Towards a Base Materialism of the Art School

This visual essay used found images alongside original AV footage to outline a base materialism of the neoliberal art school, alongside its anarchical general economy which exceeds the restricted economy of current ‘economised’ (Brown 2015) curricula and managerialism. This reading is conducted via Georges Bataille's ideas of base materialism. Bataille’s 1929 essay ‘The Big Toe’ explains that the abject responses solicited by this digit emerge from a broader psycho-social logocentrism which equates dirt, darkness, and baseness as principles of evil, to be repressed accordingly, as Hell is to the Heavens or Eden. Inversely, cleanliness, light, and celestial space embody the just, and approximate the elevated gait that distinguishes human beings from primates and other beasts. Paradoxically, its aberrancies, which are minimised or aestheticised in classical figurative painting, are also what demarcates our humanity. Our disgust with images such as Boiffard’s (above) is partly produced from ‘the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse’. Bataille’s concept of base materialism undercuts all ideals and idealisms with its ontology of dirt and debris, but also radically exceeds the restricted economy of Marxist political economy. In an era where university vice-chancellors attempt to seduce the next generations of art school students with signature buildings and the latest studio gadgetry, our video essay forwards an alternative base materialism of the art school, which counterposes splinters, paint stains, chemical burns, cigarette ash, violent protest, and cirrhosis of the liver, to the strictly regulated and disciplinary space of the contemporary neoliberal art school, whose restricted economy is realised spatially in the glass and steel aesthetic of the vanity projects of university vice chancellors.