Bookplanet: Bataille as an inspiration

Try to see it my way ...
From essays on dust to close-ups of big toes, Surrealist visionary Georges Bataille challenged our perceptions and influenced generations of artists with his journal Documents. Mark Hudson looks at an early lesson in shock tactics
Mark Hudson

No collector could ever love a work of art as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.' So wrote the Surrealist novelist and philosopher Georges Bataille, a man whose desire to bring creativity down to ground level took him into areas deeper and darker than anything that could be encompassed by a mere shoe. While Bataille, who died in 1962, is hardly a household name, his work still exerts an extraordinary influence not only in the realms of art and ideas, but also across a surprising range of popular culture. Francis Bacon, Angela Carter and YBA badboys Jake and Dinos Chapman are just a few of the artists who cite Bataille as a central influence, while the aesthetic of his short-lived magazine Documents has fed into imagery as diverse as Pink Floyd album covers, Björk videos and David Lynch movies.

Starting life as a niche journal for connoisseurs and collectors of so-called primitive art, Documents ran for just 15 issues between 1929 and 1930. Yet its startling visual style, its ground-breaking juxtapositions of the exalted and the bodily, of the esoteric and the popular, have seen it dubbed 'the first style magazine' - the unlikely grandaddy of The Face, Dazed and Confused and Tank

'Undercover Surrealism', a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery next month, illuminates this little-known but highly influential moment in 20th-century culture, bringing together an extraordinary range of objects and images that graced the magazine's pages. African masks and Aztec manuscripts sit alongside dreamlike, and often obscurely threatening, photographic images, children's drawings beside masterpieces from a list of contributing artists that reads like a who's who of Modernism - Picasso, Dali, Klee, Miro, Giacometti, Andre Masson and Max Ernst.

Yet the presiding sensibility belongs to editor Georges Bataille - sometime librarian, failed priest and pornographer - a man whose essays drew hallucinatory perceptions from such mundane phenomena as dust and saliva, and who kept photographs of real-life torture and mutilation on his desk, claiming to see 'true ecstasy' in the victims' faces.

'He presents a massive challenge to the notion of human positivity,' says artist Jake Chapman, who has made a study of Bataille's writings. 'He questions what ideas like civilisation really amount to, and he keeps throwing in nagging questions about the nature of human evil.'

Indeed, the sheer extremity of Bataille's thought does bring seemingly old-fashioned reservations about the nature of evil and depravity right back into the frame.

While the iconic images of mainstream Surrealism were long outrageous to conventional sensibilities, endless reproduction has made the likes of Salvador Dali's melting clocks or Magritte's C'nest pas une pipe seem not only clichéd, but whimsical and very much of their time. Yet if the relevance of Surrealism itself is generally agreed to be at an all-time low, the influence of the deviant branch represented by Bataille and Documents, seems inexorably on the rise. A whole generation of younger would-be transgressor artists - including the Chapman Brothers, Thomas Hirschhorn and Paul McCarthy - cite Bataille as an influence, while a recent major exhibition at Paris's Pompidou Centre was devoted to new explorations of Bataille's aesthetic philosophy, 'base materialism'.

'Bataille saw Surrealism as evasive,' says Dawn Ades, Britain's leading authority on Surrealism and co-curator of the Hayward exhibition. 'Surrealism had begun to explore the implications of psychoanalysis and the understanding of human desire. It had flirted with violence, sacrifice and seduction, but for Bataille it had sublimated them - idealised them, as he put it - through art. He wanted to bring art down to the base level of other physical phenomena.'

Chapman takes the idea further. 'The other Surrealists had the utopian aim of unmasking the unconscious as an egalitarian force. But Bataille saw it as a source of energy that was almost anti-human - as the sum total of absolute negativity.'

Born in 1897, son of a blind, syphilitic, minor civil servant and a mother 'of dubious sanity', Bataille embarked on a career in the priesthood, before turning his energies to the study of ancient documents. Indeed this scourge of bourgeois proprieties spent much of his career on the staff of France's ultra-establishment Bibliotheque Nationale. In 1920, while on secondment to Madrid, he witnessed a event that was to be central to the formation of his aesthetic ideas - the fatal goring of a bullfighter. The gouging of the matador's eye makes an appearance in Bataille's notorious 1928 novel The Story of the Eye, an ecstatic sweep of ovoid obscenity in which eyes, testicles and eggs become almost interchangeable.

While you'd expect this to be all grist to the Surrealist mill, by the late 1920s the movement's once anarchic collection of individuals had become a clearly defined movement under the autocratic leadership of poet André Breton. The relationship between Breton and Bataille was hostile from the outset, and became arctic after Bataille's brutal rebuff to a political meeting organised by Breton in 1928.

Formally 'excommunicated', Bataille became a focus for other disaffected Surrealists, including the poet Robert Desnos and critic and ethnologist Michel Leiris. When Bataille was offered the editorship of a new 'primitive'-oriented beaux-arts journal, Documents, the group hijacked the magazine for their own purposes. A typical issue might feature scholarly articles on such arcane exotica as neolithic Scythian belt buckles and Neapolitan Christmas cribs alongside startling page-size images of big toes, skyscrapers and the view down the human throat.

The almost random diversity of Documents' interests feels peculiarly post-modern. But it is in essays on such 'base' phenomena as dust and saliva that Bataille's philosophy of 'base materialism' - his desire to bring all phenomena down to the same level of direct physical experience - reveals itself most radically. The idea that bronze has no greater inherent aesthetic value than, say, snot is a concept that artists have only picked up on relatively recently.

But it was in its last issue that Documents showed its true face, as it were, in unexplained photographs of a woman's face covered in a featureless leather mask. 'This is the Sadean side of Documents,' says Ades. 'Wanting to show there are no boundaries, while stressing the pleasure of transgressing. Bataille was trying to get away from the Victorian idea of childhood as beatific innocence. But you never know with Documents how much is parody. There's a sense of humour there too. You can go too far in seeing it all as po-faced sadism.'

With so many central taboos long since blasted into history, it's difficult now to imagine the constricting atmosphere that formed Bataille's obsessive preoccupations. 'We've almost lost sight of what transgression means in the sense Bataille understood it,' says Ades. 'In the 1920s, the Catholic church still had a powerful, stifling hold on French society. Yet Bataille originally wanted to be a priest, and he never quite shook that off. There's a powerful dualism in his thought: a profound religious impulse in someone deeply convinced of the absence of God.'

And that is what makes Bataille so interesting and so difficult. In some respects Bataille, who married twice and had two daughters, led a mundane, even boring, librarian's existence. But he did literally mean it, he did believe in his own transgressive philosophies in a quasi-religious sense.

For the new generation of shock-artists represented by the Chapman brothers, Bataille's ideas are a tool, a means of jolting society out of what complacency it has left. But there is more to Bataille than that. He saw beauty and a kind of inverted transcendence in torture, cruelty and horror. There is still much in his work that is difficult to redeem and far from being accommodated by the mainstream - if indeed it ever can be.

(Undercover Surrealism runs from 11 May-30 July at the Hayward Gallery, London, SE1)