The Hayward's 2006 exhibition on Surrealism is more than twenty years after its critically acclaimed venture into surrealist territory titled Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), also curated by Dawn Ades, head of the Centre for Surrealism and its Legacies based at Essex University. Undercover Surrealism revisits surrealism by focusing on its 'undercover currents' - that current having the name of its most infamous figure, the French excremental philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962). Bataille was surrealism's self-confessed "enemy from within" whose subversive input injected a good dose of ambivalence into the rather contrived - and not so marvellous anymore - surrealism defined by André Breton.

In this review of Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille in Drain Olivier Chow says that Bataille took surrealism to its very limits, defacing the marvellous by promoting the anal sadism of the formless, a notion that collapsed traditional differences between form and matter, inside and outside, life and death.

The Hayward show is entirely based on Documents; it is Bataille's view of the world. The short-lived Documents magazine, edited and produced in Paris by George Bataille from 1929-30. Bataille,styled himself as an ‘enemy within’ the surrealist movement. Challenging the idealism he identified in the approach of André Breton and other leading figures, he urged surrealist artists to explore darker territory. Described by Bataille as ‘a war machine against received ideas’, Documents was a suitably jarring collision of ethnography, archaeology, art, popular culture and assorted other concerns. Its focus on traditional art from non-European cultures reflects one of the era’s major preoccupations, though Bataille used juxtaposition of ‘primitive’ ideas with modern, Western content to discredit notions of cultural superiority.