The paintings of Stieg Persson
EXCREMENTAL CULTURE The French philosopher-poet Georges Bataille (described by Andre Breton as an "excremental philosopher" due to his assertion that shit was a sublime substance) once asked, "Is our being ineluctably the negation as well as the affirmation of its own principle?" In Bataille's eyes, our experience of life is inextricably interwoven with death. Desire, our very life force, is simultaneously an impulse towards dissolution and decay 1
Following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Bataille's was a profoundly anticlassical sensibility which liked to remind us of the interpenetration of reason and bestial unreason. In place of the classical icons: Spirit, Mind, the Light of Reason, Bataille gives us excrement, flies, ruptured eyes, the "rotten sun". But filth does not "replace" God; there is no new excremental hierarchy. Instead we are reminded that there is something which eternally disrupts our anxious desire for order. Putrefaction does not replace gold, but is seen instead a process rather than a fetish object.2 A paradoxical process where death and dissolution are necessary to bring forth new life:
Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things. Blindfolded, we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind. We refuse to see that life is the trap set for the balanced order, that life is nothing but instability and disequilibrium. Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion.3
Our insatiable desire, our inability to be content with whatever we have achieved, is an intimation of a profound impulse which is only fully satisfied in death, and is most satisfied in life with the "little death".
CORRUPT MINIMALISM But our rational... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline