From 1929-30, the French writer and cultural critic Georges Bataille was at the centre of a small group of artists and intellectuals, publishing the magazine Documents. It was a journal that was dedicated to breaking rules, conventions and accepted definitions, deliberately placing art into startling confrontational juxtapositions with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. THE NEW exhibition Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miro, Masson and the Vision of Georges Bataille, at the Hayward Gallery in London until 30th July, seeks to reproduce the contents and often jarring impact of Documents itself while exploring the wider influence of Bataille and his magazine on art and on cultural thought.
So the visitor will find Picasso's Three Dancers alongside Yoruba artefacts from Benin, and the unsmiling face of Buster Keaton overlooking both images of the slaughterhouse and the paintings of André Masson.
Bataille's apparently pessimistic view of humanity's unconscious impulses, and his consequent obsession with themes of violence, taboo and sacrifice. can sometimes make his work problematic for socialists.
They certainly led to friction with the main current of the Surrealist movement, associated with André Breton. Documents was published during a period of disputes with the Surrealist Group.
Bataille damned Breton as a "false revolutionary", while Breton described Bataille as "the enemy within" guilty of splintering the movement. Inevilably unis exmidiuon, Dy focusing exclusively on the period of Documents, highlights such differences.
But by doing so it neglects Bataille's subsequent trajectory. By 1935, he and Breton were closely connected as members of Contre-Attaque, a grouping of revolutionary intellectuals; they stayed on friendly terms until Bataille's death in 1962.
And he was consistently associated with the Left and with causes such as opposition to France's imperialist war in Algeria.
Bataille's work can best be understood as Surrealism's dark pole or shadow aspect, rather than as an opposinonal or aeradve current.
It's a pity that Undercover Surrealism seems to downplay this dialectical relationship, reinforcing the notion that Bataile and Documents represent an entirely separate force from the Surrealist "mainstream".
There is also a more general problem, in that an exhibition of this nature necessarily transfixes Surrealism, still a living movement, as if it belongs only to a very particular historical moment.
It's rather like trying to understand the mosquito by only looking at a prehistoric specimen trapped in amber.
Having said that, exhibition curator Professor Dawn Ades, a specialist in the study of Surrealism based at the University of Essex, has been remarkably successful in drawing together a huge and quite stunning array of artworks and objects featured in the pages of Documents.
Undercover Surrealism is the largest retrospective on Surrealism to be held in this country for almost thirty years, and deserves attention for that reason alone.
It also manages to shed a fascinating light on a period of revolutionary ferment in ideas, and on the shaping of modern art. Go see it if you can.
Philip Kane
page 24 of the scan
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