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Journal Central

We regard how or where the contemporary art from the 20 century to today cross and can cross Georges Bataille's thinking that is violent and extreme. The exposition Formless: a user's guide, which Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois had organized in the Centre Pompidou in 1996, could widen the possibility of the connection between the contemporary art and Georges Bataille. They comprehend that Bataille's thinking is based on the downward shift because Bataille develops his thinking by the concept of the bottom. This is not the bottom opposed to the top in the binary system, but the dynamic relationship between the top and the bottom. Although Bataille's thinking is riddled with the violence and the extremity like the death, the transgression, the eroticism, the aversion, they are not comprehensible in the binary system. From this aspect, this study regard the opposing relationship like the love and the hate between the contemporary art and Bataille, and then the position in which the contemporary art cross Bataille's thinking out of the binary system. This bottom is considered as the ‘lower than～’ in this study. From the three axes like ‘bottom and top’, ‘dissimilation and assimilation’, and ‘other and one’, we regard how Lucio Fontana's <La fin de Dieu>, Cindy Sherman's <Untitled #175>, Andres Serrano's <Piss Christ>, Edward Ruscha's <Liquid words>, and Maurizio Cattelan's <Him> could be comprehensible by the vision of Bataille's ‘bottom’. This thinking of Bataille could be regarded as a single tissue of Merleau-Ponty and as the infinite relationship between the teacher and the student that Maurice Blanchot said. This means that the centre of the ‘me’ is disappeared and that ‘me’ and ‘you’ make a single tissue in the infinite relationship. The works of the contemporary art that inquire into the existence of the human being through the mix of ‘me’ and ‘you’, or the mix of ‘one’ and ‘other’, or the mix of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, or the mix of ‘homogeneity’ and ‘heterogeneity’ could be comprehensible by Bataille's thinking. This relationship between the contemporary art and Bataille could be also regarded as the lower love(hate) than the love(hate).

formless, high, low, assimilation, dissimilation, one, other, lower than～