The dark side of suspension of disbelief where the viewer forgets himself/herself and becomes immersed in what he/she is seeing or hearing instead. There may have been no other time in history when the loss of self was as relevant and as ever -present as it is in the
human experience today.
Television,
film,
radio,
freeways,
supermarkets,
riots and some
art all invite the loss of self. At the heart of this
phenomena is an
overwhelming sense of
despair and lack of
positive human connection. The loss of self has been called “the
epidemic of
modern life.”
The
artwork of
Francis Bacon deals almost exclusively with the loss of self by inviting us to
lose ourselves in the underlying despair itself, thus
shedding light on the
problem of
empty lives.