Destabilising forces

‘Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille’ is the subtitle of the latest extravaganza at the Hayward Gallery. Georges Bataille (1897–1962) is one of those buzz figures, beloved of the moment, without a quote from whom no contemporary art-speak catalogue introduction is complete. He has been influential as a philosopher as well as a writer (he penned a minor cult classic called Story of the Eye), and as a worthy opponent of André Breton, the self-styled Pope of Surrealism. Between 1929 and 1930 Bataille edited a radical surrealist magazine called Documents, which offered a heady mix of art and archaeology, ethnography and popular culture. This show is an examination of French culture through the lens of that magazine — an ideas-based exhibition if there ever was one.

Curators who ride exhibitions waving banners of theory often need to be treated with the gravest suspicion, for it is the exhibits which make a good exhibition, not the ideas they may (or may not) embody.