| book extract, citing in full
| also see:
| http://www.hayward.org.uk/current_exhib_detail.asp?i=299
        
A playful museum

With essays on art, abattoirs and body parts, the controversial
periodical Documents was conceived by Georges Bataille as an alternative
to surrealism. Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley explain what it was all about

Saturday May 6, 2006
The Guardian

In the late 1920s, Georges Bataille - described as "Bataille the
impossible" by his friend Michel Leiris - represented an intellectual
opposition to the surrealist movement led by André Breton, which
attracted many of the best non-conformist poets, artists and writers of
the age. He was a scholar, a pornographer, a numismatist (specialist in
the study of coins and medals), a social critic and an idiosyncratic
philosopher - but Bataille's most visible contribution to contemporary
thought was in the form of the review Documents, which ran for 15 issues
from 1929 to 1930.

Conceived as a "war machine against received ideas", Documents drew in
several dissident surrealists such as Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert Desnos
and André Masson. As, in his own words, surrealism's "old enemy from
within", Bataille was uncompromising in his disdain for art as a panacea
and a substitute for human experience, his problem remaining "the place
that surrealism gave to poetry and painting: it placed the work before
being".

Documents' approach to the visual opposed that of Breton at every turn.
Breton and the surrealists had proposed various ways of achieving
immediacy of expression; through automatic writing and drawing they had
tried to circumvent the conscious control of image-making, while Sigmund
Freud's theories had provided a symbolic code through which dreams and
the workings of the unconscious mind could be noted and interpreted. In
the heterogeneous visual material included in Documents, Bataille and
his colleagues Leiris, Desnos and Carl Einstein engaged with and
challenged such ideas, which, they claimed, far from confronting the
base realities of human thought and the violent nature of desire,
actually idealised and sublimated them. Instead, Documents aimed to
present its material and images as directly as possible, unmediated by
questions of aesthetics, allowing an unblinking stare at violence,
sacrifice and seduction through which art was "brought down" to the
level of other kinds of objects.

Documents encompassed art, ethnography, archaeology, film, photography
and popular culture, with discussions of jazz and music-hall
performances beside the work of major modern artists, and illuminated
manuscripts alongside an analysis of the big toe. It was also home to a
"Critical Dictionary", to which Bataille and his closest colleagues
contributed short essays on, among other things, "Absolute", "Man",
"Abattoir", "Eye", "Factory Chimney" and "Dust".

A dictionary would begin, Bataille wrote in his entry "Formless", when
it provided not the meanings but the tasks of words. The journal's
unlikely cradle was the cabinet des médailles at the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, where Bataille was following a promising career as
a numismatist together with the co-founder Pierre d'Espezel. The
magazine's financial backer was Georges Wildenstein, whose Gazette des
Beaux-Arts was one of the longest established art reviews in Paris.

Bataille's approach grated with Documents' backer and the more
conservative members of the editorial board from the very start. What he
meant by his title was not what they had expected, and D'Espezel wrote
after the first issue: "The title you have chosen for this review is
barely justified only in the sense that it gives us 'Documents' on your
state of mind. That's a lot, but not quite enough. It's essential to
return to the spirit which inspired us in the first project for the
review, when you and I talked about it to Monsieur Wildenstein."

Bataille's first essay, "The Academic Horse", had flouted scholarly
academic traditions of objectivity; it was a foretaste of what was to
come. Presumably Wildenstein had expected another luxurious version of
the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, with the addition of "primitive art".
However, Bataille's choice of rubric for Documents already distanced it
from the primitivist aesthetic then fashionable in Paris. Three of the
subjects on the cover remained constant: Archaeology, Fine Arts and
Ethnography. For the first three issues, Doctrines headed the list; from
the fourth issue, this disappeared to be replaced at the bottom, as on a
departure board, by Variety. These five subjects define the ostensible
coverage of material in the journal. Doctrines are defined by and define
"moral communities" and religions, and later Bataille insisted on thus
describing surrealism. Perhaps Doctrines was intended to stand both for
those beliefs held by declared religions and for those of more occult
communities, such as surrealism.

For the first five issues of Documents, an editorial board of 11 -
including scholars and museum professionals as well as Wildenstein,
Einstein and Georges Henri Rivière - was named, with Bataille taking the
title of "general secretary". Subsequent issues omit the editorial board
and credit Bataille alone as general secretary, which indicates a more
managerial or administrative position, leaving the absorbing question of
editorial control unresolved. However, Bataille later wrote that he
"really edited [Documents] in agreement with Rivière ... and against the
titular editor, the German poet Einstein". Although Einstein continued
to contribute to Documents until the end, his ambitions to draw in
German scholars and, in particular, to establish a link with the Warburg
Institute in Hamburg were only partially realised. Documents' title was
both camouflage and challenge. It was not, in itself, so out of line
with the flush of new journals dealing with art and contemporary culture
in Europe at the time.

The Belgian Variétés, which was regularly advertised in Documents,
announced "les images / les documents / les textes de notre temps" (the
images, documents and texts of our times), offering, in other words,
"documents" of the present day. Popular art, pin-ups and celebrity mug
shots figured in publications like the German magazine Der Querschnitt.
Cahiers d'Art, in the late 1920s, covered
"painting-sculpture-architecture- music-theatre-discs-cinema". In terms
of content, the journal closest to Documents was Jazz, a monthly review
dedicated to "l'actualité intellectuelle" (current ideas) edited by a
remarkable woman explorer, Titaÿna. Not only did Jazz reproduce Eli
Lotar's abattoir photos but, in its second issue (January 1929), it
included a horrific sequence of photos of Chinese executions, including
public beheadings and the notorious killing by a "thousand pieces"
witnessed and recorded by recent European travellers.

Documents, however, did more in its pages than chart the interesting
discoveries and materials, modern and ancient, western and non-western,
considered relevant to contemporary society. It constructed - or
deconstructed - them, and worked them into a series of challenges to
those disciplines that were implied by its rubric. Whereas Variétés made
a game, very simply decoded, of comparing or contrasting pairs of
images, especially art and popular culture (Charlie Chaplin beside Jean
Crotti's painting-relief Clown), sometimes via a title (a Magritte
painting beside the fictional detective Nick Carter, under the heading
"Mysteries"), Documents' use of "resemblance" drew visual and thematic
parallels, hilarious and shocking, that undermined categories and the
search for meaning.

Not infrequently, Documents picked the same topic as one just discussed
in another magazine but wholly subverted the spirit of the original
article. Take, for example, Lotar's notorious photographs of the
abattoir at La Villette and Bataille's "Critical Dictionary" entry on
Abattoir. This text links the slaughterhouse to temples of bygone eras
and evokes "the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood
flows"; photos and text relate to Bataille's interest in sacrifice and
suspicion of the modern religion of hygiene, which are consistent
concerns within Documents. But it cannot be coincidental that Cahiers
d'Art in 1928 had published, as part of its series on modern
architecture, a sequence of striking photographs of the 1907 abattoirs
at Lyon. These "model edifices", in Christian Zervos's words,
"correspond absolutely to their purpose and fulfil their role according
to the most recent requirements of economy and hygiene". Bataille's
reference by contrast to the "chaotic aspect of present-day
slaughterhouses" together with Lotar's repulsive photos of bloody floors
and indistinguishable lumps of flesh and skin directly confront the
modernist efficiency lauded by Cahiers d'Art, whose photographs of the
clean structures of the buildings are unpeopled and unsullied.

In the 1978 Hayward Gallery exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, the
section devoted to Documents undeniably stood apart as an alternative to
orthodox surrealism. The very inclusion of Documents in the show was
much debated and finally sealed on the advice of Leiris, one of
Bataille's closest collaborators. The aim of Undercover Surrealism,
opening at the Hayward this month, has been to reflect the visual
aesthetic of the review itself, juxtaposing different kinds of objects
to cut across conventional hierarchies, grouping paintings, ethnographic
objects, films, photographs, sculpture or crime magazines in relation to
the key strategies and ideas in Documents. The magazine was itself a
"playful museum that simultaneously collects and reclassifies its
specimens". Rather than simply amassing as many as possible of those
things, reproduced in the pages of its 15 issues, this exhibition tries
to represent the magazine as an active force, relying on its core ideas
as a means of presenting the objects they made extraordinary.

· This is an edited extract from Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley's catalogue
introduction to the exhibition Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miró,
Masson and the Vision of Georges Bataille, at the Hayward Gallery,
London SE1, from Thursday until July 30. Details: 0870 380 4300 or
www.hayward.org.uk.