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Abstract
This dissertation examines the interweaving of ethnography and dissident Surrealism in Documents: Archeologie, beaux-arts, ethnographie, varietes, a review edited by Georges Bataille between 1929 and 1930. Moving away from the strictly formal assimilation of l'art negre and from Andre Breton's use of the "primitive," Bataille's circle of artists, writers, and critics joined leading anthropologists in a deeper analysis of the dynamics of art in its cultural context. Bataille and his colleagues translated current anthropological investigations of taboo and transgression into a broadly subversive agenda for contemporary art.
The utopian movements that flowered in the wake of World War I gave way to an increasing anti-idealism in the late 1920s. Ethnography offered a scientific archive of Third World alternatives to the existing European malaise. Its radical leveling of cultures and reexamination of the art object were central to Documents. The journal, with its eclectic mixture of contemporary art, archaeological discoveries, and popular culture, promoted an anticlassical aesthetic that embraced the "low" values of the violent, the erotic, and the deformed.
Bataille's radical ideas are explored in his relationship with three artists: Pablo Picasso, Andre Masson, and Alberto Giacometti. Picasso was the subject of the journal's only special issue, "Hommage a Picasso." His celebrity allowed the dissident Surrealists to map out their own territory within the avant-garde, and his work provided Bataille a field on which to advance his anti-idealist agenda. Masson formed a close alliance with the Documents circle. His partnership with Bataille in L'histoire de l'oeil (1928), L'anus solaire (1931), and Sacrifices (1936) centered on a savage grammar of eroticism and violence. Finally, the journal's contributors played a pivotal role in the shaping of Giacometti's oeuvre in the early 1930s. In "Alberto Giacometti," Michel Leiris describes the sculptor's work as contemporary fetishes and heralds their ability to embody human emotions. Bataille's anti-idealism influenced Giacometti's efforts to systematically undermine conventions of narrative and form. This study of Georges Bataille and Documents addresses the construction of the "primitive" by the Parisian avant-garde between the wars and critiques Bataille's aesthetics of subversion.
