Acéphale
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Acéphale (brainless) was a splinter group from the core of the Surrealism movement in Paris.
Founded by Georges Bataille, the group was a secret society interested in instigating a new religion. Due to their secret nature, little is known about the group.
Though not central to group activities, Bataille was fascinated with human sacrifice, and planned to ritually sacrifice his lover. Though an indemnity was offered to an executioner, one was never found.
The group published five issues of a review named, Acéphale from 1936 to 1939.
They also published Encyclopaedia Da Costa (Da Costa Encyclopédique) meant to coincide with the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, but due to printing delays, the encyclopedia was not distributed until months after the exhibition ended. Ironically modelled after the format of a conventional encyclopedia, it lambasted social and individual conventions with an unprecedented fervor, as well as perpetrating more recondite clusters of ideas.
Perhaps its most insolent entry was the "License to Live", a faux governmental form requesting vital statistics from the bearer in order to enforce its legal fiat; the penalty for failing to keep the document "in order" was death. It is most likely another invention of the mind of Marcel Duchamp, typographer for the Encyclopaedia Da Costa, and a gesture that, in keeping with the best of Surrealism, had no obvious relationship to the art object as it is commonly known. A precursor to "License to Live" appears in an earlier note in Duchamp's Green Box, published in 1934 but written 20 years earlier, where he imagines a society in which people must pay for the air they breathe.
By the end of the century the encyclopedia fell into obscurity, partly because those who created it actively discouraged interested parties from procuring copies.
[edit] Works
- Stephan Moebius, Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie, Konstanz 2006.
