Category: Uncategorized (Page 362 of 1089)

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John Duncan’s Blind Date
04/06/80

TIJUANA – In May of 1980, the artist John Duncan performed what would be the most controversial and life-changing artistic act of his career, Blind Date, in which he travelled to Tijuana to purchase a female corpse, with which he had sex. Six weeks later (the minimum waiting period) he had a vasectomy so that ‘the last potent seed I had was spent in a cadaver.’ Blind Date was ‘performed in order to torture myself, physically and psychically … There was nothing erotic about it, there was no pleasure involved … it was not act of self-indulgence … I felt that I had failed at love and decided to torture myself, to punish myself as much as I possibly could. I had this focused determination to suffer.’

Driving home he found he was unable to weep, he was beyond weeping. After the vasectomy, Duncan arranged for a public listening to a tape recording he had made of Blind Date, during which he explained he ‘wanted to show what can happen to men that are trained to ignore their emotions’ and that the recording was made ‘to render any further self-torture of this kind, especially psychic self-torture, unnecessary for anyone to perform as a creative act.’

Aside from the immense risk to his mental and physical health, with Blind Date Duncan risked his artistic reputation. And indeed, the feminist network in Los Angeles saw to it his work was informally banned there, and made him a pariah. Even his closest friends turned against him. — Times Quotidian

 

 

Jordan As Hindley In Controversial Image
02/02/10

LONDON — Model Katie Price’s face has been imposed on to a picture of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley for an exhibition which opens this week. Entitled Public Enemy Number One, the controversial image sees the model fused on to the distinctive black and white police mugshot of Hindley taken in the 1960s.

Irish artist Kevin Sharkey was inspired to create the image after Price, also known as Jordan, was voted the most hated woman in Britain. “When I think of ‘hated’ women, the first person who comes to mind is Myra Hindley,” the artist says. “I think the macabre black and white police photograph of her from the 1960s is the epitome of evil. So I set about merging that iconic image with Katie’s face, and I hope when people look at it they will immediately realise the two women are poles apart.” Mr Sharkey says he is not looking to defend Jordan, but he hopes he can make people think more seriously about the way they react to celebrities.

Relatives of the Moors Murderers’ victims have condemned the picture. John Kilbride was abducted and murdered by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady in 1963, when he was 12 years old. His brother Danny told Sky News: “It is about time these people grew up. An artist with real talent doesn’t need to resort to tactics like this.” — Sky News

 

 

Artist Gregor Schneider plans to put dying person on show
04/22/08

MUNICH — German artist Gregor Schneider plans to exhibit a dying person as the focus of an upcoming show. The artist, whose previous works have included a disturbing recreation of family life in two identical houses in the East End of London and a 20-year project to transform his parents’ former house, said his aim was “to show the beauty of death”.

Schneider claims to have found a doctor in Dusseldorf who will help him find a volunteer willing to die in public in the name of art, according to the Art Newspaper. “Unfortunately today, death and the road to death are about suffering. Coming to terms with death as I plan it can take away the pain of dying for us,” the artist told the online edition of Die Welt.

Politicians and curators are in a state of uproar about Mr Schneider’s plans. “The dying person would determine everything in advance, he would be the absolute centre of attention,” said Mr Schneider. “Everything will be done in consultation with the relatives, and the public will watch the death in an appropriately private atmosphere.”

In 2000, Schneider himself feigned death as part of a show in Haus Esters Museum in Krefeld. He was awarded the Golden Lion for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale the following year for ‘Dead House ur’, a reconstruction of his parents’ home. He is currently showing an installation in Paris consisting of a series of rooms of decreasing size. Visitors make their way through the installation alone, and are filmed as they do so. — Telegraph.co.uk

 

 

Weatherston portrait might be art but we don’t have to like it
02/24/10

WELLINGTON — It was a face behind a crime that appalled the nation. Now it is a work of art. A portrait of Clayton Weatherston is one of 93 works competing in the Adam Portraiture Award, opening in Wellington tomorrow. Stretching 2.5 metres high, Liam Gerrard’s charcoal and acrylic work captures a man who dominated the national news last year, as Weatherston stood trial for the 2008 murder of his former girlfriend, Sophie Elliott, 22, whom he stabbed 216 times. Miss Elliott’s father, Gil, said he had not known the portrait was being painted and suggested the title “The Epitome of Evil” might be a suitable one. “It would have been better to have done a nice one of Sophie.”

Gerrard, 25, whose first solo exhibition late last year included a portrait of David Bain, who was acquitted on charges of murdering his family, said he chose Weatherston because “I was interested in doing a villain. The guidelines for the award were just to do an actual New Zealander. I just thought I’d try a bad guy. I went for the most hated man in the country, or he was at that time.” Gerrard said he did not expect anyone to buy the work. “As far as anyone having it on their wall, I highly doubt it. Except maybe a collector.” National Portrait Gallery director Avenal McKinnon said the portrait was probably the most contentious subject to appear in the biennial competition. “You could, in some countries, say artists are not allowed to paint bad people or murderers. But in New Zealand we have this wonderful freedom, it’s what democracy is all about.” — The Dominion Post

 

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The Murderer as Snow White
01/19/04

STOCKHOLM — On Saturday night, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, damaged an “art exhibit” glorifying a Palestinian terrorist at the Stockholm’s Historical Museum. The ambassador dismantled the electrical cables connecting the spotlights and threw one of them into some water.

Titled “Snow White and the Madness of Truth,” the exhibit consisted of a small ship carrying a picture of Islamic Jihad bomber Hanadi Jaradat (who was a lawyer and mother of two) sailing, “with the smile of an angel,” in a rectangular pool filled with red-colored water. Jaradat killed herself and 22 others, including Israeli Arabs and a number of Israeli Jewish children, in a suicide bombing on October 4, 2003, at Maxim’s jointly-owned Jewish-Arab restaurant in Haifa, Israel.

As background music to his exhibit, the “artist,” Dror Feiler, mixed music from Bach’s 199 Cantata “My Heart Swims in Blood.” Tel Aviv-born Feiler is well-known as a self-hating Israeli active in radical circles in Sweden where he lives. His Swedish wife Gunilla Skoeld Feiler, helped create the instillation.

Dror Feiler told Israel Radio on Sunday that Mazel was “an intellectual midget, his actions were similar to those of a stall owner in a third world country.”

When Mazel pulled the plugs on the installation on Saturday night, Feiler approached him angrily, shouting in Hebrew, “You’re doing exactly what you do in Nablus. This is a free country and I can say what I want to say here, not like you in your apartheid country.”

Zvi Mazel is unrepentant about his actions. “My wife and I stood there and began to tremble,” he told the Israeli Ynet Internet site. “There was the terrorist, wearing perfect makeup and sailing placidly along the rivers of blood of my brothers and the families that were murdered. My whole body trembled when I saw a female terrorist like Snow White in the exhibition.” — Mideast Media Dispatch

 

 

Loyalist killer to seek lottery aid for artist colony
10/21/03

LONDON — The convicted murderer Michael Stone, who killed three people in a gun and grenade attack in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery in 1988, is hoping to spend up to £1 million to convert a country house into workshops and studios for budding artists.

Although Stone, a former builder who learnt how to paint during 12 years inside the Maze prison, has made a fortune from his art and the proceeds of an autobiography, he disclosed yesterday that he intends to apply for public money to set up the art centre.

Among those who have bought or have been given his work are Mo Mowlam, the former Northern Ireland Secretary, and Charles Saachi, the advertising mogul. Stone’s work, which has become popular thanks to his notoriety, sells for between £500 and £25,000 per piece.

The former terrorist, who has exhibited his work in Belfast and is hoping to be nominated for next year’s Turner Prize with a sculpture made of up to 2,000 pigs’ ears, told The Times that he has put an offer on a large house in rural Co Down outside Belfast.

Stone has become such a cult figure that he has even been signed by a special agency offering former criminals as after-dinner speakers at up to £2,500 a time. He is currently writing a fictional thriller about a freelance assassin who travels to London to kill Islamist terrorists. He is also co-writing a book, designed to be a counter-terrrorist handbook, with a former member of the British Army. — The Times

 

 

Protests Against Starving Dog Art Exhibition
03/17/08

COSTA DEL SOL — The Costa Rican ‘artist’ Guillermo Vargas Habacuc is alleged to have paid some children to chase and catch an abandoned dog. He is said to have tied the animal by a very short rope to the wall of an art gallery in Managua and left it there for several days, without food or water, until it died. During this time, many people visited the art gallery, paying absolutely no attention to the torment of the dying dog. Photographs of the so-called exhibition can be found on the Internet.

The prestigious Central American Biennial exhibition incomprehensibly decided to consider this barbarous act as art, and Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel action at the Biennial of 2008 in Honduras.

In his defence, the artist has claimed that what he was attempting to prove was that those who saw the suffering of the dog just walked on by and that if it had been left on the street to die, no-one would have even known of its existence. It has also been reported that the dog did not die but escaped, and that it had been fed by Vargas and was only tied up during the gallery opening times. It has not been possible to confirm this. — Euro Weekly News

 

 

Swedish artist connected to Belgian child killer
06/08/10

LULEA — Angelina Elander, a 40-year-old singer and artist from Luleå in northern Sweden, has featured in a series of reports in Flemish and French language media sources which describe her as the “lover” and “admirer” of De Gelder, the 21-year-old man who killed three and seriously injured six more in an attack on a nursery in the town of Dendermonde in January 2009.

Elander is reported by Belgian newspaper La Capitale to have penned a slew of letters expressing her affection for the convicted killer, going as far as to submit an application for employment at his Bruges prison. On her blog, Kosmonaut Planemo, Elander has published her letters and other material pertaining to the De Gelder case and she is also reported by La Capitale to have opened a petition to free the killer.

Passages cited by the commercial Flemish television channel VTM include: “Oh, my darling. Did you really do all this pour moi? You shouldn’t have. *blushing* I feel harmony. I feel at peace with the universe. I think my boobs have grown.” — The Local

 

 

Marvin Francis’s Paper Trail
11/26/06

LOUISVILLE – Marvin Francis’s studio is cell A-10 in Kentucky’s maximum security prison, and his medium is dissolved toilet paper. He buys Charmin from “the outside,” he says, because “the stuff in here is a little rough.”Before Marvin Francis was sentenced in 1986 to life without parole for 25 years for murdering a Hopkinsville grocer during a robbery, he had never picked up a paintbrush or set foot inside a museum. “Art had never entered my life,” he said.

Now, his disturbing sculptures of life behind bars using only the limited materials of toilet paper, wood, glue, and acrylic paint fetch prices of as much as $3,000 each.

And competing with 55 other self-taught artists from around the world, Francis, 46, recently won first place in a juried competition for sculptors sponsored by Gallery 24 in Berlin, Europe’s leading gallery for undiscovered artists. Shows will follow in Paris and New York, where his work already is part of the American Folk Art Museum’s collection.

“You can’t help but be blown away by the world he creates with the contents of a wastepaper basket,” said sculptor Bob Morgan, owner of Lexington’s Gallery Soleil, which sponsored a one-man show by Francis in 2004. “That alone would make him worthy of note.” — Louisville Courier Journal

 

 

Artist to Feed Murderer to Goldfish
09/02/08

COPEHNAGEN—Controversy-seeking Danish-based artist Marco Evaristti has convinced a convict on death row in Texas to allow Evaristti to grind up his body and feed it to goldfish for an artwork should he be executed as planned, reports the Art Newspaper.

“My aim is to first deep freeze Gene’s body and then make fish food out of it. Visitors to my exhibition will be able to feed goldfish with it,” said Evaristti, who has visited Gene Hathorn, 47, a convicted murderer, in prison several times. Hathorn has been awaiting execution since being found guilty of murdering his father, stepmother, and stepbrother in 1985.

Chilean-born Evaristti has courted controversy with his work before. In 2000, he addressed mortality and the dark side of human nature by showing live goldfish in 10 electric blenders and inviting visitors to the exhibition to switch them on. In 2004, he explored issues of territory and environmental protection by painting an iceberg in Greenland red. — Artinfo

 

 

Armless artist’s headbutt kills man
09/18/07

SNELLVILLE, Ga. — Police are investigating the death of a man who collapsed after he was head-butted by an armless man in a fight over a woman. Snellville Police Chief Roy Whitehead said the two men, Charles Keith Teer and William Russell Redfern, scuffled Monday afternoon in the driveway of a suburban Atlanta home.

Police say Redfern, who was born with no right arm and only a short stump for his left arm, kicked Teer and Teer hit Redfern during the fight, which was due to long-standing bad blood over a woman who once dated Teer and now dates Redfern. After bystanders separated them, Redfern “came back and head-butted (Teer) one time,” Whitehead said. Teer complained of feeling dizzy, collapsed and died, Whitehead said.

Known by the nickname “Rusty,” Redfern made a name for himself in the late 1980s for pen and ink drawings he does using his foot. According to the Web site for VSA Arts — an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that promotes and showcases artists with disabilities — Redfern’s drawings take one to six months to complete. — msnbc

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I’m happy that your situation is on the move upwards. I have no doubt you’ll be the cool young ruler of the roost for as long as you’re interned in that way station. ** David Ehrenstein, After watching that clip, I definitely need more coffee, ha ha. ** Dominik, Hi!!! My, of course, pleasure. Yeah, I just read that our miserable heatwave is traveling eastward in your direction. Hopefully it’ll lose most of its stream by the time it barges into your world. So your bro is your new roommate? Like, long term? I don’t generally gravitate to smoothies. Or I mean I don’t seek them out. Having grown up drinking milkshakes, I’ve never gotten used to drinking liquids with thick consistencies that taste like fruit. But when I do, I usually want some friendly banana in them. I think they’re probably really delicious in a heatwave. What a handy and magical sweater your love had on. Love making the groundbreaking if unsavory discovery that eating vomit cures cancer, G. ** Jack Skelley, Skelley without the S and with the first name Mike! Sweet Thurston squib! What a dude. I need to read ‘Walt Disney’s Head’, like, ravenously. ‘Balloon’, right! And thank god not the Red one. ‘Til the cows come home, buddy! ** Misanthrope, True story. Maybe if the anti-abortion crazies could be made to understand that pulling plants out of the ground before they’ve had their natural time to fall out on their own accord is tantamount to aborting a plant-based fetus, plants could be saved. Oh, man, I really hope for the best possible outcome for your mom. That’s scary. I’ve had this weird bump on my forehead for about five weeks that hasn’t gone away and looks kind of like a pimple on steroids, and of course it’s been stressing me, but I went to a dermatologist yesterday who said it’s not cancer, it’s some benign relative of cancer, so … whew, but I still have to have it surgically removed tomorrow, grr. ** Steve Erickson, I hope your Death Valley was as short lived as ours was. I did read about Jafar Panahi’s sentence. How unbelievably fucking shocking and yet not shocking at all tragically. I actually know one of the people behind that 35mm site, and, yeah, it’s terrific. ** Erotica, At first I thought you meant as in Madonna. Yep, yep, I totally agree with you. It’s always shocking to me when otherwise thoughtful, nuanced people become simplistic dunderheads when discussing politics. And, yeah, I learned long ago that an author and their work are tangential. Take me, obviously, or even an ‘ultra-extremist’ like Peter Sotos who’s just the nicest guy IRL. But I guess it’s the same weird problem as with politics or something. ** Robert, It’s weird that we can drench ourselves. I guess it’s not weird technically, but it’s still weird. Good weird, I guess. I have a friend who has fucked up sweat glands and barely sweats a drip even in the hottest weather, and she says it is not a plus whatsoever. Man, best of luck keeping up the traction on your novel. Stay inspired whatever that takes. Excellent! *cheerleading sounds* ** Okay. Here’s another old, defunct post that I decided to shove back into the world at large. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Almost fifty years have passed since the publication of this remarkable book (Editions de Minuit, 1957). Mary Dalwood’s translation appeared rather quickly by the standards of academic publishing (Calder and Boyars, 1962); but still, outside of a small circle of intellectual Francophiles, Bataille was and remained largely unknown. Even in Vincent Descombes’ Modern French Philosophy, which many of the UK’s leading ‘Continental’ philosophers of the present day were devouring as undergraduates in the 1980’s, Bataille is only mentioned in passing. Why read the relatively obscure Bataille now? And why read Bataille’s Eroticism now? Besides the practical considerations that it is two pounds cheaper, the illustrations are noticeably crisper, and it is easier to fit in one’s pocket than the 1987 edition?

‘Perhaps the speed at which a thinker becomes canonical is an index of how little their thought changes anything. Even if that were so, it by no means implies the counter-principle that a thinker’s profundity can be measured by the degree of ignorance afforded to them by the kingmakers who write histories of French thought. Sartre’s swiftly popular philosophy of freedom and responsibility, for all its avowed atheism, made perfect ontological and moral sense to anybody who had enjoyed a short term with the Jesuits. God was dead for many Twentieth century intellectuals, but all His values remained in place in the ‘human soul’, the unique being-for-itself. The anti-humanism of Bataille was then and is now beyond the pale for many readers. Despite the profound relevance of Bataille’s work to fields as diverse as theology, psychology, literature, anthropology, economics, sociology, and philosophy, there was never the slightest chance of Bataille joining the popular lists of the great and the good. It is not that Bataille is a second- or third-rate thinker. Rather his thought was simply too disruptive, and even when he was alive his mixed and virulent output had something of the character of an unburied corpse. Eroticism is amongst the most important works of one of the most stimulating and neglected French thinkers of the Twentieth century. Anyone who has laboured through the endlessly qualified and deferred prose of late-phenomenology would do well to look at Bataille’s Eroticism as soon as possible. Much contemporary French thought is as difficult but ultimately harmless to assimilate as a ten course tofu banquet. After such fare, the encounter with Bataille’s late works – particularly Eroticism, Literature and Evil, or The Tears of Eros – should be satisfyingly dense, bloody, and rich. Earlier texts such as Guilty, Inner Experience and On Nietzsche are to say the least challenging, even to the most sympathetic readers. Eroticism is not an easy text for reasons we shall come to presently, but it is arguably the easiest and most rewarding portal into Bataille’s disturbing world.

‘Broadly speaking, Bataille is a programmatic (though not a systematic) thinker. But his programme is self-avowedly impossible. This impossible project involves examining those blindingly over-lit or twilight points at which theorization collapses or dissolves into seizure, sobbing, fugue, orgasm, or the scream of anguish. Eroticism is not an object of enquiry, simply because the erotic is precisely that ‘sacred’ materiality which abrades and ruptures the categories of subject and object, self and world, inside and outside, human and animal. Unlike Hegelian reflections upon the logical constitution of the limit, Bataille is primarily concerned with the somatic limits of experience and theorizations thereof. It is not our habits or their disruptions which make us human, Bataille contends, for animals seem to exhibit as much: “animal sexuality does make for disequilibrium and this disequilibrium is a threat to life, but the animal does not know that […] Eroticism is the sexual activity of man to the extent that it differs from the sexual activity of animals. Human sexual activity is not necessarily erotic but erotic it is whenever it is not rudimentary and purely animal…”.

‘Such a bludgeoning division between the human and the animal (especially via the dubious privilege of ‘knowledge’) might suggest that Bataille is proposing a partially-atheistic humanism similar to Sartre’s. But that is merely the surface: the entire notion of separability (logical, ontological, moral or biological) is rapidly abraded in Bataille’s world. Indeed, only the relative ‘discontinuity’ of conscious ‘beings’ absurdly raising themselves above the blind ‘becomings’ of a world of material continuity can configure this set of problems as a set of problems. It is the habitually desired balances and equally habitually desired transgressions of those habits that makes human embodiment so uncanny.

‘The impurity of this book will no doubt offend the sensibilities of many academics, whatever their stance on the value of interdisciplinarity. Bataille’s twisted and tangled reflections on incest, art, mysticism, pre-history, cell division, philosophy, menstruation, economics and murder form not so much a rich tapestry of argumentation as a catastrophe. ‘Catastrophe’ in two senses, one positive, the other negative: firstly, if one expects from Bataille an ‘argument’ in the classical mode, a careful connecting of evidential propositions to safe conclusions, one can only see this kind of work as confusion and abomination. This is the positive catastrophe of Eroticism (and indeed, of eroticism). Like the common or garden variety of misogynist bore pointing to the child-molester, the purportedly abject failure of an other’s behaviour to measure up to decent standards is seized upon as evidence of the positive value of ‘respectable’ theoretical work. The ‘straight’ anthropologist, sociologist, theologian or philosopher will be much reassured by the untenability of Bataille’s corpus on their terms. From the inside of any hygienically constituted discipline, Bataille is a transgression which shores up the norm. This is the ‘positive’ or utile value of his catastrophic work.

‘The negative catastrophe of Bataille’s Eroticism is concerned with the work of the writer as something impossible and paradoxical. It amounts to nothing less than an incitement to the pursuit of non-utile work. The production of a book which is literally good-for-nothing (except perhaps the de-commodification of knowledge) is about as heretical an idea as could be fielded in the free democracies of latecapitalism. Yet Bataille’s project, if it can be thus described, is precisely geared towards a theorization of the conditions under which everything is wasted for the sake of a sacred, impossible contact with the ‘outside’ of the human world of work and utility. It is for this reason that Bataille’s book, for some, remains as enigmatic, compelling and sordid as the transmission of an impossible truth: as if a close relative with a good career and a great marriage had been arrested in a public lavatory for a practice so unusual that the Crown Prosecution Service were having difficulty deciding whether or not it was covered by existing laws.

‘The greatest difficulty that a philosophical reader might encounter in Bataille’s Eroticism may well be the uneasy relationships Bataille courts with two large figures in the history of Continental thought. Throughout Eroticism one senses the suppressed and distant noises of a titanic battle between Nietzsche and Hegel. Both are mentioned, the former more or less in passing and the latter as a means of pointing up the failures of a selfsatisfied, stabilized and systemic notion of philosophy. Hence my claim that Eroticism is a difficult text despite its deceptively straightforward and conversational tone. The path by which one reaches a thinker will always to a certain extent colour the reading; but with Bataille’s work there seems to be a particularly chronic inbuilt problem concerning hermeneutics and personal histories. Readers from a broadly Hegelian background will probably find Bataille’s reflections upon unmediated ‘base’ materiality naively pre-critical, whilst readers approaching the work from the domain of a ‘Nietzschean’ critical materialism will scent something suspiciously dialectical about many of Bataille’s formal argumentative moves. Bataille does indeed suffer from all manner of faults at the level of methodology, often crushing together statistical studies, myth, dialectics, genealogy, poetry and appeals to biological ‘fact’.

‘Yet in a way this failure (or, refusal) to make explicit any kind of harmonic synthesis between his approaches to the impossible (non-)object of his enquiry is entirely appropriate for an attempt at understanding the nature of radical disruption. The extent to which one considers his bricolage enlightening may ultimately be undecidable on theoretical principles alone. For some, the ragged urgency of Bataille’s mission may lead them to excuse him on similar grounds to Malcolm X’s “…by any means possible”. For others, it may provoke something closer to bewildered horror, as when Colonel Kurtz asks “Do you think my methods are unsound?” and Captain Willard answers “I don’t see any methods, Sir.” Throughout Eroticism Bataille is keenly aware of the difficulties involved in the attempt to communicate and justify one’s journey into radical alterity, given the paradox of language as method for communicating only the commonest experiences (see particularly his chapters on DeSade in Part II).

‘Anybody interested in the darker side of the arts, social sciences and humanities, or who is interested in destroying their lives as utile subjects should read this book.’ — Mark Price

 

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Further

‘Erotism’ @ goodreads
Cogent thoughts of a sick mind
off the shelf: Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality
Eroticism, violence, and sacrifice: A postmodern theory of religion and ritual
Sexuality in organizations: An approach based on Georges Bataille’s theory of eroticism
Consumption, Transgression, Eroticism: Watching Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day with Georges Bataille
Fetishism: Georges Bataille and Sexual-Textual Transgression

 

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Illustrations

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Extras

“As-Far-as-The-Eye-Can-See (At the Limit of Vision)”

Interview de Georges Bataille sur l’art et l’angoisse.

Georges Bataille : la mort à l’oeuvre par Michel Surya

Débat entre Georges Bataille & André Maurois: Où en est la critique littéraire? (1948)

 

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Interview (1958)

 

‘In [the interview], Bataille appeared relaxed and handsome, and scandalous (for the times) beneath an absolutely serene exterior (his way of saying the worst of things with an air of innocence was all his own). He talked about literature and what was ‘essentially childish’ and infantile about it. It is a childishness that literature has in common with eroticism: ‘It seems to me to be very important to perceive the infantile nature of eroticism.’ Evidently Bataille was little concerned about demonstrating that eroticism was innocent in the sense that morality would like to understand it. It has the cruel, black innocence of childhood. To understand it, we must reflect on what Bataille said of Gilles de Rais: ‘We could not deny the monstrosity of childhood. How often would children, if they could, be a Gilles de Rais.’ It is a monstrously happy childhood that Bataille was thinking of, a childhood that has no limits except those imposed by law (by authority). And literature is dangerous because it is linked to childhood; because it is the element within us that is open to childhood that it is essential for us to ‘confront the danger’ in it, and that it is essential, through it, to ‘perceive the worst’.

‘It was Bataille’s first and last television appearance. He was too tired to remember what he had found to say (though in fact he had been clear to a fault); leaving the studio, he only recalled having talked about polygamy, and this was enough to send him into raptures.’ — Surya

Interviewer: First I want to ask you about the name of this book. What evil are you talking about?

Bataille: I think there are two opposite kinds of evil. The first one is related to the necessity of human activity going well and having the desired results, and the other consists of deliberately violating some fundamental taboos like, for example, the taboo against murder or against some sexual possibilities.

Interviewer: As in do evil and act evil.

Bataille: Yes.

Interviewer: Does the name of this book indicate that evil and literature are inseparable?

Bataille: Yes, I think so. Maybe it’s not very clear at first, but to me it seems that if literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring. This might seem surprising. Nevertheless, I think that soon it becomes clear that literature has to deal with anguish and that anguish is based on something that is going the wrong way, something that no doubt will turn into something very evil. When you make the reader see this or, at least, put him in front of the possibility of a story with an evil ending for the characters he’s concerned about (now I’m simplifying what novels are about), when the reader is in that unpleasant situation the result is a tension which makes literature non boring.

Interviewer: So the writers, any good writer, is guilty of something when writing?

Bataille: Most writers are not aware of that, but I think there is a profound culpability. Writing is the opposite of working. This may not sound logical, but still, all the amusing books are efforts that went against real work.

Interviewer: Could you name one or two writers who felt guilty of writing, who thought they were criminals because they were writers?

Bataille: There are two whom I wrote about in my book who are exemplary in that regard. They are Baudelaire and Kafka. Both of them knew that they were on the side of evil, and consequently that they were guilty. With Baudelaire, it’s clear by the fact that he chose the title “Flowers of Evil” for his most intimate writings, and with Kafka, it’s even more clear. He thought that when writing he went against the wishes of his family and therefore he put himself in a guilty position. It’s a fact that his family let him know that it was evil to spend his time writing, that the right thing to do in life was to devote himself to commercial activities, and if you did something else you were doing something evil.

Interviewer: But if being a writer is being guilty of something then for Kafka or Baudelaire, being a writer is also not being very responsible. That was the opinion of their families. This feeling of guilt is for them something childish. Do you think that Baudelaire and Kafka felt guilty of being childish when writing?

Bataille: I think it’s very clear, they even say so. They felt that they were in the same situation as a child before his parents: A child who’s been naughty and who consequently has a guilty conscience because he thinks of his beloved parents who are always telling him what not to do, that it was an evil thing to do in the strongest sense of the word.

Interviewer: But if literature is childish, if writers are guilty of childishness when writing, does that also mean that literature is childishness?

Bataille: I think there is something essentially infantile in literature. It may seem incompatible with the admiration that one has for literature and which I share. But I believe it’s a profound and fundamental truth that you can’t really understand what literature means if you don’t approach it from the child’s point of view, which is not to say from a lower perspective.

Interviewer: You wrote a book on eroticism. Do you think that eroticism in literature is infantile?

Bataille: I’m not sure if literature differs from eroticism in that respect, but I think it’s very important to realize the infantile character of eroticism in general. To feel eroticism is to be fascinated like a child who wants to take part in a forbidden game, and a man fascinated by eroticism is like a child before his parents. He’s afraid of what might happen to him, and he never stops until he has a reason to be afraid. It’s not enough for him to only do what normal adults content themselves with. He has to become scared. He has to find himself in the same situation as when he was a child and constantly afraid of being scolded and even punished in an unbearable way.

Interviewer: Maybe you and I have given the impression that you were condemning this childishness. But in fact, it’s time to go back to the title of your book: “Literature and Evil”. You are not condemning neither literature nor evil. Could you tell us more about the ideas in the book?

Bataille: It certainly is a warning. It says there is danger, but, maybe, once you realize the danger, you have good reasons for confronting that danger. I think it’s important for us to confront the danger that is literature. I think it is a very great and real danger, but that you are not a man if you do not confront that danger. I think that in literature we can see the human perspective in its entirety, because literature doesn’t permit us to live without seeing human nature under its most violent aspect. You only have to think of the tragedies, Shakespeare – there are lots of examples of the same genre. And finally, it’s literature that makes it possible for us to perceive the worst and learn how to confront it, how to overcome it. In short, a player finds in the game the force to overcome what the game contains of horror.

 

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Book

Georges Bataille Erotism: Death and Sensuality
City Lights Books

‘A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true ‘churches’, Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.’

Excerpt

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p.s.Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, That’s what I’ll look for, thanks. Apparently they’ve discovered that people who drink coffee every day live longer, yay! ** Jack Skelley, JammingJack! Oh, man, it was rough. It was like Death Valley was vacationing in Paris. Now it’s raining and far more than decent outdoors, at least for the next 24. Thanks about the grab bag, bud. So, I’m assuming we’re watching ‘The White Ribbon’ for Saturday, right? Lurve, me. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It was fucking unearthly. The heat. But good old rain came along and murdered it this morning, at least for the time being. Nice that your bro is around. I’m going to indulge in some seaweed something or other maybe even today since the outdoors is beckoning again. Your love knows me so well! Love floating a spring of mistletoe over the head of every Emo boy in Budapest, G. ** Robert, Hi. Ha ha, right? The heat got murdered in the middle of the night, and it’s honestly kind of sirenic outside my windows this morning. But it was murderous yesterday. ‘The Turin Horse’, excellent. He’s pretty consistently great. Hm, yeah, going to readings seems like a logical ‘in’. I feel like there must be interesting writers in Chicago, but I cant think of any because I rarely know where writers live for some reason. I’ll have a think, and if there’s someone(s) who seem cool who I know at all, I’ll try to hook you folks up. In the meantime writing a bunch seems like a pretty happy solution from my outside perspective. What’re are you working on? ** Steve Erickson, It’s particularly weird here because, unlike NYC, Paris has never had extreme heat before, or not in forever at least, so there’s this heavy wrongness about it that makes it quite scary in addition to being annoying. But the heat is gone as of about 3 am today for the time being. No, I don’t know the Romance album. Hm, worth at a least a dip, it sounds like. So, thanks. If there are (such videos), I didn’t find them when I made that post. In fact, there were a lot more Hades videos in the original, but they got killed by youtube since then, so I suspect there’s less chance of finding that kind of booty now. ** Happy Prince, Hi. Ha, well, you’ve read my work, so that interest of mine can’t be hugest surprise. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever written a friendly, sex-positive sex scene, not because I don’t think real sex isn’t positive, of course, but I sure do think it’s boring and dumb to write and read about. i did not melt, seemingly, although I haven’t looked in the mirror with my glasses on yet. I’m definitely not an expert whatsoever on Mishima and his inner workings and motivations, but I do think the ‘fascist’ tag is extremely simplistic in his case and just lazy thinking. I’ll never understand why people want everything to be resolved and identifiable. It seems delusional and arrogant or something. So, not huge thoughts on my part, and I need more coffee, but there you go. What are your thoughts/analyses? ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. I’m sure we’ll get at least one more of those brutal onslaughts before the summer is over, but hopefully not for a restful few weeks. I don’t know ‘The Projector and Elephant’ or those guys’ work whatsoever. You’re so good at winnowing really good stuff. Anyway, needless to say, I’ll initiate getting them under my belt (or wherever). Bon midweek! ** Okay. I realised the other day that I haven’t done a Bataille post in a long time, and so I did an eeny-miney-mo thing, and the winner was ‘Erotism’. See you tomorrow.