Tag: Georges Bataille

Weekend links 60

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Jean Genet (1950) by Leonor Fini.

• Bibliothèque Gay looks at a series of erotic engravings made by Leonor Fini for La Galère (1947) by Jean Genet. The author reciprocated with Mademoiselle: A Letter to Leonor Fini. At the hetero end of the erotic spectrum, Tate Liverpool will be showing a series of drawings by René Magritte produced for a proposed edition of Madame Eduarda by Georges Bataille. René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle opens next month.

• George Clinton will be appearing with Nona Hendryx at the British Library on 18th June, to talk about “all things galactic”. In addition there’s a screening of John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History, a documentary about Afrofuturism and black science fiction. See an introduction to that here. Related: the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has acquired the Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership for its collection.

• RIP Gil Scott-Heron. “Why does this colossus remain relatively unknown? Is he too political? Too uncompromising? Too angry? Too satirical? Too painful? Too playful? Too alive? Too black? Too human?” Jamie Byng in Gil Scott-Heron: poet, campaigner and America’s rough healer.

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Le Fils du Maçon (1950) by Leonor Fini.

• China Miéville examines alternative histories in Brian Aldiss’s The Malacia Tapestry, David Britton’s Lord Horror and Richard Curtis’s chilling dystopia, Notting Hill.

• What happened to Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettmann when the Kosmische Musik dream collapsed? Find out here.

• Mlle Ghoul interviews Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction about horror paperbacks, good and bad.

• Another Surrealist woman: Claude Cahun at Strange Flowers.

• The Key of Hell: an eighteenth-century sorcery manual.

• Partitura 001: realtime sound visualisation.

• Scientific Illustration: a Tumblr.

• Cosmic Slop (1973) by Funkadelic | Cosmic Slop (1991) by Material.

Surrealism at the Hayward

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Something I’ll definitely be going to see, especially given the emphasis on Georges Bataille. Above: André Masson’s cover design for the first issue of Bataille’s Acéphale (1937).

UNDERCOVER SURREALISM: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille. The Hayward Gallery, London, 11 May–31 Jul 2006.

This major Surrealist show, curated by Surrealism specialist Dawn Ades, documents the extraordinary cross-currents of Paris in the late 1920s, through painting, film, sculpture, music, photography, masks, ritual objects – all subject to the provocative vision of Georges Bataille.

Featuring works by Miró, Dalí, Giacometti, Brancusi, Boiffard, de Chirico, Arp, Nadar and Ernst, and an entire room of works by Picasso, it brings together loans from major collections around the world.

Bataille waged war on the “idealism” of the Surrealist movement, using his famous magazine DOCUMENTS as his weapon. Undercover Surrealism takes his magazine’s subversive juxtapositions as its starting point, and shows how Bataille unflinchingly exposed the raw underbelly of the human creative impulse.

The Hayward Gallery first explored Surrealism almost 30 years ago in its legendary 1978 show, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, co-curated by Dawn Ades. Ades, now regarded as one of the world’s greatest Surrealism experts, returns to curate this exhibition.