The Torture of the 100 Pieces: A work in progress by Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak

Abstract

In 1925, Georges Bataille, who was to become one of France’s most renowned writers and intellectual figures, received a photograph depicting a torture method formerly practised in China. This photograph, which he refers to as the ‘Torture of the Hundred Pieces’, was sent to him by a certain Adrien Borel—a founder member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society—and Bataille's analyst at that time. The reason for sending Bataille this picture might have been an encouragement from Borel to get his patient to open up and look deeper into the abyss of his own unconscious. Indeed, Bataille later stated that this treatment together with the discovery of the torture photograph helped him to lose his inner inhibition and write his debut novel, the now classic transgressive work The Story of the Eye, in 1927. Lingichi, translated variously as ‘death by a thousand cuts’, ‘death by a hundred cuts’, ‘death by slicing’ or ‘the lingering death’, was regarded as the most extreme execution method reserved for the very worst crimes and was practised in China from 900 CE until it was banned in 1905. It was not a torture as such that it invited the victim to end his suffering; death, while inflicting the greatest possible amount of torment, was the only inevitable outcome. Bataille’s picture of the execution later became the trigger for an epic, corporeal collaboration work between the multimedia artists Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak. Making the controversial assumption that Bataille had elevated this historical document into art, Bladh leads us through this exhausting Gesamtkunstwerk, from his initial idea - his fascination with Bataille’s fascination - into a complicated creative process which encompasses various real self-inflicted body harm, photography, and a huge amount of literary sources.