Sylvia Bataille (nee Maklès, 1908–1993) was a Romanian-Jewish French film actor married to philosopher Georges Bataille and, later and until his death, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Despite being married to two of the most radical intellectuals of the 20th century, and both men prolific writers, Sylvia Bataille remains largely unknown. Sylvia Bataille’s biography takes shape through a small number of articles, interviews, and obituaries, her story told in a few short pages within her husbands’ lengthy biographies. The facts are so few that any telling of it necessitates construction into what quickly becomes an embellished fiction. Georges Bataille never wrote a word about Sylvia Bataille, save perhaps that in his novel Blue of Noon (1957), the character of Edith is allegedly modeled after her. Once, in 1955, Lacan dedicated a lecture to Sylvia Bataille. In 1928 and at the age of nineteen Sylvia Maklès wed a thirty-year-old Georges Bataille. Her three sisters also married into the center of this French intellectual and artistic circle—Bianca Maklès to Théodore Fraenkel, Simone Maklès to Jean Piel, and Rose Maklès to André Masson. It was during her marriage to Georges Bataille that Sylvia Bataille first appeared in film as the voice of a rabbit in the animated feature Le Roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox). Sylvia and Georges Bataille separated in 1934, six years after marrying and four years after the birth of their only child, Laurence Bataille. They remained legally wed until 1946. Over a brief but concentrated period between 1930 and the onset of World War II, Sylvia Bataille appeared in more than twenty films. She was awarded the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti in 1939, an annual award given to the most promising young French actress. Her first big leading role came in 1936 as the female protagonist in Jean Renoir’s acclaimed Une Partie de Campagne (A Day in the Country).

It would be ten years until the film was released. In 1938 Sylvia Bataille began a relationship with a married Jacques Lacan. Two years later and shortly after the German army invaded Paris, a pregnant Sylvia Bataille fled the city for the south of France. In the summer of 1941 she gave birth to a daughter by Lacan, Judith. Lacan and his first wife Marie-Louise Blondin would divorce by the end of the year. Sylvia Bataille acted in only a handful of films after the war, making her final appearance on screen in 1950. On July 17, 1953, Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille married. Besides an eponymous 2013 French biography described by its publisher as a roman biographique, the most substantial account of Sylvia Bataille is a doctoral thesis by Jamer Hunt, submitted to the Department of Philosophy at Rice University in 1995. Piecing together the minimal biographical information on Sylvia Bataille, Hunt builds a narrative that verges on creative non-fiction. The bulk of his paper is a personal and obsessive search for Sylvia Bataille taking the form of journal entries that chronicle attempts to gain access to her. Hunt’s dissertation culminates with their sole interview, conducted in her Paris apartment in 1993. “I don’t have much to tell. I feel very bad for you,” Sylvia Bataille self-effacingly and acerbically tells her interviewer. The least specious sections of the text are those in which Hunt weaves in documents such as film reviews of Une Partie de Campagne and a selection of obituaries from French newspapers. The cited film reviews, nearly all authored by men, conflate Sylvia Bataille and the character she plays—the critics’ apparent fetishization of her image mirroring Hunt’s own. What appears throughout these fragments is a perpetual reference to and reduction of Sylvia Bataille to her face or eyes. Projecting sensuality, desire, and eroticism onto her face, they cut her up (admittedly, taking cue from Renoir’s cinematography and frequent use of the close-up). Crucially, it is Sylvia Bataille’s face that is excised and not that of her character Henriette Dufor. What we are dealing with here, what Hunt encourages we take as historical record, is only ever fantasy.

Sylvia Bataille haunts. True to form, in her ghost-like haunting she is a blur. Just when she appears most clearly, when the edges of her life come into view, her figure falls away. In this respect, historical research carried out in her name can do little more than add to the fantasy of Sylvia Bataille. This exhibition is bound by the same constraints. But as a conscious effort to add to this fantasy it is also a stopgap—an attempt to let the blur of Sylvia Bataille spread out and swell without getting more diffuse.

Works in the exhibition:

Sound:

Dirty Mirrors (Frank Lutz, John Miller, and Aura Rosenberg)
Ballad of Sylvia Bataille, 2015
Recorded by John Miller live at Frank’s place, August 23, 2015
Text and music: Lutz/Miller/Rosenberg
Guitar and vocals: Lutz
Guitar: Miller
Piano and vocals: Rosenberg

Entryway:

Michel Auder
Blind Sex, 1983
1/2" Betamax video SP to digital video SD, color, and sound
5:16 minutes

Clockwise from entrance:

Harry Dodge
The Virtual is not Immaterial (Plastic Sunset/External Anus), 2015
Concrete, galvanized bolts, galvanized nuts, Plexiglas, clamps, urethane resin, paint, oil-based Varathane, sock, wood, pic, India ink, and graphite

Matt Wycoff
Untitled (For Lindsey), 2015
Silver gelatin print and archival pigment print

John Miller and Aura Rosenberg
Sylvia Bataille, 2015
PowerPoint
6:11 minutes

Justin Lieberman, Mariah Robertson, and Stephanie Weber
Stephanie's title:
A former curatorial assistant from The Museum of Modern Art relieving herself of all real substance so that the artist, and you, his sycophantic followers, may speak of her in the most crude terms. However, the inhuman monstrosity called forth by this voiding does not belong to you. Rather it bears the seed of your eventual destruction.
Mariah's title:
Justin Lieberman, you are my friend and I trust you. I trust that your intentions are honorable and your ideas worthy of exploration. And you have been there for me when I very much needed a friend. So for these reasons I have endeavored to fulfill your request by making a piece which is outside my zone of interest and possibly a violation of my adult life project. But having an interest in critical analysis of systems, I am willing to invert or violate those of my own in the spirit of open experimentation.
Justin's title:
A photograph taken in the gallery by the artist Mariah Robertson documenting a curatorial assistant from The Museum of Modern Art’s department of media and performance art enacting a scene from the opening chapter of Georges Bataille's 1928 novel The Story of the Eye. The props from the performance: A 1994 stainless steel Alessi reproduction of Marianne Brandt's 1928 Bauhaus work, Shallow Bowl, filled with organic milk from a local farm.
2012/2015
Framed C-print on metallic paper, stainless steel bowl, local organic milk and bottle, and three titles

Christopher K. Ho, John Magee, Cynthia Talmadge, and Kevin Zucker
Nearer to Man, 2015
Wood, rope, fabric, paint, and digital print on metallic paper

Jackie T. Kennedy and Sean Kennedy
For Lottie and Hans, 2015
Coffee table, Kennedy family DVD collection, poodle bookends, Republican and Democratic candlestick holders, Meica jarred Frankfurters, Coca-Cola, drawings on notebook pages, photographs taken at 23 Rat-Beil-Strasse, Frankfurt, Germany, 60318, digestive biscuits, Goethe and Schiller salt and pepper shakers, chipmunk salt and pepper shakers, ceramic pig chopstick rests, tortoise tchotchkes, and Japanese figurines

NOWORK
The Elder, 2015
Slide projector and carousel, 80 slides, NOWORK 2010-2014 catalogue raisonné, painted wood, concrete, metal, 5 gallon water jug, rubber gasket, and extension cord

Roni Shneior and Barak Zemer
I’ve Got You Under My Sink, 2015
Papier-mache, acrylic paint, wood, popcorn ceiling spray, water pipes, ceramics, ceramic tiles, and glass

Albert Herter
Lacanian Analysis, 2015
Business cards

Eileen Quinlan and Cheyney Thompson
Three Sisters and Interior Views (studio), 2015
Polaroids and metalpoint on clay-coated paper

Upstairs:

John Boskovich
National City Ten-Year Re-Issue, 1997
Gelatin silver prints and Polaroids

“Selections from “Boskovich House,” 1996-8, interior environment, Los Angeles
Includes: John Boskovich, Post-Colonial Day Bed, 1997-8, clear vinyl, Toile de Jouy, plywood, and foam; and three Weegee gelatin silver prints […Is really a boy having himself fun, 1943; Human Head Cake Box Murder, c. 1940; and Shadows on the street corner (upside-down), 1950]

Thanks to: China Art Objects, Los Angeles; EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix, New York); Light Industry, New York; Martos Gallery, New York and Los Angeles; Melikseitan | Briggs, Los Angeles; Krista Montagna; Jin Son; Alan Sondheim; and Barak Zemer.

All installation views of SYLVIA BATAILLE, JOAN, Los Angeles, © Dawn Blackman