baker entry

Simon Baker “Doctrines [The Appearance of Things],” in Dawn Ades + S.Baker (eds.) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, London + Cambridge,Mass.: Hayward Gallery + MIT Press, 2006.

Simon Baker discusses the distinctive editorial rationale and design principles at work in George Batailles’ review, Documents’. Conceived as “a war machine against received ideas,” the journal adopted a radically disjunctive format to suit its deconstructive aims. Documents was full of ‘documents’: of rare coins and of sculptural and ethnographic objects, of pictures taken from the newspaper, from films and museum archives, pictorial documents of contemporary art works art photography, poetry and philosophy, discussions of music and a wide range of scholarship concerned with the appearance of a wide variety of things. The contents were diverse and the relationship between image and text informal—‘formless’ to borrow the term Bataille himself used to describe his critical organizational attitude. Images and texts were illogical in their positioning; categories of things and genres of representation were set against each other to disrupt the logic of the sequence, rather than in combination for illustrative purposes. Disciplinary boundaries were transgressed, cultural hierarchies demolished. More akin to the logic of a medieval curiosity cabinet than the modern museum display, these odd juxtapositions meant to destabilize the positive associations between meanings and categories that modern representational practices of all kinds made a habit of promoting. Bataille’s methods were deliberate and purposeful in their rejection of the predominating tendency in representational practice of the time—in popular and avant-garde circles alike—to find visual correspondences and poetic equivalents between ideas and things.