WHEN AN exhibition takes, as its central motif, the critical force of

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1 Undercover Surrealism Picasso, Miro, Masson and the Vision of Georges Bataille 11 May 30 July 2006, Hayward Gallery John Phillips and Ma Shaoling Something always escapes [vigilance] and if, unlikely as it may seem, by some wonder the list were complete, it would signal for that very reason the inauguration of the reign of confusion: what am I saying? The reign of confusion has already long been with us. The tangle of observations is inextricable. And any number of problems are insoluble only because the answer is lost in the labyrinth of documents. (Encyclopaedia Da Costa in Brotchie et al., 1996) WHEN AN exhibition takes, as its central motif, the critical force of a dictionary the results should be unpredictable. Georges Bataille begins his dictionary entry, informe [formless], by observing that a dictionary would begin from the point at which it no longer rendered the meanings of words but rather their tasks. Formless is one of the Critical Dictionary entries Bataille wrote for Documents, the journal he was involved in founding and editing between 1929 and 1930, and which resides at the heart of the Hayward Gallery s exhibition, Undercover Surrealism. This rather lavish review (all fifteen issues of which are on show in facsimile editions in the exhibition) on the surface resembles mainstream arts journals of the time. It was founded by Bataille and Pierre d Espezel, both of whom worked in the Cabinet des Médailles at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and the editorial board included art historians as well as archaeologists and ethnographers (some not yet fully established in an academic discipline). The intention, however, at least on Bataille s part, was to subvert the mainstream. Bataille s subversive collaborators included Michel Leiris, Theory, Culture & Society 2006 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 23(7 8): DOI: /

2 254 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7 8) Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers (La Danse), 1925

3 Phillips & Ma Undercover Surrealism 255 Joan Miró, Robert Desnoes and André Masson, figures associated with Dada and Surrealism, but who had split from André Breton s group and who thus composed a kind of rebel surrealist movement, conceiving Documents as a war machine against received ideas (Ades and Bradely, 2006: 11). In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton noted, I am amused... to think that one cannot leave Surrealism without running into M. Bataille, so great is the truism that the dislike of discipline can only result in one s submitting oneself anew to discipline (Breton, 1969: 183). One might imagine Breton s amusement at discovering the Hayward Gallery s new staging of the historical divisions that marked Surrealism as a vibrant and strange plurality. Curated by Dawn Ades, who was a part of the team that conceived the 1978 survey exhibition, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (featuring a section devoted to Bataille), Undercover Surrealism is an ambitious project. With the focus now on Bataille, the exhibition presents an ensemble of texts and images from the magazine. The paintings, photographs, films, music, sculptures and ethnographical artefacts appear alongside actual pages of the magazine in juxtapositions reminiscent of Documents itself, inscribing once again the difficult relationships between text and image and artefact and work. Undercover Surrealism attempts to evoke what Ades and Fiona Bradley, in their introduction to the catalogue, call the active force of the magazine. They have attempted to recreate the visual aesthetic of Documents by juxtaposing different kinds of objects to cut across conventional hierarchies, grouping paintings, ethnographic objects, films, photographs, sculpture or crime magazines, thus illustrating its operations and ideas (Ades and Bradley, 2006: 15). The task is that of informing the materials of illustration with the theoretical force of Bataille s philosophy. The rubric advertised on the cover of Documents would barely have distinguished it from the mainstream Doctrines, Archéology, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie (Doctrines, Archaeology, Fine Arts, Ethnography). But after the first three issues the advertisement for Doctrines was replaced by Variété ; and, inside, luxuriously reproduced images of the contemporary avant-garde are juxtaposed with covers from the popular mystery series, Fantômas; enlarged images of body parts (like the big toe); accounts and images of slaughterhouses; ethnographic objects; carnival masks; numismatic emblems; reviews of popular music hall performances; discussions of jazz. Interspersed throughout are the unexpected definitions of the dictionary entries (such as Abattoir, Museum, Formless, Mouth, Eye.) If one of the aims of Undercover Surrealism is to dissect the factions within Surrealism it must first of all address the folds within Documents itself. The thematic divisions of the exhibition fall into disarray when for textual evidence it draws on the theoretical force of the Dictionary within the magazine (Documents). For instance, the first room is dominated by an extract from a Hollywood musical on perpetual repeat and projected onto a screen surrounded by ethnographic carnival masks. But this opens into a

4 256 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7 8) Anon, Central Africa, Female Anthropomorphic Arched Harp with Five Strings, 19th Century Alberto Giacometti, Man and Woman (Homme et Femme),

5 Phillips & Ma Undercover Surrealism 257 second, featuring Jacques-André Boiffard s photograph The Big Toe in ghastly enlargement, which illustrates that entry in the Dictionary. The Dictionary was created as a separate section in Documents from the second issue onwards, when an article by Bataille in issue number one Le Cheval Académique, which lamented the deformations of horses on ancient coins so infuriated d Espezel that he called for the magazine s suppression. Subsequently, similar elements disliked by other members of the editorial board would be contained in the Dictionary, whose format was undoubtedly Bataille s idea. The gradual movement of essays from there to the main part of the review, however, with the additional factor of insufficient profit, proved intolerable for Documents financial backer, Georges Wildenstein, and he withdrew his backing after two years and fifteen issues (Brotchie et al., 1996: 9 10). Bataille is the main figure in the exhibition, as he arguably was in the conception of Documents generally, though little is known of its production procedures. The articles Bataille contributed form a central part of his early theoretical development (and comprise much of the first volume of the Oeuvres Complètes). Bataille was by this time a skilled archivist, a librarian, and a brilliant academic. Yet his obsession with manifestations of filth, violence, horror and the pornographic, which served to distance him from many of his contemporaries, inform what was then an emerging philosophy with an uncompromising and idiosyncratic force that remains influential in contemporary thought and aesthetics. The exhibition focuses perhaps with more emphasis than necessary on the split with Breton. Bataille s renunciation of beauty was undoubtedly in part directed at what he saw as Breton s aesthetic idealism, but is more generally aimed at resisting the several kinds of idealism (Humanist, Christian, Hegelian) and materialism (Marxist) that form for Bataille the philosophical bases of various political fascisms. Such resistance involves an approach to what Bataille called non-logical matter, manifestations of matter so repulsive that all attempts to establish humanity on a ground of dignity would fail. The notion of non-logical matter, of course, is difficult, but the curators of the exhibition have not shirked from attempting to present Bataille s thought with explanatory rigour. There is a risk involved. Just as Documents masqueraded, in its time, as an arts magazine, only to reveal subversive juxtapositions inside that rendered the very meaning of arts uncertain, so too Undercover Surrealism masquerades as a conventional exhibition documenting a neglected moment of the Parisian avant-garde. Picasso, Miro, and Masson receive top billing and, indeed, their artworks, along with some striking works by Klee, Dali, Giacometti and Ernst, show up as the now familiar and consoling side of modernism amongst exhibits gathered from museums, libraries and private collections that still seem out of place amongst the beaux-arts. The risk is that instead of recreating the active force of Documents, this new exhibition this new document of subversive documentation might turn out to be an act of revenge against Bataille the impossible from the archive itself.

6 258 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7 8) Anon, Ivory Coast or Liberia, Mask, late 19th early 20th century. Wood, metal, quills, pigment, 21.6 x 17.5 x 10.5 cm. Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, University of East Anglia. Photo: James Austin

7 Phillips & Ma Undercover Surrealism 259 Bataille sees exhibitions (which for him serve as part of the encyclopaedic function of modern cities) as forces of attraction (The Hayward website proudly cites him on this: A Museum is like the lungs of a great city: the crowd floods into the museum every Sunday like blood and leaves it purified and fresh ). So they must be regarded in terms of counter-forces, the forces of repulsion, manifested, according to the dictionary entries, by the slaughterhouse and the guillotine. According to the Grande Encyclopédie, Bataille notes in the dictionary entry Musée [ Museum ], the first museum in the modern sense of the word (i.e. the first public collection) was founded on July 27, 1793 in France by Convention. The Louvre becomes, as a function of the terror, a museum to replace the royalty, and so the origin of the modern museum would thus be linked to the development of the guillotine (Bataille, 1970: 239). The link is then immediately made to the University and public library. Undercover Surrealism exhibits the trappings of a professional, fully theorized and annotated exhibition, a pedagogic exercise for the 21st century. Yet perhaps the missing sense of the magazine s title, Documents, would be its implications for teaching and learning in the public sphere. A document [documentum] was a lesson or a piece of instruction (from the Latin docēre to teach) and a doctrine (from the Latin doctrīna) the action of teaching or instructing. If the active force of Bataille s Documents is indeed as subversive as the exhibition curators argue, then the subversion of teaching (informing or building) remains well hidden. The days of European ethnographic wonder are indeed captured alongside documents of rapidly developing media technologies. What remains obscure is the sense of what this kind of questioning can teach us today about modes of classification and exhibition as a function of international, even global, public life. Simon Baker, in his article from the catalogue, observes that the word doctrines had, and has, complex philosophical connotations. It suggests strident opinions, both orthodox and unorthodox (Baker, 2006: 34). There is considerable theorization implied and evoked throughout the exhibition but also in the rich documentation of the exhibition catalogue too, especially with reference to the dictionary entry informe [formless]. Baker notes that as an anti-categorical operation directed against the stability of meaning, formless has fulfilled many tasks in the field of representation (2006: 35). 1 Yet there remains an undecidable confusion here, between the notion of a word that means something and the notion of a word that has a task to do. The difference between a dictionary that renders the meanings of words and one that renders their tasks cannot, it seems, be reconciled. According to this definition, a dictionary that did the former (but not the latter) would not even have begun as a dictionary. Formless must therefore be understood in terms of what its task is. Its task would be to dissolve the illusion that a word can securely name or worse resemble a thing (as Bataille puts it, its task is to bring things down in the world [1985: 31]). This is all very well (and familiar from at least a century of critical

8 260 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7 8) philosophy), yet what are its implications for an exhibition whose role is not to be dissociated from that of the critical dictionary itself? The risk that inevitably issues from this confusion involves the relationship between the objects of exhibition, on one hand, and the documents of and about exhibition, on the other. The exhibition features as its central concern a form of documentation that forcefully resists the standard practices of exhibition. The different materials (documents, works and artefacts), which are collected and now re-placed around the documents themselves, serve the function of illustrating the historical phenomenon Documents. So the exhibition might be understood as performing a strange reversal of the historical situation that it documents, subordinating the philosophical force of Bataille s contributions to a visual aesthetics (the juxtaposition of different kinds of objects ) and a historical juncture (the split from surrealism). Nonetheless, if Undercover Surrealism in these ways risks neutralising the subversive potential that it celebrates, the risk has its other side. The critical subversion of practices of cataloguing, encyclopaedism, and classification help to put these practices themselves into view. Bataille and his collaborators established what James Clifford calls an ethnographic museum out of dissociated citations of disparate cultural events. In this way they helped to invent modern modes of ethnography. Clifford writes, culture becomes something to be collected, and Documents itself is a kind of ethnographic display of images, texts, objects, labels, a playful museum that simultaneously collects and reclassifies its specimens (Clifford, 1988: 132). Clifford prefers to play down Bataille s role and insists instead on the collaborative character of the magazine: it attracted the participation of too many serious scholars and artists to be written off as merely self-indulgent or nihilistic (1988: 134). Yet Undercover Surrealism, by putting the playful museum itself into a museum, emphasizes both the playful ethnographic side of the project the impossible quest for the overdetermined totality of the social field and the darker, singular, sensibility that characterizes Bataille s peculiar contribution. Man s architecture, writes Bataille, is not simple like that of animals and it is not even possible to say where he begins (Bataille, 1930: 299). The question of beginnings, of course, is consistently dispersed throughout Documents, as its determinate focus on the disciplines of origin (archaeology, ethnography, and fine-art) suggest. A dictionary only begins, for Bataille, by shifting from meaning to task. In a similar way the question of where Man begins involves a shift from civilization to bestiality. The organ (if one can call what is essentially an orifice an organ) that most maintains the connection between the civilized and the bestial is the mouth: Among civilized men the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has amongst primitive men [yet] it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an

9 Phillips & Ma Undercover Surrealism 261 extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals. (Bataille, 1970: 237) The open orifice (in a straight line to the anus) especially functions to liberate inhuman impulses. Boiffard s photograph from Documents 5, showing an open mouth with salivating tongue, illustrates the point. But it is not just for the task of opening that one must recognize the orifice. The key point is that the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude is characterized especially by a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe (Bataille, 1970: 238). This coupling of the closed and open mouth (of civilized humanity and its bestial impulses) compares with the opposition of forces of attraction and repulsion that dominates Bataille s accounts of the museum and the slaughterhouse. How does one exhibit the screaming terror of the slaughterhouse from within the safe confines of the museum (which is anyway for Bataille merely its other side)? The question is posed, particularly, by the title, Undercover Surrealism. Surrealism, from Bataille s point of view, represents at best the mouth of the museum shut tight, unless there is something of surrealism itself that belongs to Bataille s vision, something of Bataille in surrealism (under surrealism s cover). Surrealism is mutism, Bataille claims, if it spoke it would cease to be what it wanted to be, but if it failed to speak it could only lend itself to misunderstanding; it was even in the impossibility of responding to the first demand that it succeeded: in forming an impersonal authority (Bataille, 1994b: 56). The challenge for Undercover Surrealism, then, lies in putting Bataille s open mouth to work without betraying his demand and thus opening itself to misunderstanding. It is difficult to age in a gallery, difficult to feel age while contemplating dated objects. Surrealism is an ageing European name for a movement marked by its fascination for non-western religious and artistic forms. We are, whether western or non-western, its immature children, too much a part of the age and yet also apart from it. Undercover Surrealism attempts to focus on the age of Surrealism in order to uncover, as the programme notes suggest, its enemy from within. It sets itself up in this way as an archive whose responsibility is the undreamed of, unformed, future of Surrealism. However, no exhibition can ever realize, in the words of Georges Bataille, the stammerings of childhood, [without which] our deepest thoughts would never have the lightness to gauge their depths (Bataille, 1994a). One can dream of aging prematurely, difficult as that may seem, but, more difficult even than that would be to reverse the process. Notes 1. Formless: a User s Guide, edited by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss (1997), details some of the uses of Bataille s notion in contemporary art theory. Doubling as the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at the Centre Georges

10 262 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7 8) Pompidou in Paris in 1996, the book can be regarded as an intellectual context for Undercover Surrealism. References Ades, D. and Fiona Bradley (2006) Introduction, pp in D. Ades and S. Baker (eds) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Ades, D. and S. Baker (eds) (2006) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Baker, S. (2006) Doctrines (The Appearance of Things), pp in D. Ades and S. Baker (eds) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Bataille, G. (1930) Bouche [Mouth], Documents 5. Bataille, G. (1970) Oeuvres Complètes I. Premiers Écrits Paris: Gallimard. Bataille, G. (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings Allan Stoekl (tr.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Bataille, G. (1994a) Notes on the Publication of Un Cadavre, pp in Michael Richardson (ed., tr.) The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. London: Verso. Bataille, G. (1994b) Surrealism, pp in Michael Richardson (ed., tr.) The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. London: Verso. Bois, Y.-A. and R. Krauss (1997) Formless: A User s Guide. New York: Zone. Breton, A. (1969) Manifestos of Surrealism, Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (tr.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Brotchie, Alastair (ed.) et al. (1996) Encyclopædia Acephalica (Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts edited by Georges Bataille and the Encyclopædia Da Costa edited by Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg). London: Atlas. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. John Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at The National University of Singapore. He has written on linguistics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, philosophy, literature, urbanism, postmodernism, critical theory, military technology and aesthetics. Ma Shaoling has recently graduated from the National University of Singapore with an MA in English Literature and is now a PhD student at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include continental philosophy, critical and literary theory, ethics and justice, in particular the mortality of political concepts in literature.