“…a way of seeing surrealism through a dissident’s eyes.”

The Hayward Gallery’s extraordinary exhibition Undercover Surrealism is built around the philosopher-pornographer-polymath Georges Bataille's ground breaking magazine DOCUMENTS (1929 - 1930), which ran for 15 issues and juxtaposed ‘primitivism’ with ‘modernism’ through an ideological-free cultural critique of writing and poetry, examining art, archaeology, ethnography, and ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

Bataille (1897-1962) described himself as Surrealism's 'enemy from within' and termed his DOCUMENTS as a "war machine against received ideas", and thus became antithetical to the reactionary idealism and sexual conservatism of André Breton (1896-1966) who was author of the Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924).

The surrealist painter Leonor Fini (1908-1996) refused to join Breton’s Circle because she found the group to be homophobic and misogynist and was repelled by Breton’s authoritarian leadership. Like Fini, Artaud, and Dali, Bataille despised Breton and his Circle for being pseudo intellectual poseurs or what Dali aptly identified as a "typical petit bourgeois mentality" – playing at being radical whilst remaining obedient to the status quo.

Breton loathed Bataille’s belief in an ‘anti-idealist materialism’ and his radical anti-concepts of ‘baseness’ such as: ‘absolute negativity’, ‘base materialism’, ‘heterogeneous matter’, ‘formlessness’ and ‘acephality’ (decapitation) – an image of human sacrifice which became the symbol of Bataille’s secret society, Acéphale (The Headless), the symbol of which was a decapitated man.

In a public attack against Bataille Breton stated: “It is noted that M. Bataille misuses adjectives with a passion: befouled, senile, rank, sordid, lewd, doddering; and that these words, far from serving him to disparage an unbearable state of affairs, are through which his delight is most lyrically expressed.” Breton’s ad hominem attack on Bataille in the Second Manifeste du Surréalisme (1929) announces the ending of the surrealist dream.

Whilst Breton and his Circle were profoundly petit bourgeois and reactionary, Bataille was both bourgeois and radical and was not a ‘Surrealist’ but a ‘Bruterealist’. After his rift with Breton, Bataille used his DOCUMENTS as a "war machine against received ideas", assembling writings and art works from disenchanted surrealists such as Joan Miró, André Masson, Michel Leiris, Carl Einstein, and Robert Desnos.

On to the exhibition itself: just as the claustrophobic acoustic at the Royal Festival Hall never really worked for listening to music so the Hayward Gallery was never properly designed for viewing art, with its similar sterile spaces having all the ambiance of an underground car park. On entry all is in a subdued light as if to evoke an uncanny (surrealist?) atmosphere but all seemed gloomy throughout the different levels. There is a fashion today to have everything underlit, almost in the dark.

Whilst the lighting was nondescript, the layout and contrasts of ‘works’ with ‘things’ worked very well indeed. For instance, the brute juxtaposing of African Masks – ‘the Masques-Janus du Cross-River (Cameroon)’ – the ‘real thing’ as it were - with Pablo Picasso’s pseudo-primitivist paintings simply showed us how wonderfully ‘savage’ these African Masks are in stark contrast to Picasso’s ‘polite’ primitivism. Originally what was not even perceived of as (so-called) ‘art’ the African Masks were by far the most powerfully hypnotic images in the exhibition: from being ‘things’ of ‘fear’ they have today become aestheticised and anaethetised as ‘works’ of art’ and fetch a fortune today at auction houses. Whilst a complete edition of DOCUMENTS in 1930 was dedicated to Picasso, like Bataille, he was never really a Surrealist – but then neither was Miró.

Surrealist painting was never as invigorating, imaginative or inventive as Surrealist writing, poetry or photography as typified here by the embarrassingly bad paintings of Miró and Masson which came across as dull decoration whilst Hans Arp’s ‘reliefs’ were dreary beyond belief.

 

In stark contrast were the six psychologically insightful coloured drawings by Bataille which were made when he was suffering from acute writer’s block and undergoing intense psychoanalysis. These had a far greater impact than the works of Arp, Masson and Miró, as did the eerie photographs by Jean Painlevé, Jacques André Boiffard and Karl Blossfelt. The most paradigmatic surrealist image was that of Painlevé’s Lobster Claw (1927) which is shot almost head on, taking on the appearance of an alien face with eye and jaws and hooked nose confronting us. The most disturbing photograph was Eli Lotar’s Slaughterhouse (1930) which depicts severed cows legs stacked very neatly up-right against a wall looking like regimented soldiers in line – part of a series of abattoir- slaughterhouse images - a theme linked to Bataille’s ideas of ritual sacrifice as a form of sexual desire and transgression.

 

I spent much more time reading than looking: there were facsimiles of the DOCUMENTS for us to examine and I became totally engrossed and mesmerised by the illuminating writings of Leiris, and Bataille and the art historian and German poet, Carl Einstein, which proved to be infinitely more visually stimulating than the surrealist imagery itself – a case of the pen being mightier than the brush. Allow yourselves plenty of time whilst taking in these texts, these things, these images.

I leave you with the words of Michel Leiris' essay Civilisation from DOCUMENTS 4, 1929 which uncannily reads like a critique of Breton and His Circle: “And so we enjoy seeing other people take risks as we sit comfortably back in our chairs and give ourselves up to the maddening exhilaration of danger, while never actually exposing ourselves to the slightest hazard likely to destroy our flesh, so enamoured of lazy tranquillity.”

Alex Russell

The catalogue, written by the exhibition curator Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley, is an invaluable document on the subject. Undercover Realism: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the Vision of Georges Bataille. £22.50.

Running from Thu 11th May 2006 until Mon 31st Jul 2006

£7.50 (Adults) £6 (Seniors) £5 (Students, U18s, Unemployed) £3 (12-16 year-olds) Free (U12s) Telephone: 020 7960 5226