I’ve been researching the question of hope without idealism or utopianism. I’m looking for a way to explain the feeling of hope I get reading Beckett or Nietzsche or Bataille. The kind of hope that doesn’t conflate itself with beauty, that shakes me to the core, that demands action not sometime in the future but RIGHT NOW. I mean, I love all sorts of things about surrealism and situationism but I think Bataille was on to something important: the surrealists did idealise things, or in his words, they “placed the work before being”. And the situationists inherited this legacy with their fetishising of the image or map of the city.
As writers and visual artists, they relied on the production of texts and images. They advocated radical forms of expression, but rarely questioned the limits of re-presentation itself. When I’m inspired by Archigram’s Walking City, Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, Superstudio’s Continuous Monument or Constant Nieuwenhuis’ New Babylon it’s not unlike the feeling I get when I’m grateful for having remembered a dream. In the end I’m left to guess – also to dream – the relation between process and product. I may have a map, but there is no territory.
On the topic of representation, Bataille objects to classical academic and artistic standards of beauty, order and intelligibility – pointing out that they always already rely on connections to their opposites. He looks instead to “primitive” or “low” art for the monstrous, the violent, the chaotic, the non-sensical – and there claims a certain truth of expression, a realism that he also believes the surrealists wish to avoid. He argues that representations emerge from acts of destruction, from altering materials around us and shaping them to our will. There is no idealism to redeem Bataille’s abject humanity, but there is hope in what rises from the ruins.
Apparently, Bataille saw Documents (1929-30) as his “war machine against received ideas” and a “playful museum that simultaneously collects and reclassifies its specimens”. The question of “resemblance” or “correspondence” in representation was explored through juxtaposed images that undermined traditional categories. In Documents, the ideal chafes against the real, and contradictions are left unresolved.
Hayward Gallery | UNDERCOVER SURREALISM: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille | 11 May – 30 July 2006
But as Joyce Cheng points out, while Bataille positioned himself against surrealism and against idealism, “Breton and Bataille converge crucially in the insight that in vision or the experience of the eye, the human subject has a chance of escaping the tyranny of rational, civilized and abstract thinking … Although one is accused of relishing in idealism and the other known for being the supreme blasphemer of beauty, both treat the notion of beauty in such a way that it is neither a class of object nor a set of regulations, but an experience.”
The important act, it seems, is seeing and representing beauty regardless of how one defines it. But doesn’t that get us right back to the idea that I want to avoid – that beauty is hope and hope is beauty?