krauss, michel, bataille et moi

Michel, Bataille et moiAuthor(s): Rosalind KraussSource: October, Vol. 68 (Spring, 1994), pp. 3-20Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778694 .

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"Michel, Bataille et moi"

ROSALIND KRAUSS

In 1927 Mir6 unmistakably inscribed the name of Georges Bataille onto the face of his art. The site is the painting Musique: Michel, Bataille et moi, which, like the other so-called "dream paintings" from this period, portrays its contents ideogrammatically. Thus Mir6 establishes this scene of himself and his two friends-Bataille and Michel Leiris-walking at night in Paris, along the banks of the Seine, by carefully penning these events onto the loose, umber wash that suffuses his canvas with an indeterminate, undulating, spatial web.

But if Mir6 thus indelibly wrote Bataille into his art, no scholar or critic engaged with that art (with the sole exception of Carolyn Lanchner, the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's recent Mir6 exhibition) has ever done likewise.1 There are two reasons why this should not surprise us. The first has to do with the extraordinary grip Andre Breton has had on the reception of all of Surrealism such that art historians have been entirely mesmerized by the aura of explanation he cast around it. So great has been his control that until the late 1970s neither Bataille, whom Breton openly declared his enemy, nor Bataille's magazine Documents figures in the index of any account of the Surrealist movement in painting or sculpture. This is something I became acutely aware of as I was working on the relationship of Alberto Giacometti to primitive art and I began to see the centrality of the Documents position for any understanding of this subject.2

And yet we could say-and this brings me to the second reason-that while the sadism in Giacometti's work, its thematics of enucleation, and its drive to produce the "round phallicism" that is one avatar of the informe forges an open connection to the universe of Bataille's thought, there seems to be little in Mir6's art that would provoke any such association. This is true whether we think of Mir6 under the rubric of "childishness," which has been the category of his popular success, or whether we approach him as what has been called "a painter's painter,"

1. Carolyn Lanchner,Joan Mir6 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1993), pp. 55-57. 2. See my "No More Play," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

October 68, Spring 1994, pp. 3-20. ? 1994 Rosalind Krauss.



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which is the more serious form of his acceptance. Interestingly enough, both these descriptions were launched by Breton himself, the first when he said that he feared that Mir6's development "had been arrested at the infantile stage," and the second when he stated that Mir6's only desire was "to give himself up utterly to painting, and to painting alone."3 And while Breton was employing neither characterization as a compliment, they have alternatively become the standard forms of the Mir6 accolade.

Thus there is, on the one hand, the idea that Mir6 has translated a world of childlike innocence and playful spontaneity into a bestiary of excited and fantas- tic forms, and on the other, the notion that Mir6 has committed himself to a world of space and color, the daring and inventiveness of which other painters instantly recognize. This latter position entered the Mir6 literature with greatest force in 1929 by means of Michel Leiris's vivid metaphor of the Tantric exercise of forming an incredibly precise mental image of a garden and then removing every leaf and twig and stone within that image-down to the very earth and sky which are then themselves removed-so that nothing remains but the stunningly sharp experience of a void, this metaphor understood as a way of presenting those stripped-down Mir6s from the mid-1920s that have come to be called "dream paintings."4

3. The first is from "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism" (1941); the second from "Surrealism and Painting" (1928); reprinted in Andrd Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Icon Editions, 1972), pp. 70 and 36, respectively. 4. Michel Leiris, 'Joan Mir6," Documents, vol. 1, no. 4 (1929), p. 263.



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Opposite: Musique: Michel, Bataille et moi. 1927.

Above: Catalan Landscape. 1924.

Below: The Family. 1924.

By the late 1950s Leiris's idea of the void had changed in the subsequent literature on Mir6 to something more like the surging allover washes and charged expressiveness of action painting, so that Mir6's pictures of this time were being seen as precursors of the work of, say, Jackson Pollock.5 And a decade later, in my own work on the Mir6 of this period, which led to an exhibition called Magnetic Fields, organized at the Guggenheim Museum by Margit Rowell and myself, the dream paintings, with their monochrome blue or yellow or umber grounds interrupted by nothing more substantial than a hair-thin line more adapted to the writing of words than to the bounding of things, were placed in relation to color-field painting, which is to say, an aesthetic of disembodied, dematerialized, optical space.6

How, indeed, would this Mir6, by turns the maker of children's toys and the painter of ethereal clouds, inhabit anything like the same universe as Georges Bataille?

And yet there is a third Mir6, one who seems to be quite interested in tapping us on the shoulder, so to speak, and, like the man reaching into the inner pockets of his raincoat, offering to show us his "dirty pictures." The throbbing genitalia that enter Mir6's painting in the summer of 1924 as the only palpable organic elements to be hung on his otherwise diagrammatic stick figures, whether it's the hunter gaily ejaculating in the Catalan Landscape or the extraordinary

5. Jacques Dupin, Mir6 (Paris: Flammarion, 1961), p. 154. 6. Joan Mir6: MagneticFields (New York: The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, 1972).



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maternal vulva sprouting, bulblike, in the center of The Family, are subsumed for the most part within a kind of robust peasant admiration for fecundity and germi- nation. But by the fall of 1924 and into the following year, Mir6 begins to construct an entire, somewhat spatially schematic universe through which to operate metaphoric strings of relationships based on these organs. One of the most persistent of these strings involves the equivalence that moves from the lips of the mouth to those of the labia, which, with their excited aureole of hair, allows the form to be transmuted into a dazzling sun, whose spherical body, now sur- rounded by tentacular flames, produces the suggestion of a spider, which in turn can evoke the radiant sprays of a comet, or the stamen and corolla of a flower, and so on.

That the expressive goal of these pictures is explicitly sexual, the metaphoric substitutions driving toward a kind of stunned, explosive climax, becomes all the more obvious when we look at the group of paintings Mir6 made in 1925 of couples making love, this act frequently conceived as pure biological contact in which sperm meets ovum and a primitive dehiscence begins to split the single cell into two. Mir6's extraordinary painting The Kiss delivers this copulatory sign with stunning directness as the fission on the schematically simple level of the cell is overlaid by the far more materialized image of the contact of sexual organs achieved by the red bar that enacts the connection where male meets female and by the hair that identifies the vulva.

It must be said, of course, that an incredible prudishness dogs the literature on Mir6, such that this preoccupation-this third Mir6, so to speak-is consis-



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Opposite right: Painting (Project for a stage curtain for Romeo and Juliette). 1925.

Left: The Kiss. 1924.

tently either ignored or shuttled to one side. Jacques Dupin, Mir6's most complete chronicler, describes this painting, for example, as follows:

With The Kiss we have the triumph of a complete absence of premeditation and a pure form of dream writing. This kiss is inscribed on an indeterminate, blue-gray ground that, perfumelike, suggests the confinement of an alcove. Two circular forms are attracted to one another to the point of joining and communicating as through the narrow neck of a vase: this is the kiss. Jubilation is expressed through the long, fine flames that escape from the interior and fly away, tapering, winding, and changing color at each turning. Around this absolutely stripped-down symbol of love, only the prison of a fluctuating line, black, white, or dotted, remains.7

The chasteness of Dupin's notion of this kiss is reinforced, in his argument, by his characterization of the colored ether within which it appears as "perfume." This, we could say, is the sublimatory drive of Mir6's critical reception, working consistently to purify his imagery. And yet Mir6 was not above specifying smells of a very different sort, as, for example, in the painting Oh! Un de ces messieurs qui a fait tout fa! (1925), which the artist himself has said is about farting. And as for the ethereal character of the backgrounds of the so-called dream paintings, Mir6 was far more equivocal about how to characterize them. Writing to Michel Leiris in

7. Dupin, Miro, p. 145.



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Left: The Birth of the World. 1925.

Opposite: Head of a Smoker. 1925.

the late summer of 1924 he speaks about having to purge his work of color, saying that "the charm and music of colors" are "the final stage of degeneration."8 Therefore, he says, he has decided to resort to drawing alone and admits, "This is hardly painting, but I don't give a damn." Recalling the same period in an inter- view in 1928, he says, "I was painting with an absolute contempt for painting.... I was feeling aggressive but at the same time I was feeling superior. ... I felt contempt for my oeuvre."9

Accordingly, when Leiris turns away from the metaphor of the Tantric exercise with which he opens his 1929 essay on Mir6 and actually gets down to a direct description of the pictures from the mid-1920s, he characterizes them as seeming "not so much painted as dirtied."o10 Adopting Mir6's position of attack on the medium and on color, he speaks of

These huge canvases that [are] ... troubling like destroyed buildings, tantalizing like faded walls on which generations of poster-hangers, allied over centuries of drizzle, have inscribed mysterious poems, long smears taking louche shapes, uncertain like alluvial deposits coming from God knows where, sands swept along by perpetually shifting rivers, their beds subjected to the movement of wind and rain.11

8. Joan Mir6, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Margit Rowell (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), p. 86. 9. Ibid., p. 95. 10. Leiris, "Joan Mir6," p. 264. 11. Ibid.



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Thus it is perhaps against the background of the dirty wall rather than the blue infinity of the cosmos that the transformational chains of the Mir6 imaginary should be seen. One of the differences this would make is that the tendency to abstract Mir6's line by pushing it toward the cursive, noncorporeal quality of script by means of the analogy many critics (including myself) have tried to set up between these works and calligrams would meet with a certain resistance. And because of this we might begin to experience the material specificity of any given point in the metaphorical chain. An example might be the 1925 painting Head of a Smoker, which has always been welcomed in the Mir6 literature as yet one more example of the vaporousness and fragility of the dream space, with the evanes- cence of the cloud of smoke resonating with and thereby reinforcing the nebulous quality of the background. Accordingly, when I wrote about this work in 1971, I compared it to Apollinaire's "Fumies," in which the cigar and its smoke seem to be subsumed, before our very eyes, so to speak, into the idea of the smoke's dispersal and disappearance. And although I spoke about the phallic associations of the pipe, reproducing the apposite drawing in which a man walking along, reading a newspaper, is given a tiny pipe that is then visually rhymed with splendidly outsized genitals, I saw the transformational work of the painting as one of raising or sublimating this association, dematerializing it, so to speak.12 Thus I did not consider the little hairs that Mir6 has shown growing at the base of the puff of smoke in the painting, hairs that work to lower the relationship, to keep it fixated

12. MagneticFields, pp. 90-91.



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on the phallic half of the analogy, with the same intrusion of tactile specificity as in the little red bar of The Kiss. The hairs, we could say, insist that the point around which the metaphoric chains circulate is obdurately genital.

It is here that the occlusion of Georges Bataille in the Mir6 literature begins to take on a certain interest. Because if, in a case like this one, I didn't address the hairs that are, in a certain sense, what the painting is about, it was not so much because I didn't notice them as because I didn't know what to do with them. For it was clear they didn't fit into the "idea" idea of Mir6's art.

What they do suggest, however, is the work of permutation that Bataille performs in his Story of the Eye, as similar metaphoric chains are used to generate both the action of the novel and its actual linguistic texture, as well as to deper- sonalize the narrative, making it the adventure not so much of its characters as of its organs, the story, indeed, of an eye. Roland Barthes has described this work of permutation as the result of a kind of grid on which one axis-that of shape- allows the eye to produce the associations to eggs, testicles, and the sun.13 The other axis-structured on the liquid contents of these objects-produces the chain that reads: tears, yolk, sperm, urine. It is the intersection of these axes that then suggests a given episode in the story and generates the language through which it is told, as when the sun, metaphorized as eye and yolk, can be described as "flaccid luminosity," and can give rise to the phrase "the urinary liquefaction

13. Roland Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye," Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 239-48.




of the sky." Barthes stresses, of course, that the combinatoire, used in this way as a kind of machine to produce the work, is itself a rebuke to Breton's notion of the poetic image, to his idea of the metaphorical encounter as a result of chance. The calculated programming of the linguistic space of the work is thus a rejection of the aleatory, just as the focus on organs is a derisive comment on Breton's glorification of love.

And yet no matter how important we may think Barthes's analysis is of the role of the metaphorical chains in Story of the Eye, we have to acknowledge that Bataille's avowed aesthetic, enunciated many times over in the essays in Documents, was hostile to metaphor in any form, whether poetically happenstance or coldly structuralist. When he said, in "L'esprit moderne and the Game of Transpositions," that "what we truly love, we love above all in shame," adding, "I defy no matter which collector to love a painting as much as a fetishist loves a shoe,"14 he is writing the manifesto of this refusal of metaphor. Bataille's fetishism is, of course, the ethnographic rather than the Freudian kind, with the fetish not conceived as above all a substitute for what is missing, but as the real power of real objects. It is this power that Bataille gives to the big toe, the essay on which ends:

The meaning of this article lies in its insistence on a direct and explicit questioning of seductiveness, without taking into account poetic concoctions that are, ultimately, nothing but a diversion (most human beings are naturally feeble and can only abandon themselves to their instincts when in a poetic haze). A return to reality does not imply any new acceptances, but means that one is seduced in a base manner, without transpositions and to the point of screaming, opening his eyes wide: opening them wide, then, before a big toe.15

"A return to reality." This is the explicitly anti-Surrealist stance that will forbid metaphor just as surely as it will reject the dream. And this aesthetic is shared by the Documents group in general. Thus to return once again to Leiris's Mir6 essay from Documents, we find that even with the extraordinary passage on the dirty walls and the louche configurations, these paintings come in for criticism precisely on the grounds of their dependence on metaphor. Accordingly, from the vantage of 1929, Leiris says, "If there was a time when Mir6's painting posed and instantly resolved all sorts of little equations (sun = potato, slug = little bird, gentleman =mustache, spider=sex, man=sole of the foot), it seems that it is different now, and that he is not satisfied by these facile solutions."16 In Mir6's present work, Leiris counters, "[The] paintings are still fascinating mysteries, but these

14. Georges Bataille, "L'esprit moderne et le Jeu des Transpositions," Documents, vol. 2, no. 8 (1930), pp. 490-91. 15. Georges Bataille, "Le Gros Orteil," Documents, vol. 1, no. 6 (1929), p. 302; reprinted in Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 20-23. 16. Leiris, "Joan Mir6."



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mysteries don't fear the light of noon, and are even more disquieting in that no cock's cry can put them to flight. The ghosts he brings on stage don't vanish when the clocks strike twelve."'17 With this direct rejection of the very idea of dream painting, Leiris speaks approvingly instead of the portrait series from 1928 which he illustrates in conjunction with his essay. But in summing up the power of these works, which he admits earlier paintings by Mir6 have also shared, he says: "Beautiful as snickering, or as graffiti showing the human structure in all that's particularly grotesque and horrible about it, these works are so many malicious pebbles that cause circular and vicious ripples, when one throws them into the swamp of reason, where for so many years now, so many nets are rotting."18

In his introduction to the re-edition of Documents Denis Hollier has demon- strated the centrality for Bataille's aesthetic of site-specificity, of the work that cannot be moved but must, instead, be consumed on the spot.19 The idea of an object's resistance to being uprooted and transplanted to the museum's space of aesthetic exchange and formal equivalence results, therefore, in Bataille's insistence on-as Hollier puts it-"the inexchangeable heterogeneity of a real,

17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 266. 19. Documents, 2 volumes (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1991), pp. vii-xxxiv; reprinted as Denis Hollier, "The Use-Value of the Impossible," October60 (Spring 1992), pp. 3-24.




an irreducible kernel of resistance to any kind of transposition, of substitution, a real which does not yield to a metaphor."20 One form this real might take is the photograph, which, like the readymade, is independent of any imaginative manipulation. Stenciled, as it were, off the world itself, it enters the space of exchange-whether that be the aesthetic space of the museum or the space of the linguistic code of a page of text-as a heterogenous object: a splinter under the skin of meaning, a fly that lands on the lecturer's nose. And not only were photographs Bataille's major visual resource in the pages of Documents, but he reviewed a book of crime photography under the title "X Marks the Spot."

The deictic character of that title, its pointing gesture, its demonstrative "this," reminds us that photography belongs to that group of signs set off semio- logically by the name index. It is the character of the index, indeed, to mark the spot, since it is the one type of sign that is the result of a physical cause. Unlike the icon, a sign that relates to its referent through the axis of resemblance, or the symbol, where the relationship between sign and referent is arbitrary, conven- tional, the index has an existential connection to meaning, with the result that it can only take place on the spot. If the photograph is classified as an index, rather than as an icon, this is because it is the result of a photochemical form of causality that allows the light that falls onto the film as though it were a shadow, to register the actual trace of the object that projected it. The photograph is in this sense a cast shadow-an obvious form of index-but preserved now in amber. Within language itself there are indices as well, those words like "here," "now," "this," "today," or the personal pronouns "I" and "you," which are what linguists call "empty signs," since they, too, depend for their meaning on their existential relation to the person who speaks them.

It is in this context that we might examine Ceci est la couleur de mes reves (1925), a work that has always been received as the very definition of Mir6's dream paintings. It is furthermore a work Mir6 himself considered "very important," in fact-as he told me in 1971 when I interviewed him on the subject of these paintings of the mid- and late 1920s-it was "a point of departure" for the rest of his work. I must admit, however, that it was never that clear to me how this painting functioned. My assumption was that, like the calligram, the work was opening a margin between image and language within which to encounter the "idea"-that which escapes representation altogether-so that the point of the picture was that color, like dreams, like the affective lining of our innermost feelings, is fundamentally ungraspable. This reading served to suggest how the work would be the "point of departure" for the whole of the series that was to follow, a reading consonant with what I saw as the series' exploration of color as evanescent, as what Jacques Dupin had called "perfume." But what was troubling for this interpretation is the word "Photo" that also appears on the canvas-a

20. Ibid., p. 11.



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word that summons up totally different associations, as it reorients the blue splotch and its accompanying text from the field of the calligram to that of the document, and as it insists on the deictic or indexical structure of the work.

"Photo," in other words, insists on the arrival of a piece of the real into the illusionistic space of the canvas; it qualifies the cake of blue paint as heterogenous to the picture's field, thereby making us aware of it not as a kind of generalizable idea-the color blue shared by the other paintings in the series-but as an immovable particular, the nontransposable this of the fly that lands on the lecturer's nose. And in this sense it is less about perfume than about Leiris's idea that the canvases in this series are not so much painted as "dirtied"; which is to say that it opens up to another aspect of the work that Leiris had applauded in 1929, namely Mir6's connection to graffiti.

With graffiti we encounter yet another form of heterogeneity within the field of representation, one that relates to the invasive nature of this type of mark, its criminal character, so to speak, the fact that it is defined by being a violation by the marker of a space that belongs not to him but to another. Thus no matter what the iconic character of the configuration, the graffiti mark is, like the photograph, always structured indexically, as the trace of the marker's passage, a trace that is therefore always a signature, a sign whose signified always reads "Kilroy was here; I was here."

And in being this trace of the marker's violation of the surface, the graffiti alerts us to another feature of the index, namely its performative character. The index, in naming the particular, the "this," in making the referent erupt onto the




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Opposite: Ceci est la couleur de mes reves. 1925.

Left: Sketch of Ceci est la couleur de mes reves. 1970.

page of writing, or onto the surface of the canvas, is not so much generating a meaning as causing something to happen. It belongs less, then, to the logic of signification than it does to the structure of events.

It is this sense of the performative that Leiris evokes when he calls Mir6's paintings malicious pebbles tossed into the pond of reason, an image that stresses not only the character of the works as indexical but also a quite different meaning of the "dream-painting" notion of their surfaces as evanescent. For these stones, in performing their meaning, consume themselves at the same time. Vanishing without trace, they are used up in the very act of enunciation; they are a form of object that does not outlast its use.

This insistence on use-value is, as Hollier has shown, the major feature of the Documents aesthetic. The exchange-value of the object-turned-work of art, as it is propelled into circulation through the museological system, as it leaves the spot where it had a use, sacred or secular, postpones that use indefinitely in favor of a kind of systematic equivalency through which it is formalized: reduced to the common denominator of style, of meaning, of beauty. The attack on exchange value was conducted by both halves of the Documents group, the ethnographers on the one hand, as they deplored the aestheticization not only of tribal objects but of the sacred glyphs from the caves, and the avant-garde on the other, as Bataille set out to theorize that which escapes categorization altogether, that which would collapse any system of equivalency whatever.



16 OCTOBER

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At this point two questions undoubtedly arise, the answers to which are, I believe, extremely intertwined. The first is: given that in 1929 Leiris read Mir6 in terms of use-value, graffiti, and the performative, and further, given that Bataille himself, in a brief notice on Mir6 in Documents in 1930, spoke of his work as informe, is such a reading a kind of pure projection that has nothing to do with how Mir6 himself saw his work? And second: if Mir6 not only welcomed this interpretation but was drawing closer and closer to the anti-aesthetic of Documents, why has this remained, to this day, invisible to the reception of his art?

In answer to the first, we have not only the statements Mir6 made in 1927 to the effect that he wanted to assassinate painting and that "Painting has been in a state of decadence since the time of the caves,"21 but the fact that between 1928 and 1930 he was as good as his word. Not only did he start making little con- structions of objects picked out of garbage cans, not only did he reinforce the indexical aspects of his work, exploiting cast shadow in the hatpin skewered to the surface of his Spanish Dancer (1928), for example, or the nails projecting from the constructed relief of 1930, and welcoming the performative aggressivity that this and the sandpaper surfaces of his collages embodied, but by 1930, in the very paintings Bataille chose to reproduce in Documents as examples of Mir6's success, Mir6 had, in Dupin's words "declared war" not only on painting in general but on his own gifts in particular. Calling these works "bastard, swollen, dried up," Dupin sees Mir6 "touching bottom." The large paintings of 1930, he says, "willed and

21. Cited by Dupin, Mirn, p. 191.




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Opposite left: Spanish Dancer. 1928.

Opposite right: Spanish Dancer. 1928.

Left: Painting. 1930.

fiercely desperate, are like cannon shots fired from a sinking ship. Mir6 expected too much from his energies in assuming large formats; if he had wanted to assassinate painting he has succeeded in destroying himself."22

Addressing one of the pictures Bataille clearly prizes, Dupin deplores its obvious attempt to leave the domain of painting, of art, altogether: "In a Head on white ground of very large scale," he says, "we find furious scribblings, a shower of meteors, angry grooves striating the canvas without being able to release a true creative force. A distraught head, outlined with an awkward gesture, rises in the midst of the painting, as though stuck in the center of an impotent storm."23

As Bataille himself discusses these precipitates of a will to kill off painting, however, he declares that "the decomposition was pushed to the point where nothing remained but some formless blotches on the cover (or, if you prefer, on the gravestone) of painting's box of tricks. Thereafter little colored and mad elements irrupted anew, after which, today, they have disappeared once more in his pictures, leaving only the trace of one knows not what disaster."24 And for Bataille, the painting from 1930 that most Mir6 scholars and collectors now see as the one refugee from this general scene of debacle is no different, no better or worse, than the luckless Head.

If there is a general agreement in the Mir6 reception that 1930 is somehow a write-off in Mir6's artistic trajectory, and if we can show the cause for this in a

22. Ibid., p. 198 23. Ibid. 24. Bataille, "Joan Mir6: Peintures r&centes," Documents, vol. 2, no. 7 (1930), p. 399.



18 OCTOBER

willing collaboration with the Documents position, as Mir6 seemed, like a suicidal moth, to draw closer and closer to the flame of Bataille, why, we might ask, has the silence on this connection been so absolute? Dupin, in approaching this episode of anti-painting, needs to look back to Dada some thirteen years earlier and speculate on Mir6's continuing admiration for Marcel Duchamp. "This idea of anti-painting had haunted Mir6 for a long time," Dupin writes, "but he only now embraced it and took it into his work so consciously and with such determination."25 It does not occur to Dupin to open the pages of Documents and read Bataille.

The universal silence about this episode in Mir6's work stems, I would say, from two things. The first is that, if we were to take account of it, we would be forced not simply to acknowledge what it means for the two years during which Mir6 entered the pages of Documents but as well to grasp what it sanctions in the interpretation of the paintings from the mid-1920s, making them appear not so much as stain paintings, but as stains pure and simple, not so much ideograms as graffiti, not so much dreams as the aggression Mir6 himself claimed for them at the time.

But the second is that, after 1933, the year in which Dupin sees Mir6 having resurfaced after "touching bottom" in 1929-30, Mir6 himself conspired in effacing this reading. This would explain a telltale absence in the drawing Mir6 made for me of Ceci est la couleur de mes r^ves, in which the word "Photo," borne by the original painting, has been omitted in the sketch through which Mir6 remembered it in 1971. In speaking of the work as a "point de depart," the sketch projects, therefore, a very different series to follow from it than does the actual painting. But Mir6 is rewriting his past from the point of view of an artist who was determined to survive, and who must have instinctively felt that, however seductive Bataille's aesthetic of the "real" might have been, however extraordinary the lure of the big toe, he could not embrace it and continue as a painter. So this is a story of a refugee who went to a strange and dangerous shore and almost foundered but was determined to come back. Whether that comeback was then a success or a failure depends, clearly, on one's point of view.

At the outset of this account, I spoke of Lanchner's willingness to write Bataille into the Mir6 record as the one exception to the general state of Mir6 scholarship, with its peculiar condition of either amnesia or repression. And so it is to this exception that I turn here, by way of a coda.

Pointing out that in 1930, some time soon after Bataille had published his "Big Toe" essay in Documents (1929), Mir6 filled an entire sketchbook with drawings circling around this part of the body, Lanchner goes on to say, however, that

25. Dupin, Mir6, p. 191.




-wra. .. . . .. . .. AT iii

Untitled. 1930.

the two men's interests in the big toe "were-to borrow a children's locution- 'the same but different.'"'26 This difference she sees turning, on the one hand, on Bataille's conception of the toe as that part of the human body that resists the idealizing, "humanizing" values that are read into the rest of the body's upright posture and thus-although she doesn't use the term-the toe's "base material- ism," and, on the other hand, on Mir6's concern with the toe as "emblematic of our common humanity, male or female-the support that connects the terrestrial and the celestial. One widely quoted remark," she adds, "makes his view quite clear: 'You must always plant your feet firmly on the ground if you want to be able to jump up in the air.'"27

It is with this notion of "the same but different" that Mir6 is thus removed from a Bataille contagion that would attack the interpretive structure that has been erected for his work. Yet in this specific example, the separation fails to work. For, unlike Mir6's earlier exploitations of the toe for a kind of terrestrial anchoring, the placing of it into this specific context of either a formless round phallicism or an intergenital fascination-as phallic toe pushes, pseudopodia-like, from the amoebic mass of a body consistently centered around flaming vulva- surely ties these drawings to Bataille's notion of base seduction. And further, Bataille's conception of a rearranged and desublimated architecture of the human body in general seems to have had an enduring effect on Mir6's imagina-

26. Lanchner,Joan Mir6, p. 56. 27. Ibid., p. 57.



Woman in Revolt. 1938.

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tion. So that even in the opening years of the 1930s, as he was swimming back upstream toward painting, against the tide of the Documents anti-aesthetic, he found himself repeating almost stroke for stroke some of Bataille's fetish objects. I have in mind particularly a drawing he made in 1933 that incorporates in an extraordinarily precise way the features of those examples of children's graffiti that Bataille published in an article on "Primitive Art," and this in the very pages of Documents that immediately precede his brief review of Mir6 in 1930.

What this absorption of Bataille's conception of the human form means for the rest of Mir6's production is, I would argue, that the toe in particular becomes an organ that will no longer function in the artist's work as the hinge between the earth of peasant honesty and the sky of disembodied thought. The toe, indeed, is where Mir6 will locate what is most unclassifiably monstrous and aberrant, as in an extraordinary drawing of 1938 where a Woman in Revolt extends an engorged foot that will neither rest on the ground nor allow her to surmount its shackles, a foot whose grotesque toe is the woman's pure phallic appendage. It is in a detail such as this that we see the continuing reverberations of Mir6's Bataille connection working away in the background of his thought but made increasingly available to him, no doubt, by the ominous political events now gathering on his horizons. It is this Bataille legacy that commands our attention and urges us to consider "Michel, Bataille et moi."

