Luquet's conviction that the art of children and the art of primitive man form a single category, one which contests the values of "civilized" art, was undoubtedly what interested Georges Bataille and drew him to review Luquet's book in the magazine Documents.21 At the point, however, where Bataille sharply diverges from Luquet's benign view of the forces at work behind the development of primitive figuration, we can start to take the measure of the attack launched by this wing of the radical avant-garde on the art-for-art's-sake view of primitivism. Since, as I will argue, Bataille's attitude had a great deal to do with shaping Giacometti's ultimate conception and use of primitive material it is worth attending to his criticism of Luquet.
Luquet presents the child as having no initial figurative intentions but rather as taking pure pleasure in manifesting his own presence by dragging his dirty fingers along walls or covering white sheets of paper with scrawls. Having made these marks, the child later begins to invest parts of them with representational value. With this "reading" of the lines he has made, the child is eventually able to repeat the images voluntarily. Since the basis of the interpretation is enormously schematic, what is involved is the connection of a mark with the idea of an object, a process that has to do with conception and not with resemblance. For this reason Luquet calls primitive figuration intellectual realism, reserving the term visual realism for the Western adult's preoccupation with mimesis.
Luquet's presentation of the development of prehistoric cave painting follows the same schema as that of the present-day child: random marking changes gradually to intentional patterning, which in turn gives rise to a figurative reading. Resemblance to external objects having been first "recognized" within the nonfigurative patterns it can be elaborated and perfected over time.
In Luquet's program, then, an absolute freedom and pleasure initiates the impulse to draw; it is this instinct, not the desire to render reality, that is primal. On top of this foundation a procedure is gradually built for adjusting the mark to the conditions of representation, and within this a "system" of figuration develops with consistent characteristics over the entire domain of primitive art, whether that be the drawings of children, graffittists, aborigines, or peasants. Characteristics like the profiles of faces endowed with two eyes and two ears, or the rendering of houses and bodies as transparent in order to display their contents, or the free combination of plan and elevation, are what remain unchanged through the practice of "intellectual realism." In Luquet's scheme, knowledge is thus generously added to pleasure.
Of course, the chronology of prehistoric art does not support Luquet's cheerful progressivism. The caves of Lascaux, with their astonishing naturalism, precede the much cruder renderings of later periods. Yet if Bataille draws his reader's attention to this obvious flaw in Luquet's scheme, it is not for reasons of historical accuracy but in order to assert something that had already become a staple of his thinking throughout his editorship of Documents, and was to continue beyond. What Bataille points to is the unequal mode of representation, within the same period, of animals and men. "The reindeer, the bison, or the horses," Bataille attests, "are represented with such perfect detail, that if we were able to see as scrupulously faithful images of the men themselves, the strangest period of the avatars of humanity would immediately cease being the most inaccessible. But the drawings and sculptures that are charged with representing the Aurignacians themselves are almost all informe and much less human than those that represent the animals; others like the Hottentot Venus are ignoble caricatures of the human form. This opposition is the same in the Magdalenian period."22
It is because "this crude and distorting art has been reserved for the human figure," that Bataille insists on its willfulness, on its status as a kind of primal vandalism wrought on the images of men. Indeed, Bataille wishes to substitute destructiveness for Luquet's serene view of the pleasure principle at work at the origin of the impulse to draw. The child's marking on walls, his scrawls on paper, all proceed from a wish to destroy or mutilate the support. In each subsequent stage of the development charted by Luquet, Bataille sees the enactment of new desire to alter and deform what is there before the subject: "Art, since it is incontestably art, proceeds in this way by successive destructions. Thus insofar as it liberates instincts, these are sadistic."23
The term that Bataille finds to generalize the phenomenon of sadism in both children's art and that of the caves is alteration, and this word, in the precision of its ambivalence, is characteristic of Bataille. Alteration derives from the Latin alter, which by opening equally onto a change of state and a change (or advancement) of time, contains the divergent significations of devolution and evolution. Bataille points out that alteration describes the decomposition of cadavers as well as "the passage to a perfectly heterogeneous state corresponding to . . . the tout autre, that is, the sacred, realized for example by a ghost."24 Alteration—which Bataille uses to describe the primal impulse of man's self-representation—thus becomes a concept that simultaneously leads downward and upward: like altus and sacer, the double-directed, primal concepts that interested Freud. The primal, or originary, is therefore irresolvably diffuse— fractured by an irremediable doubleness at the root of things that was, in his closeness to Nietzsche's thought, dear to Bataille. In its confounding of the logic that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar opposites, it is this play of the contradictory that allows one to think the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of death; and that it is impossible for any moment of true intensity to exist apart from a cruelty that is equally extreme.25
Bataille is well aware that the civilized Westerner might wish to maintain himself in a state of ignorance about the presence of violence within ancient religious practice, so that he either does not notice or does not reflect upon the significance of the deformed anthropoids that appear in the caves, or so that he aestheticizes the whole of African art. In the first essay that he wrote on primitive civilization Bataille remarked this resistance on the part of scholars to acknowledge what is hideous and cruel in the depiction of the gods of certain peoples. The text, included in a collection of ethnological essays occasioned by the first major exhibition of pre-Columbian art in Paris (1928), was called "L'Amérique disparue," and in it Bataille tried to understand the reality behind the representation of the Aztec gods, depicted as caricatural, monstrous, and deformed.26 Although his knowledge of pre-Columbian culture was still rather superficial, his analysis proved to be extremely prescient, according to the ethnologist Alfred Métraux as he looked back on this early performance of Bataille's.27 For what Bataille could read into these images was the presence of malign and dissembling gods, trickster gods to whom was dedicated a religious fervor in which pitiless cruelty combined with black humor to create a culture of delirium: "Doubtless, a bloodier eccentricity was never conceived by human madness: crimes continually committed in broad sunlight for the sole satisfaction of god-ridden nightmares, of terrifying ghosts! The priests' cannibalistic repasts, the ceremonies with cadavers and rivers of blood—more than one historical happening evokes the stunning debaucheries described by the illustrious Marquis de Sade."28 Broadening the reference from Mexico to de Sade was characteristic of the intellectual field common to 1920s ethnological thinking (particularly in the circle around Marcel Mauss), with its focus on the violent performance of the sacred in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

Hey, thanks for sticking through this far! I hate to tell you this, but the rest of this exhibit is under construction. Please check back occasionally for updates, including many more images. If you can't wait for the rest of the essay, go buy Ms. Krauss' book, I even gave you a link up front to amazon.com...