Ana Mazzei: Desmascarado e Nu

Presentation :

Deformations of horses. The combination of ethnology, aesthetics, philosophy and writing. Not literary in any ordinary, or even extraordinary, sense of the word. Anti-aesthetic. Ethnology gave the lead: it was not concerned with the beautiful. ??Boring though it be to repeat it, ethnography is interested in both beauty and ugliness, in the European sense of these absurd words. It is however inclined to be suspicious of the beautiful - a rare, and consequently a freakish, event in civilization». New ethnography aimed to show all of man. Emerging disciplines devoted to understanding «primitive» social structures. No distinction was made between high and low culture; only their usefulness to understanding was significant. Vigorous relativism to extremes on occasion, often in the service of satire and derision if logic masks the gaping inadequacies of the logos, to expose all the contradictions, chose both to uphold logic and to remove the MASK. An immediate political task being to define possible structures not based on individualism, totalitarianism or the feeble cohesion of democracies - A parody or anti-idealist version of renaissance depictions of the harmonic arrangement of the human body - The celebrated aphorism of hermetic philosophy «AS ABOVE, SO BELOW» situated man in a universe designed by God in which the structure of the microcosm reflected that of the macrocosm. A heretic exalting the base over the spiritual in a universe in which «man can set aside the thought that it is he or God who keeps the rest of things from being absurd» - the body is projected onto the world: AS BELOW, SO ABOVE. The body as trope for society and other structures recurs throughout his writing (e.g. Architecture), in particular with regard to the sexual act and orgasm, from which he derived his concept of expenditum. A doomed attempt to encompass the tumult of the sexual act. Exceptionally scarce, usually ambiguous, and often deliberately inaccurate. A ?VOYAGE OUT OF THE WORLD?. «It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. It is too late to be reasonable and educated, which has led to a life without appeal.» Furthermore: «A world that cannot be loved to the point of death, in the same way that a man loves a woman. (?) If it is compared to worlds gone by, it is hideous, and appears as the most failed of all.» Assume within oneself perversion and crime, not as exclusive values, but as a prelude to their integration into the totality of humanity. «Do not acknowledge anybody, do not speak to anybody, and take a seat at some distance from other travellers?. VERS UN NOUVEAU MYTHE? Premonitions et defiances. Economic and political chaos. An even longer hiatus. Enthousiasme; Bataille: Erotisme, Extase; Breton: Enfantin, Esquimau, Etoile; Brunius: Ectoplasme; Chavy: Erotin; Chenon: Euclide; Duits: Eloge; Ferry: Emeraude, Enclume, Escrocs, Estime; Lebel: Education, Engels, Epicier, Estorgissement, Exposition; Waldberg (Isabelle): Eclat. Unfortunate dualities (profane/sacred, homogeneity/heterogeneity, accumulation/expenditure, thought/eroticism). Not exactly a coherent philosophical system (nor for that matter a religious, political or ethical one), contradictions, images, poetry and fiction to convey meaning. As a conflation of philosophical speculation and prose poetry the moral, ethical and political issues affecting the individual within a social context. «The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space». Emerging bourgeoisie war, alienation, slavery and the destruction of community on the social scale, and loss of communication and intimacy on the level of the individual.

Economic slavery luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity...?Religion (Escrocs, Existence, Extasiee), State (Emancipation, Etat, Expiation), Army (Emulation), Education and Philosophy (Education, Evidence, Essence, Explication), not to mention the niceties of bourgeois existence (Edifiant, Elegie, Eloge). Homogeneous comprehension only destroys what it wishes to seize, the heterogeneous is unassimilable, it crumbles when exposed to the exhalations of the «frock-coated» professors.  And how should one respond to their efforts? By «the excretion of unassimilable elements, which is another way of stating vulgarly that a burst of laughter is the only imaginable and definitively terminal result?. The fly on the orator?s nose in Human Face. «A way of thinking whose movement corresponds to the concrete character of the totality that is offered for selection». One can sense unease with such an apparently tenuous and arbitrary method which, in fact, is either absent from the book or tautological. The more «civilized» a society, the «cleaner» it is, history itself being simply a record of the progressive negations of all givens, and the primary given for man is nature. (Even its buildings are a repressive imposition of form on nature: Architecture).

* Excerpts from the introduction of Alastair Brotchie for the 1995 edition of Encyclopaedia Acephalica (Atlas Arkhive) by Georges Bataille, reissued by the publisher Atlas Press (London).

Extraits tirés du processus de recherche au cours de la conversation entre l?artiste Ana Mazzei et le commissaire Bruno Mendonça pour l?exposition ?Desmascarado e Nu?.