When Georges Bataille founded his groundbreaking “literary and anthropological revue,” Documents, in 1929, he was reacting to a shift in the practice of Surrealism. An early and enthusiastic member of Breton’s clique, Bataille soon came to find his dictatorial style, his authoritarian mandates (no homosexuality, no challenging Breton), and his philosophically arbitrary designations stifling. With Documents, Bataille articulated a definitive break, reaching for what he termed a kind of sousrealism, concerned with the baser (and thus – for Bataille – more truthful) nature of things. In this, Bataille is a self-confessed heir to the Marquis de Sade, whose idealized depravity subverted the classical preciosity of the 18th century. Like Sade, Bataille’s aesthetic experiments explored the idea of fetish alongside conceptions of dominance, submission and power. Early issues of Documents feature photographs of the African Other encountering an eroticized submissive in a sadomasochistic transaction. This not only problematized the central question of the dominant and the dominated, but implicitly coded the viewer’s gaze as either dominant or submissive. Furthermore, by presenting his revue as an anthropological and artistic endeavor, Bataille gave Documents a certain ontological, pseudo-scientific depth, a holism that exceeded the presentation of a specific aesthetic perspective and approached a more fully integrated worldview.

KRATOS — ABOUT (IL)LEGITIMATE(D) POWER, the exhibition curated by Raphael Gygax on view at Team Gallery through the end of this week, engages explicitly with ideas of power. Showcasing multiple works by several, very different artists, KRATOS focuses on the oscillation between submission and dominance, between seeing and being seen. For my purposes, I’ll focus on two artists, Maria Eichhorn and Maja Bajevic.

Maria Eichhorn’s series of photographs entitled Prohibited Imports is the show’s most engaging work. These are images taken of a Robert Mapplethorpe catalog after Japanese customs officials sanded away the material they considered objectionable. This has the odd effect of heightening the baroque realism common to Mapplethorpe’s work. Slightly wary of shows with such explicit titles, I was thankful for the location of these photos so near the entrance, setting up the subtlety and intelligence of the curatorial effort. Of course, a conscious effort must be made to focus on these, as Maja Bajevic’s very aggressive video threatens to overwhelm, on which more later.

In any case Eichhorn’s photos are worth it, the first of which, Mr. 10 1/2, is Mapplethorpe’s famous side view of Mark Stevens, head out of the frame, bent over a table and clad in, faute de mieux, assless leather chaps. The joke, of course, is in knowing where we all immediately look. You’ll be disappointed, because where Mr. 10 1/2‘s 10 1/2 ought to be there is a sort of etched-looking white blur, where the customs agents had sanded away the image, seeming to reveal a light shining from beneath it. This kind of teasing, flirtatious dialogue is the first moment in a lighthearted process of visual seduction. Beneath this archness, though, there is something deeper at play. The S/M signifiers, the submissive pose, the subject’s decapitation by the frame, all create a network of deferred submission and refracted power. In the explicit blurring of the most obvious symbol of sexual dominance in the picture – what, by rights, out to be the locus of that whole network – Eichhorn offers a found object that captures an established matrix of power rejecting an emerging one. Like Bataille, she understands that truly transgressive work does not simply invert established symbolic hierarchies, it occludes them.

This kind of parrying of expectation is the central fascination of Eichhorn’ documents. Helmut NYC 1978 changes the position of the gaze and goes further by questioning what is– and should– be deflected. Here we are presented with a posterior, bent before us in a leather harness. Here the viewer is in an even more explicit position of power but this time, our dominant gaze is deflected by a leather strap covering the anus, blocking it from our penetrating view. The subject’s sex is again blurred out by the glimmering edge, so that even as the viewer’s power is refused, the object protects its autonomy, even, bizarrely and wonderfully, its privacy. In outsourcing the activity of authorship, to customs officials, no less, Eichorn reactivates the implications of this unconsummated desire. Mapplethorpe’s images become poignant, achieving, for a second time, a prescience of the looming AIDS epidemic. We are again confronted with interaction of illness with desire, which, in turn, informs our understanding of the dominant relationships in play.

Eichhorn manages to convey a deep level of emotional abstraction while maintaining a tongue-and-cheekiness that borders, endearingly, on camp. This constant dash of humor is essential when dealing with such a ponderous subject, and where Eichorn succeeds in finding the Sadean humor in Big Brother’s response to the sexually transgressive, she is the strongest and most convincing of the artists on display.

Perhaps it’s a lingering Marina Abramovic hangover, but Maja Bajevic’s How do you want to be governed? struck me as reductive and disingenuous. Hanging proudly at the back wall of the gallery, the video depicts woman’s face gazing out, her eyes refusing to meet the spectator’s gaze. A male hand intrudes upon the frame, fondling her face, now kindly, now sensually, now violently, as a man’s voice intones, in varying cadences, “How do you want to be governed?”. It’s about gender, it’s about power, it’s about violence, it’s about systemic social dominance. There. It’s all perfectly tiresome, with not a dash of wit or passion. When Abramovic allowed a gallery crowd to manipulate her body with any number of objects, including a loaded gun, she was conveying, with urgency and pathos, the same questions about power, human instincts, aggression and passivity. Bajevic’s video’d abstraction, 30 years later, feels joyless and flat. Her blank face is a fair reflection of how I felt standing in front of it.

It’s possible, in the contrast between Eichhorn and Bajevic’s pieces, to hear an echo of the division between Breton and Bataille. Both engaged the same issues, but one did so in a way that felt refreshingly complicated, while the other relied on the tired authority of history. Though the latter was louder and harder to avoid, the subtlety of Eichhorn’s documents, like those of Bataille before her, are more likely to be remembered.

Multiple Transgressions: Eichhorn and Bajevic at TEAM

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