Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS

by Dawn Ades (Editor), Simon Baker

An exploration of the unsettling collisions of art and culture in Georges Bataille's revolutionary journal and a new consideration of twentieth-century masterpieces by Picasso, Miró, Dalí, and others against the canvas of their renegade times. In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader. Copublished by Hayward Gallery Publishing, London

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays

272 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2005

Reviews

[Egor xS · Rating 2 out of 5]

This exhibition catalogue has great reproductions and some primary texts translated, yet how come it never discloses more about the history of the journal or why and how it flopped?

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Documents" was the great writer and the thinker of the Underworld Georges Bataille's great journal that lasted for a year or so. Put together in the late 20's, the journal was probably the first time that a group of artists thought about Africian Tribal art or old civilizations and what it meant to Contemporary Art and practices.

With Bataille you got the feeling that he had sort of X-Ray eyes at looking at contemporary culture and had an understanding what lurks underneath that skin. Strongly erotic impulses are measured along with the 'waste' of previous cultures and civilizations. A beautifully (if one can call it that) document of a time when artists explored their regions and matched it up with something from the past.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite a helpful overview of a significant, often-overlooked element of Surrealism: Georges Bataille and his circle around the journal Documents. Originally produced as a catalog for an art exhibit in London, Undercover Surrealism is an important and timely study, helping present a less monolithic rendering of Surrealism than is often readily available.

[Luke Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful Bataille-lia. Still highly theoretical but balances the background of the journal DOCUMENTS itself. the journal was trying to explore surrealist art in photography, sculpture, numismatology (study of coins), and painting as a way of unpacking the “Hellenic ideal” that has taken hold of the way our civilization discusses beauty.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

great visual history of Bataille's documents!

[Rachel Fatoorachi-Shprintzen · Rating 3 out of 5]

such a beautiful and compelling work