it.
The most prominent feature of this work is the writing. It is soaring and often sublime. The game is strongly NPC-driven, and between the crazy-broad conversation branches, the subjects you are steered to pursue and the nifty voices of the characters it is Engaging right out of the gate. Here’s some examples that really resonated with me. If you don’t recognize these quotes as top tier writing, blame me for yanking them from context:
“I will be his father and his patron and his lover and his lover and his lover and so many more of his lovers, and one day I will be him. It is inevitable, as much as I wish it weren’t.”
“That’s why The Underworld, or Hell, or whatever you want to call it works, you know. Because you have no sense of solidarity.”
The game also performs a minor miracle… actually I don’t want to call it that. It implies some kind of providence or accidental confluence. The author’s wordsmithing talent and painstaking word-by-word precision has rendered deeply affecting, wide-ranging, almost natural conversations on super heavy topics of mortality, trauma, art, unhealthy sexuality, and corroding relationships. I know, right? With parser-IF NPCs!
There are two tricks the author leverages, and again I don’t want the word ‘trick’ to cheapen the achievement. Firstly, the use of TOPICS provides a quickly-disappearing gentle steer into all that great dialogue. Second, the nature of the NPCs provides just the barest distortion that papers over whatever uncanny-valley glitches might be there. These choices ensure the dialogue shines bright without the slightest scuff. And boy howdy, the stories they tell are complex, tragic and affecting. By the time I had plumbed the depths (breadths?) of the triptychs, I was ensnared in the tragic history and surrounding discourse.
And then the thread ran out? The art narrative had pulled me along with ever deepening ideas, drama and tragedy, and then kind of stopped without climax. (Or perhaps a tragically understated one.) Had the game ended there, it would have been fine. Had the painting climax been echoed or integrated into a larger ‘real world’ climax it would have been better, and we might be talking Transcendent. What it did instead was segue to a different kind of wry but simple puzzle collection.
The story all along was signposted by ACHIEVEMENTS. I think I understand this choice. It kind of refreshingly kept things from becoming too self-serious and provided a teasing counterweight when exploring the paintings. Buuut they also triggered my inner Ash Ketchum, and so I started chasing other achievements. Much more mundane ones. And I interacted with other NPCs that didn’t have the… distortions… that the paintings did and felt just the slightest off because of it. I don’t want to be too down, these mini-puzzles and real human interactions were sparky and joyful and fun. Objectively, stronger NPC implementations than 95% of parser games. The (Spoiler - click to show)barista’s reaction to the philosophical topic list was particularly giggly. But they were qualitatively a step down from the central story of the art (barring one interaction with the (Spoiler - click to show)guard that DID subtly resonate in a complex hopeful/creepy way).
So I’m left with a work that was deeply Engaging for 1/2 of its runtime, then downgraded to the finish line. This seems unfair as I’m thinking through it though. The second half was actually Engaging as a parser puzzle, it just wasn’t the SAME Engaging as the first half. After expertly cycling me into an affecting dramatic state, it asked me to take a breath, then just play around a while. Am I really complaining that I had to deal with two different flavors of Engaging IF? I think I have to acknowledge that Engaging+ added to Engaging- is still Engaging. Yeah, maybe I could have wanted more connection between the two halves but maybe I should just shut up and not look an IF gift horse this wonderful in the mouth. Engaging it is.
Two final disconnected notes. Don’t limit yourself to provided topics, these characters have DEEP wells of things to say. Beyond the tour de force dialogue implementation, the whole package is the most robust amateur parser implementation I’ve seen to date, in terms of fully implemented nouns and organic ‘can’t do/talk about that’ messages. I have the vague sense there were glitches around characters remembering-but-not-remembering you, but have no specific memory of them. Vanishingly close to Seamless.
Played: 10/3/23
Playtime: 2hrs, 12/17 achievements
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, ~Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Yes, more achievements please!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
The Fury and the Beaten., December 11, 2023A white gallery room. A Francis Bacon triptych. You, empty-handed, wearing only a linen robe. Another room, and yet another. Three triptychs hang before you.
You can enter the art, yes. Please do. Have a closer look.
Talk to the paint-imprisoned pain, the monster and the lover. Talk to the Fury and George Dyer. Poor George, bruised, dead.
See what mirrors the Creator makes. What tortured creatures he chooses to reflect his image.
The mouth, the bruise, the death.
Come see… Make your acquaintance with Francis Bacon, painter, tormented heart.
Mourn with us, perform with us.
And ask yourself while asking them: What is this deep within us all?
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A brazen head, December 4, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. Some spoilers in this one, though the concept of spoilers is a little odd as applied to this game!)
If you are the kind of nerd who likes Greek words, poetry, and/or Greek words about poetry, you’ve probably come across the rhetorical device “ekphrasis”, which is piece of writing about a work of (usually visual, I think?) art. It’s a hoary enough trope in poetry and prose, the most famous example probably being Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, though there are more modern practitioners too – A.S. Byatt’s novel Still Life talks about Van Gogh’s art in smart, richly-descriptive prose that made me appreciate his work far more than I had before I read the book. I can’t offhand say that I’d applied the label to a piece of IF before coming across the rich, enigmatic Gestures Towards Divinity.
The blurb says that the game isn’t about Francis Bacon but his work – violent and frankly unpleasant – and biography – likewise violent and frankly unpleasant – are certainly the main elements of the piece. As an anonymous museum-goer, you have the opportunity to explore a small exhibition of his paintings, looking at three triptychs exemplifying different eras of his career. You can also enter each of them and carry out deep conversations with their central subjects: an imagined, misshapen Fury; Bacon’s muse and lover George Dyer; and Dyer’s corpse, after he’s committed suicide. Or you can go to the café, which is much more pleasant (there’s no gift shop).
There is a fair amount of gameplay here – seventeen achievements are available to mark various accomplishments, surprisingly including some medium-dry-goods stuff that makes for a nice change of pace. There’s also basic information about Bacon and his art available in the museum’s placards, while the written descriptions of the paintings are quite good, conveying more than a flat narration of the objects in view by communicating something of the effects of the piece, without imposing too much of a prejudged interpretation that would crowd out the player’s imaginative faculties. But these are just enough to prime you with questions and a basic orientation towards the Bacon’s themes; the heart of the game is the three set-piece dialogues where you learn about Bacon’s upbringing and evolution as an artist, as well as Dyer’s life and relationship with Bacon.
These conversations are richly-textured, engaging directly with challenging material without sanitizing or dumbing it down in the slightest. Bacon had a domineering, abusive father, and as a gay man, his earliest sexual experiences were inextricably linked with violence and shame. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps just because he was the way he was, he grew into a man with deep obsessions around religion, death, and suffering, which were reflected in his art – and with a deep masochistic kink that saw him push others, Dyer included, into becoming sadists, regardless of whether they were comfortable with the role.
Each of your interlocutors provides a distinct perspective on these dynamics, and there’s plenty of straight biography and art criticism, but the game isn’t afraid to take on larger questions. There’s an additional swirl of other themes around luck, karma, divinity, and the afterlife – in addition to these being common conversation options that appear for all of the key characters, (Spoiler - click to show) there are indications that the player is dead, though whether they’re meant to be the ghost of any particular person or character in the story is left open-ended so far as I can tell. And Dyer pinches Jesus’s last words.
These elements didn’t really cohere all that strongly for me, though. The bits of dialogue are interesting enough on their own, but unlike the themes related to relationship dynamics, I felt like they had only a loose connection to the main narrative, and as a result didn’t seem as connected to the main thrust of the game, even if I can see how they’re clearly important elements of Bacon’s art (I mentioned these are all triptychs, right, which is the standard format for altarpieces?). It’s intellectually rich, but it just feels a bit abstract compared to stuff like this:
He grimaces. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, after all. I don’t know. My stomach hurts.” He falls silent for a moment, then says “why do we fall in love with bad men? Why do we stay in love with them? Why do we deny and make excuses and protect them? Who protects us?”
While I very much admire (I can’t really say “enjoy”, given the subject matter) the content and prose style of these conversations, the mechanics can occasionally be slightly awkward. GTD is a parser game, and uses the ASK ABOUT/TELL ABOUT system with an ever-updating topics list to help keep the dialogue on track. It’s quite well paced too, with new topics being added to the list as they come up in conversation, and whole tranches of new ones being unlocked when you start to exhaust an earlier set. The game also rewards exploration; I found quite a lot of subjects that weren’t listed in the topic catalogue but which led to robust, interesting responses. Unfortunately, the topic names are often quite complex – you can ask the Fury about “its relationship with Bacon” – or seem to overlap – Dyer has different responses when asked about “his life” and “life in general” – and the parser sometimes struggles to keep up unless you type things in exactly as they’re written in the topic list, which detracts from the otherwise-organic give and take of the dialogues.
In these conversations and in the museum sequences, GTD is a game of nearly pure exploration. The player doesn’t have any external goals to accomplish – the names of the achievements are hidden until you get them, and there’s nothing stopping you from walking out the museum’s door without looking at any of the art – and the “puzzles”, such as they are, aren’t especially meaningful in and of themselves. Instead, most of my engagement with the game came from trying to decide what I thought about Bacon, and the vexed question of whether his artistic accomplishments in some sense justify his actions (often quite horrifying, I haven’t come close to mentioning the worst parts).
It’d be understandable for a game so fully engaged with an artist’s work to ultimately take his side, but just as GTD doesn’t impose its interpretation of Bacon’s art on the player, so too it maintains a studied reticence. If anything, in the places where it offers a glimpse of its hand, its sympathies seem to come down against Bacon. There’s an oblique resonance to Dyer’s choice of reading material in the second triptych, for example – it’s a newspaper story about the kidnapping and murder of an ordinary woman who the criminals have mistaken for Rupert Murdoch’s wife. She’s an ordinary person who’s come to great harm by getting mixed up with a rich, famous person, in other words. So if she’s the analogue for Dyer, that means Bacon plays the Murdoch role…
The barista working the museum’s café offers another hint; she’s trans and has a girlfriend, but except for one note about some uncomfortable relationship dynamics before she transitioned, she’s notably trauma free, thinks Bacon’s art is unpleasant and his personal history is worse, and mostly seems to care about cleaning up litter and playing D&D – a regular, functional person with what sounds like a functional relationship, serving as a notable counterpoint to Bacon and Dyer’s tragic queerness. True, the barista is also there to balance out the museum guard, an amateur painter who’s enthusiastic about Bacon’s paintings – but even she is clear-eyed about his human failings, and uses Bacon as fuel for her own work.
And then there’s the climax that greets the ordinarily-diligent player. If you work through the conversation with the guard, she lets you into her locked office, which contains one final Bacon painting, this one a self-portrait (it also contains a computer with some draft placard text which enables the player to learn exactly which self-portrait this is – thanks to playing Hand Me Down earlier in the Comp, I thought to try MOVE MOUSE to wake up the screen). You can’t enter this one, nor engage it in dialogue, since this representation of Bacon ignores whatever you say, simply spewing out bon mot after bon mot, witty observation after witty observation, a never-ending and exhausting charm offensive from someone convinced (not undeservedly) of his own cleverness.
If you check your topics list, though, you will see that you do have one additional option: you can tell him that you know who he is – and once you do, the urbane litany ends, and Bacon begins to howl, keen, and gibber, giving voice to sheer terror and self-loathing. It’s hard not to interpret this as a judgment; having plumbed his dark secrets by studying his art and talking to the man he victimized and ruined, you have the power to cast aside his self-protecting delusions and expose him. This is a rhetorically neat solution, too; if you go back to the Greek, ekphrasis means to speak out, or more poetically, to call something by its name. So by understanding Bacon, by naming him, you cast him down in act of karmic, retributive justice.
There are only two troubles with this reading. The first is that the player’s action of revealing Bacon to himself is entirely unnecessary. Even if you never decide to use that conversational topic and let him continue his babblelogue uninterrupted, he’ll also eventually begin his unending scream. You aren’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know, in other words. The second is, well, did we forget that he’s a masochist?
No, the blurb didn’t lie; this game isn’t about Francis Bacon and whether he gets his just or unjust deserts – even in this imagined space, that’s far beyond our power to accomplish. And it’s only incidentally about his art as such, or about the people he loved and hurt along the way, or about whether he’s a monster or an inspiration or just (“just”) a flawed, talented man. No, GTD is a simple game, or at least only as complex as the player wants to make it: all it does is ask how all this makes us feel or think, and, like the best museum pieces, makes us consider whether we’ll take anything away with us when the time inevitably comes to leave the exhibition.
6 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
One of my favourites IFComp 2023 pieces, November 30, 2023Recent world events are fairly disheartening and would give a lot of comfort to those who believe that violence is the dominant force in human nature, if comfort were something that such people could be given. On my Mastodon account, I wrote:
The willingness of others to engage in massive violence and cruelty can make our own attempts at kindness seem so impotent and pointless.
That that is not so, that even the smallest human gestures are of supreme importance, that in some sense they redeem the world, that is the faith we need.
It’s not an easy faith, but there is no alternative.
I had decided to start my review of
Gestures Towards Divinity with this quote, even without realising that I too had used the word ‘gesture’, something I only noticed when I copy-pasted it into this post. But this is what Cochran’s game is about. It is about small acts of kindness against a background of relentless violence. Those are our gestures towards divinity. Without them, we can only be the inhuman mourners at a crucifixion that might not even be taking place, and certainly will not absolve us of any of our sins.
Gestures Towards Divinity is a piece of interactive fiction that would have been perfectly suited as an entrant into the IF Art Show competitions, back in the days, which focused on creating an object or scene which the player could explore. In this case, we explore an entire art show, albeit a small one, in which three triptychs of Francis Bacon are being exhibited, along with a still from Battleship Potemkin. These are real paintings, and I assume that only considerations of copyright stopped Cochran from adding visuals to the game. As it is, we can easily look up the paintings as we play, which adds to the atmosphere. The middle panel of each triptych can be entered, and we then come into an abstract space in which we converse with either a fury, or George Dyer, once at the beginning of his relationship with Bacon, and once after his death.
The most famous of the Art Show games, entered in 2000, is Emily Short’s
Galatea, and it’s hard not to be reminded of that piece when
Gestures Towards Divinity allows us to converse with the painted characters. But there are important structural differences. In
Galatea, a large part of the point is that the conversational space is wide open and the conversation can take different turns, depending on how your choices influence Galatea’s mood. In
Gestures Towards Divinity, however, the conversations are meant to be exhausted – there are even achievements for this – and we are given explicit lists of topics we can still discuss. This is a textbook case of lawn mowering, where we almost mindlessly choose one option after another because in the end we’ll have to choose all of them anyway. This was a bit tedious; but what saved it from being really tedious was the great writing and intense substance. I think the game would have been even stronger if some of the less central subjects had been left out (nothing, I feel, would be lost if the topics ‘fate’, ‘luck’, ‘karma’, ‘life after death’ and ‘soul’ were to be removed from the game entirely), but even in the current version I was thoroughly intrigued by what the characters had to tell me. The vapidity of my conversations with the barista was endearing as a contrast, and as a useful reminder that life can be concrete and small.
The approach that Cochran takes to Bacon’s art is unashamedly biographical. The piece does mention stylistic choices, world events, art movements… but it returns again and again and in great depth to Bacon’s life, his relationships, and especially the violence, the alcoholism, the masochism and sadism, and the influence – the terrible, destructive influence – he had on Dyer. It’s not a nice portrait that is being painted; which is fitting, given that Bacon was not in the habit of painting nice portraits of others. Just as the painter puts the ugliness, the violence and the estrangement at the centre in all his works, so Cochran puts all of that at the centre of our conversations on Bacon.
(Spoiler - click to show)The fact that we can talk to Dyer both when he’s still hopeful and naive, and when he has committed suicide in a desperate attempt to win back Bacon’s love, and that we can do that because the real Bacon painted a bunch of triptychs showing the dead Dyer in horrible poses(!) and then sold them(!!), makes all of this extra haunting and powerful. If that had been the entire game, it would have been very interesting and it would have mostly confirmed me in the antipathy I felt towards Bacon’s art. I’m not sure I have seen it in real life – certainly not much of it – so I must be a little circumspect in judging it… but, essentially, I really don’t need art to show me the ugliness, the violence and the estrangement with which the world is rife. Or rather, maybe I do need that, and certainly I can handle it, but please do also give me, I don’t ask much, but at least a
gesture towards divinity.
Well, Cochran has me covered. Some reviewers have stated that there’s a disconnect between, on the one hand, the heavy and serious conversations in the paintings; and, on the other hand, the extremely light-hearted puzzles that you can solve in the museum. But there’s no disconnect. The paintings are the background of violence and ugliness. The puzzles, all of which involve small selfless acts of compassion and positivity, are the gestures towards something else. They are acts of faith.
(Spoiler - click to show)To have seen the dead Dyer casting a devil’s shadow, to have mourned at the cross of a God who does not exist, and then still to pick up the empty cup and put it in the bin, then still to buy the water and give it to the plant – it’s such a small thing, but it is an affirmation of that than which nothing is bigger. (Which you could call God, but which I prefer to call humanity, or love. God has so many problematic connotations.) It is no accident that only through an act of kindness can we gain access to the final conversation, the one with the guard, who is the only one to give us a more positive perspective on Bacon’s art. That was nice, and made me feel better about Bacon – not, perhaps, Bacon the man, although he too was in need of acts of kindness, but about the art. It can work differently on different people, and its power is undeniable.
There’s a strange, strange sequence at the end that I’m not sure how to place. We finally come
(Spoiler - click to show)face to face with Bacon himself, but we can’t talk to him, since he is hiding behind bon mots and abstract theories. But then, if we wait long enough, he starts screaming. (According to some reviewers, you can also get him to scream by telling him who he is. I tried this, but it didn’t work. Perhaps the parser was being overly finicky.) And there he is, screaming, screaming, screaming. Is this a final gesture of the game, condemning Bacon to a hell of his own making? I suppose those gestures too are towards divinity. I tried my best to be kind to Bacon – to hold him, or soothe him, or console him – but nothing worked. “If comfort were something that such people could be given,” well, indeed. It was a dark, dark note to end the game on. But at least I had a date with the guard, and I suppose, as I (almost) said in my own entry to this competition, that the point of art and fiction (I said history) is not to help the dead, but to help the living. A wonderful piece. Thank you, Charm.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Thoughtful interactive museum/psychological piece about artist Francis Bacon, November 22, 2023I have to preface this review by saying that I have always that that Francis Bacon, the renaissance guy, was the same as Francis Bacon, the scary pope painting guy. I thought it was just some kind of über-Protestant thing. This game really cleared that up!
I was excited while playing this game, although perhaps not for a reason the author would have foreseen. I’ve been making an area in my own game which is a puzzleless museum placed adjacent to conversation heavy areas, and I was wondering how many conversation topics would be appropriate, and how large of a museum would make sense, and whether players should be able to lawnmower all topics or have to pick and choose.
So when I saw this puzzleless museum conversation game, I was very intrigued to poke around at the mechanics and see my overall impression. So while the game seems far more focused on story than mechanics, this review will focus a bit more on the latter.
The setup is that you are in a museum with three main rooms, each with a triptych of paintings. The paintings are real paintings by Francis Bacon; I was able to look them all up and see what they looked like in real life.
Examining the paintings and walking around the museum gives you the opportunity to converse with various figures, each of which has their own opinion on Francis Bacon. The NPCs are also adaptable, and you can change their opinion of you and willingness to talk by various actions, in a way I haven’t seen much of since games like Galatea and Blue Lacuna (although on a smaller scale here).
Topics are listed, and as you talk they change, although the change isn’t notified. You can ask about some things not on the list (for instance, I asked an early character about Christ, since the topic of the painting was Golgotha).
There are also several achievements, allowing for some puzzle elements. Some of them are straightforward, while others might be difficult to think about. Several achievements involved exhausting conversation trees, which I honestly did not want to do; not because I didn’t want to see more text, but by picking only the topics I wanted, I felt I had agency, but exhausting the tree didn’t feel ‘agent-y’. ‘Agentic’?
This game has some very heavy themes: sexual abuse and rape, violent assaults, traumatic death, obsession, religion, broken relationships, and so on. But all of it is examined in a thoughtful way, from a distance. None of these things are glorified; instead, different observers comment on it, some finding it deeply repugnant, others finding beauty in pain.
There is a great deal of strong profanity, and some of the language around Christ made me feel uncomfortable (as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but I understand the author’s choices here and the effect they were going for. So while those parts weren’t for me, much of the game was, and I plan on rating this very highly. Beyond just appreciating the game’s messages, I also learned and grew as an author by reading this work, which is the highest compliment I am capable of giving.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant, November 16, 2023Damn, this game. It’s got so much depth, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it after playing. There’s so much emotion here, so much hurt, and yet we have this reflective distance from which to interact with and interrogate it all, even as it feels very personal given that two of the NPCs are different iterations of George Dyer, Francis Bacon’s doomed lover. This is a window on suffering people who in turn inflict suffering on others; on self-destruction/self-harm; on pain channeled into art. It begs the question of what the purpose of art is, why people are led to create and view it, and calls out how it can both connect and alienate us. It makes me feel very conflicted, and I think that’s a good thing. Altogether a brilliant game.
7 of
7 people found the following review helpful:
IFComp 2023: Gestures Towards Divinity, October 5, 2023The works of Francis Bacon evoke different reactions for good reason. He inspires controversy and awe. But as the game's blurb points out, "This game is not about him."
We are first introduced to him through plaques explaining his overall life story and his triptychs. As we view his works, the middle panel beckons us to LOOK CLOSER. We accidentally enter these paintings and emerge into his strange, surrealistic visions. There, depending on which triptych we've gone through, we can talk to a Fury, George Dyer, and Dyer's corpse.
The entire game revolves around exhausting conversation trees between these characters in the artworks and the people in the gallery. By asking around, we'll learn about what Bacon has thought about life, art, God, the soul, love, and some more. While it may remind players of Emily Short's influential Galatea, this game is mechanically far simpler: you'll be switching back and forth between different characters to unlock new topics to talk about.
While the gameplay was tedious, I couldn't satisfy my curiosity. I wanted to know more about Francis Bacon's art and how people understood them. Why are people so drawn and repelled toward his works? Is there some deeper meaning or could it simply be nothing at all? What was his relationship with Dyer? Why did he paint the Fury like that? Is the painting of the corpse just shock art or is there more to it?
As we ask these questions to different people, we begin to get a portrait of an artist from different perspectives. One fan sees him as a surrealist artist capable of subversion and bold new ideas. A detractor, on the other hand, finds his work too grotesque and even opportunistic. But those who are close to him -- the models of his work -- see him as (Spoiler - click to show)someone who craves masochistic pleasure and forced his partners to replace for his long-lost desire. He desires violence upon himself. For those who remain unconvinced and decide to investigate the question of Bacon's intentions even further, (Spoiler - click to show)you'll have the opportunity to "talk" to his self-portrait at the end of the game. He doesn't respond to anything you ask him because he seems too interested in himself as an artist. But you can tell him *who* he is, and he screams, implying you taught him something he didn't realize he had all along. At any point in the game, we can leave the gallery and get on with our lives.
Whether you dug through every topic or not, the game suspends its judgment on Bacon's art. We are left with our own voices to find out how we feel about his work. In my case, I wasn't aware he was a real figure until I started writing this review and I found his work beautiful. But his actions are inexcusable to me: he was an incorrigible, abusive artist who profited from people's misery for the sake of art. At the same time, he's been dead for so long that I don't have an ethical problem with his work being seen all over the world. Other people could disagree with me and that's fine.
This game is not about Francis Bacon the artist. It's about how the people inside and outside his works are affected by them.
When we ask people and the subject matter questions about Bacon's art and philosophy, we're actually teasing out something else entirely: our lives. Bacon is simply an author-function; his biographical details don't really matter. His works are the real focal point. What's more important is what we take away from it, and that journey is always meaningful.
As for me, his works and this game embody the sadder parts of queer desire. What we desire is often taboo because we cannot decouple love and dehumanization from our thinking. Losing it hurts even more because we can't talk about what we've lost. Shame and fear drive us into abstraction, into talking about nothing else because words and gestures no longer reflect our state of mind.
Is it so wrong for us to seek it?
Gestures Towards Divinity, like other works of art, cannot answer that question. All we can do is enter the game and explore it. Perhaps, we could chance upon some important truth that even their creators don't know -- or we don't. Satisfying or lacking, they are all we have.
Whatever the case, our personal answers we find are always gesturing toward something. Our curiosity is what makes art divine to us.
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