Your Body Figured

In Your Body Figured, Douglas A. Martin presents the reader with three prose pieces, each focused on an artist: the painter Balthus, the poet Hart Crane, and finally the Irish painter Francis Bacon as seen through his relationship with model and muse, George Dyer. Each section is a meditation on the relationship between art and life, artist and model, subject and object–evidence of the troubled landscape at the core of human desire and creative production. Martin reaches out to the reader through his near-incantatory use of the second person point-of-view, so that one constantly feels called upon to respond, to return to the text. Evoking a myriad of twentieth century writers—Kathy Acker, Marguerite Duras, Andre Gide, among others—Martin’s work breaks from perceived form to create a trilogy of serial narratives that bring the life of the modern artist up against the limits of the body and language.