If the 1920s are celebrated for the consolidation of an aesthetic of form, whether through the careers of the great abstract painters or the major architects or design schools (like the Bauhaus), the end of the decade brought an attack on formal thinking. As Bataille explained, dictionaries—like works of art or literature—should be operational: rather than bestowing form by giving definitions, their job should be to strip things of their idealizing cloaks of abstraction to reveal their materiality, a materiality that is formless.

Although Bataille’s analogue for the informe was the crushed spider or the blob of spittle, and though Miró‘s detour from painting took the form of working with trash, Giacometti’s example of formlessness cannily assumed a highly polished, even geometrically simple set of shapes. The formlessness generated by Suspended Ball came instead from how it short-circuited the structural logic of form, which Bataille had spoken of categorically. Based on opposition, every category of thought is maintained not simply by what it names but by what it opposes: good as opposed to bad, male to female, life to death. Giacometti’s work, containing a cleft ball hung so that it could swing over a recumbent wedge produced just this stymieing of categories in that its “erotics” enacted a blurring of gender, the wedge appearing both labial and phallic, the ball cast as both active and passive.

Not surprisingly, given Modernism’s commitment to an aesthetics of form, the accounts of artists such as Giacometti or Miró have until recently omitted their connections to Bataille and to Documents, passing as well over the theoretical implications of the informe. These implications are not just tied to Surrealism [more], however, but extend to much postwar art as well, whether in the French movement of décollage or in Robert Morris’s notion of “anti-form” or Robert Smithson’s concept of entropy.