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Michel, Bataille et moi

1994; The MIT Press; Volume: 68; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/778694

1536-013X

Rosalind Krauss,

Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis

In 1927 Mir6 unmistakably inscribed the name of Georges Bataille onto the face of his art. The site is the painting Musique: Michel, Bataille et moi, which, like the other so-called dream paintings from this period, portrays its contents ideogrammatically. Thus Mir6 establishes this scene of himself and his two friends-Bataille and Michel Leiris-walking at night in Paris, along the banks of the Seine, by carefully penning these events onto the loose, umber wash that suffuses his canvas with an indeterminate, undulating, spatial web. But if Mir6 thus indelibly wrote Bataille into his art, no scholar or critic engaged with that art (with the sole exception of Carolyn Lanchner, the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's recent Mir6 exhibition) has ever done likewise.1 There are two reasons why this should not surprise us. The first has to do with the extraordinary grip Andre Breton has had on the reception of all of Surrealism such that art historians have been entirely mesmerized by the aura of explanation he cast around it. So great has been his control that until the late 1970s neither Bataille, whom Breton openly declared his enemy, nor Bataille's magazine Documents figures in the index of any account of the Surrealist movement in painting or sculpture. This is something I became acutely aware of as I was working on the relationship of Alberto Giacometti to primitive art and I began to see the centrality of the Documents position for any understanding of this subject.2 And yet we could say-and this brings me to the second reason-that while the sadism in Giacometti's work, its thematics of enucleation, and its drive to produce the round phallicism that is one avatar of the informe forges an open connection to the universe of Bataille's thought, there seems to be little in Mir6's art that would provoke any such association. This is true whether we think of Mir6 under the rubric of childishness, which has been the category of his popular success, or whether we approach him as what has been called a painter's painter,