Room 206.02

Magazines were an indispensable tool in the total action on the world put forward by Surrealism. Among such publications was Documents, edited by Georges Bataille, a core part of unifying an ensemble of artists who, between 1929 and 1930, raised objections to the dogmatism imposed by André Breton, which was somewhat more Eurocentric and limited to literature and the visual arts than that propounded by Bataille. On its pages, artists such as Michel Leiris, André Masson, Robert Desnos and Joan Miró appeared alongside experts in ethnography, numismatics, jazz and archaeology, in a crossover of knowledge that defined the publication.      

This ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach enabled Bataille to use its pages to articulate a critical position against aesthetic idealism as convention: the magazine was defined as a “war machine against pre-conceived ideas”, stressing the distorted, the monstrous and the abject, translated into a visual art of formlessness which was conspicuous in the works of Joan Miró, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp and Jacques Lipchitz. Perversion and the violent manipulation of forms sought to flesh out base impulses, the unmentionable, in addition to a mythological and psychological dimension that imparted coarse readings of classical mythology and the iconography of Christianity, read in a context of the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In Bataille’s opinion, approaching human or anthropomorphic representation from this angle was necessary to deconstruct the notion of a natural, normative body regarded as a social construction.    

Documents also stood out for the role it gave to photography and different forms of montage and the association between image and text. Accordingly, this room is arranged as a type of collage which gathers works of some of the publication’s contributors.