Bataille Series

Looking at Bataille Series, or, if you are anything like me

Nicole Smythe-Johnson

The first time I saw the drawings that comprise Francisco Gonzalez Castro’s Bataille Series I was a little embarrassed. Embarrassed in that way that causes school children to giggle at the mention of words like breast, penis or vagina. I might have blushed but I am blessedly dark skinned, so no one was the wiser. I’d come to visit Francisco’s apartment and I was kind of accosted by this large scale, unfussy, charcoal drawing of a sex act he was apparently working on in his living room. I remember my eyes being drawn to the drawing over and over, and being further embarrassed by that. I remember being afraid to ask about it, and wondering if I recognized the bodies in the drawing. Was that Francisco and, his partner, Lucy? Who is that bald man? What are they doing there? That looks like it could be quite nice actually. That other one, not so much. 

Here I was, in my friends’ apartment, a place I had spent many hours, sharing many intimacies and I was scandalized by a new (and fairly banal) idea. They must have sex here! What kind of sex do they have? What do these bodies look like without clothes? Like that? Do they wonder about my body without clothes? About my sex? Is that okay? Why is this embarrassing? 

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t often discuss sex with friends, my own sex life or theirs. Occasionally, we might share a generalization— “I fucked Tom, it was good (or bad),” “He was gentle (or adventurous, or fumbling, or practiced),” “I haven’t had sex in ages” etc— but that’s as far as it goes. Exactly what I did with Tom, how it felt and so on, is generally between Tom and I. Now that I have committed to having sex with only one person for the foreseeable future, I talk about sex even less. Outside of the confines of that partnership, sex is more taboo than it’s ever been. It’s almost as though, to maintain that covenant, its necessary to not only not have sex with others, but also to not think about it with others. That’s the thing about sex, we like to think of it as a physical thing, something we do with our bodies, but it is so much more. Sex requires us to bring our whole human self to the table, the thinking, the feeling, the sensing, imagining human self. As Sylvia Wynter has noted, we, human beings, are bios and logos. We are mere animals, biological organisms, but also the combination of stories and ideas we have about our animal selves. We are made, through an evolutionary and biological process, but also, we make ourselves.

It may have taken me two or three visits to finally ask about Francisco’s drawing. I think it was the one of three people, two men and a woman with the woman astride one man, her back to the viewer, while the other tentatively touches a lock of her hair. I can’t be sure, I’ve now seen so many of the drawings that it’s hard to be sure which was the first. Francisco was happy to talk about it. He told me about reading French philosopher Georges Bataille’s novels, first Madame Edwarda and then Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon, and My Mother. In reading the series of erotic novels, he found himself imagining passages from the texts in great detail, and eventually being drawn to render them. First, he wrote the passages out by hand, then he made sketches based on the passages, then he invited friends to be models for drawings of each figure, then he composed the final scene. These final compositions would then exist in three forms- a large scale charcoal drawing, a smaller drawing and a copy of that smaller drawing, made with red carbon paper. That first evening when I asked Francisco about his drawings, I was taken by the repetition of the process. It seemed to me to parallel my own attempts to understand why these works occurred to me as intensely as they did, a process that required a going over and over, examining the feelings and sensations that emerged as I looked, trying to track them, to make sense of them. The primal and childlike, the intense and the playful, the mental and physical machinations they initiate. And of course, their seduction. Now that I think of it, I might describe my best sexual experiences in the same terms. I have never been attracted to pornographic images, moving or still, but I love erotic literature. It just does it for me. And that’s about as far as I’ve taken my thoughts on it. What is the “it” it does? I cannot (will not?) say. I leave you to imagine. That’s as close as we’ll get in these few words, let us keep it a work of imagination. Enough about me, back to these drawings. 

That’s what these drawings do. They invite you into yourself, and maybe through there, into (an)other(s). They ask you to imagine, and when you imagine, you may begin to feel (physically and emotionally). And if you are among others, also imagining and feeling, you may begin to see them and sense them in a new way. In a way related to what we think of as “sexually,” but that word may acquire some additional breadth. And you may wonder about it, you may also wander into it. Into that idea, that feeling, that sense, that person or people. If you are brave enough, adventurous enough, safe enough. It has the potential to be something new, something embarrassing, or satisfying, or tantalizing, or all of the above. No matter what though, it will be deeply human, in a way that is so basic, but also transgressive. That is, if you are anything like me. 

Francisco González Castro (Santiago, Chile, 1984) Artist, researcher and writer. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (2006) and a Master of Arts (2009) from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. PhD in Arts (2017), mention in Visual Arts, at the same institution. As an artist he has developed his work from 2005 to date with exhibitions and presentations, solo and group, both in Chile and abroad (Sweden, Germany, Spain, France, United States, Mexico, Lebanon, Peru, among others). In his works and research he addresses social and political issues around power and reflections on the usefulness of art as an element of concrete change in society and within the contingency, positioning the concept of the political-artistic. The projects En Medio / art and society (2012), En Medio / art and contingency (2014) and Layers of disappearance: 1002 of 7000 (2016) stand out. He has also presented his research in various congresses and journals in Chile and abroad. He has published the books Performance Art en Chile: historias, procesos y discursos (2016) together with Leonora López and Brian Smith, and Mario Pedrosa y el CISAC: Configuraciones afectivas, artísticas y políticas (2019) together with Lucy Quezada and Claudia Cofré, both books in Editorial Metales Pesados. In addition, he has published his texts in edited books from different countries. 

Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator from Kingston, Jamaica. She has written for Flash Art, Terremoto, Jamaica Journal and several other regional and international publications. She has also been editor of Caribbean Quarterly, the University of the West Indies' flagship journal of culture. Smythe-Johnson worked on several exhibitions as Senior Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, and has independently curated exhibitions in the US and the Caribbean. Most recently, she was Assistant Curator on “John Dunkley: Neither Day Nor Night” (2017-2019), an exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.