Documenting A Revolution Of Thought

It lasted for only a year in the late 1920s, and only 15 issues were ever printed, but Georges Bataille’s controversial and provocative magazine, Documents stands as one of the most influential publications of the 20th century. “Conceived as a ‘war machine against received ideas’, Documents drew in several dissident surrealists such as Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert Desnos and André Masson. As, in his own words, surrealism’s ‘old enemy from within’, Bataille was uncompromising in his disdain for art as a panacea and a substitute for human experience, his problem remaining ‘the place that surrealism gave to poetry and painting: it placed the work before being’.”