Spittle, dust, and flies: documents and tuberculosis in the visual culture of interwar France

Persson, D. (2023) Spittle, dust, and flies: documents and tuberculosis in the visual culture of interwar France. In: Hopkins, D. and Persson, D. (eds.) Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde. Series: Routledge research in art history. Routeldge (Taylor & Francis), pp. 137-162. ISBN 9781003309000 (doi: 10.4324/9781003309000-9)

Abstract

The avant-garde journal Documents (Paris, 1929–1931) was an interdisciplinary endeavour. The editorial board consisted of ethnographers, archaeologists, art collectors, and art historians. Among the regular contributors were a group of recently ex-communicated Surrealists. Dubbed the journal's secrétaire général was Georges Bataille, a notoriously slippery character in the avant-garde scene. The result was eclectic: photographs of a Parisian slaughterhouse, stills from Hollywood films and displays of archaeological finds all shared space. In art historical discourse, following Rosalind Krauss’ formative interpretation of the journal, cemented in the 1980s and 1990s, Documents’ criticality tends to be identified in deconstructionist terms: as a text that enacts a radical displacement of meaning by sabotaging the very processes of meaning-production. Seeking to instead establish a historicised understanding of the journal's critical work, this chapter re-inserts Documents into the visual culture of interwar France and re-interprets it through the pragmatist semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce – a theory that locates the process of semiosis in the social use of signs. Focussing on a specific set of signs reproduced in Documents – ‘spittle’, ‘dust’, and ‘flies’ – that, once identified as the primary vehicles for microbial tuberculosis contagion, circulated widely in public health campaigns, political discourse, and popular culture, this chapter suggests that the critical function they enacted within Documents was fuelled not by a deconstructionist capacity to collapse semiosis but by the very particular, charged currency they carried in culture, subversively re-disseminated to avant-garde ends: a lethal threat to the stability, order, and progress of the Third Republican organism.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Persson, Miss Disa
• Authors: Persson, D.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities
• Publisher: Routeldge (Taylor & Francis)
• ISBN: 9781003309000

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