Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Chrono-Tortoise
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Undercover Surrealism
The Hayward is running an exhibition on Georges Bataille and Documents. I like Bataille. Well, actually I like Deleuze, but I obsess about Bataille. Ever since I first came across him, his writing has been hovering around my consciousness. I was planning to write my PhD on him, but decided against it because it might taint my appreciation of his work; that was one of the smartest moves I ever made. Thinkers you work on for extended periods of time tend to leave a nasty taste in the mouth; Bataille still leaves a knot in my stomach and an ache in my testicles.
The things I like about Bataille are those parts of his work which bring out the worst in me (or, as one of my tutors once put it, ‘the adolescent Bataille’). I appreciate The Accursed Share and enjoy his writing on Lascaux, but the stuff that really does it for me is the porn, and the short early writings on some form of anti-Platonic, sun and deviant readings of various form of art. When he writes in ‘The Lugubrious Game’
yet still claims this as some form of approbation, I know exactly what he means. Horror can and should play a major part in the visual arts.
So, as he becomes fashionable in history of art circles; notably after Rosalind Krauss’s taking up, and bastardisation, of ‘Informe’, the Hayward runs a major exhibition on Bataille and Documents and it is something I can’t possibly miss, so I finally emerge from the Little House to blunder round a London gallery.
Worth going? It’s Bataille! You would have to be a fool to stay away. Documents was a bizarrely eclectic magazine which, if it had any claim to be Surreal (and I don’t think it did) achieved that by its juxtaposition of unrelated items. I saw the exhibition with IT, who made the rather apt comment that “Documents was very much like a fanzine or a blog”. Of course, the difference was that Bataille was scabbing the money for the project from Georges Wildenstein who was apparently somewhat disappointed that the finished article failed to resemble an academic ethnographic journal masquerading as art,
The great thing about the exhibition, if you are heavily into Bataille, is that it juxtaposes a large quantity of objects which are discussed in Documents, and with which you are already familiar from the articles in question, but may not have seen the original accompanying illustrations (they are not in the Oeuvres Complètes, and only some are available in various English reproductions, the best of which is probably The Encyclopaedia Acephalica from Atlas), let alone the things themselves. A good example is ‘The Language of Flowers’, where the Hayward displays Karl Blossfeldt’s fabulously sexualised close ups of various parts of plants which both predate and outdo Robert Mapplethorpe’s floral studies.
Documents relationship with film is particularly well served with a small cinema showing short extracts from various films ranging from ethnographic studies to The Broadway Melody of 1929 via Luis Bunuel. If one is to believe The Guardian (not that I ever do) some of the exhibits no longer contain the shock value they may once have had, but the casual racism of some of the cinema pieces is simply stunning. There is not really sufficient information in the exhibition itself to work out why some of these pieces had any importance for the people behind Documents.
Is it an exhibition about Surrealism? Not really. In the same way that Picasso (who deservedly features heavily) was subsumed under the Surrealist umbrella, the scene around Documents has been heavily touted as a sort of ‘Black Surrealism’, but the fact is that the people who were congregating around Bataille were disaffected to such an extent that they had moved far beyond the cosy borders of Surrealism. Whilst Dali would pull back from Bataille and unsuccessfully attempt to cosy up to Breton’s version of Surrealism as a working through of the unconscious in some sort of cathartic teleological push towards communism, artists such as Masson (whose exhibited work is quite prosaic, but whose fabulous illustrations for The Story of the Eye are in the catalogue) and Belmer (who only features in the catalogue) travelling down a road of pure horror and violence indicated by Bataille which completely obliterated the more utopian dreams of Breton. Perhaps at this distance it is difficult to appreciate the shocking nature of much of the material on display, but if you can read it through the work of Bataille, Masson, et al., you begin to see why Breton was so appalled with them and why some fairly innocuous objects can take on such a threatening nature if viewed in a certain light.
The things I like about Bataille are those parts of his work which bring out the worst in me (or, as one of my tutors once put it, ‘the adolescent Bataille’). I appreciate The Accursed Share and enjoy his writing on Lascaux, but the stuff that really does it for me is the porn, and the short early writings on some form of anti-Platonic, sun and deviant readings of various form of art. When he writes in ‘The Lugubrious Game’
That the paintings of Picasso are hideous, that those of Dali are frighteningly ugly
yet still claims this as some form of approbation, I know exactly what he means. Horror can and should play a major part in the visual arts.
So, as he becomes fashionable in history of art circles; notably after Rosalind Krauss’s taking up, and bastardisation, of ‘Informe’, the Hayward runs a major exhibition on Bataille and Documents and it is something I can’t possibly miss, so I finally emerge from the Little House to blunder round a London gallery.
Worth going? It’s Bataille! You would have to be a fool to stay away. Documents was a bizarrely eclectic magazine which, if it had any claim to be Surreal (and I don’t think it did) achieved that by its juxtaposition of unrelated items. I saw the exhibition with IT, who made the rather apt comment that “Documents was very much like a fanzine or a blog”. Of course, the difference was that Bataille was scabbing the money for the project from Georges Wildenstein who was apparently somewhat disappointed that the finished article failed to resemble an academic ethnographic journal masquerading as art,
The great thing about the exhibition, if you are heavily into Bataille, is that it juxtaposes a large quantity of objects which are discussed in Documents, and with which you are already familiar from the articles in question, but may not have seen the original accompanying illustrations (they are not in the Oeuvres Complètes, and only some are available in various English reproductions, the best of which is probably The Encyclopaedia Acephalica from Atlas), let alone the things themselves. A good example is ‘The Language of Flowers’, where the Hayward displays Karl Blossfeldt’s fabulously sexualised close ups of various parts of plants which both predate and outdo Robert Mapplethorpe’s floral studies.
Documents relationship with film is particularly well served with a small cinema showing short extracts from various films ranging from ethnographic studies to The Broadway Melody of 1929 via Luis Bunuel. If one is to believe The Guardian (not that I ever do) some of the exhibits no longer contain the shock value they may once have had, but the casual racism of some of the cinema pieces is simply stunning. There is not really sufficient information in the exhibition itself to work out why some of these pieces had any importance for the people behind Documents.
Is it an exhibition about Surrealism? Not really. In the same way that Picasso (who deservedly features heavily) was subsumed under the Surrealist umbrella, the scene around Documents has been heavily touted as a sort of ‘Black Surrealism’, but the fact is that the people who were congregating around Bataille were disaffected to such an extent that they had moved far beyond the cosy borders of Surrealism. Whilst Dali would pull back from Bataille and unsuccessfully attempt to cosy up to Breton’s version of Surrealism as a working through of the unconscious in some sort of cathartic teleological push towards communism, artists such as Masson (whose exhibited work is quite prosaic, but whose fabulous illustrations for The Story of the Eye are in the catalogue) and Belmer (who only features in the catalogue) travelling down a road of pure horror and violence indicated by Bataille which completely obliterated the more utopian dreams of Breton. Perhaps at this distance it is difficult to appreciate the shocking nature of much of the material on display, but if you can read it through the work of Bataille, Masson, et al., you begin to see why Breton was so appalled with them and why some fairly innocuous objects can take on such a threatening nature if viewed in a certain light.
