Surrealism

Exhibitions of Surrealist art just come and go. The Hayward Gallery has mounted a new show, entitled 'Undercover Surrealism'. The show focuses on a magazine, Documents, edited by the notorious Georges Bataille. This was a weird enough product of such confusing times and a better title would have been Connections, which is what Bataille above all sought to establish as a process in surrealism. The reliance on primitive cultures as source material for Surrealist antics is the most acceptable ploy of Bataille. But it is two-edged as a process, which lays open the current civilisation to ridicule, or that was the intention. By contrast, it is the Hayward Gallery itself that comes off best as the receptacle for weird goings on. The exhibition runs through 30 July.