"Georges Bataille accused ‘mainstream’ Surrealism (André Breton et al.) of placing ‘the work before the being’ (like too much makeup on the face). In 1929 Bataille founded Documents, a short-lived alternative archeo-surrealist magazine, proclaiming it as a ‘war machine against received ideas.’ Milledge supposedly misheard this phrase, but reiterates her aural gaffe and thus attributes a power to a war-m-sheen – a thin coating becomes a weapon. Kafka wrote that a ‘book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within us.’ He would be pleased to know that a warm sheen can also do the job."



"For Bataille, the paintings on the cave walls expressed a ‘burning presence’ and indecipherability. He was particularly intrigued why there were so few images of human figures compared to representations of animals, or human-animal hybrids. These paintings, he concluded, expressed an early attempt to ‘negate human life’ at the very point in which the conception of the human is born. The painters shared a poetic bond, now lost, with the animals and hybrid figures they conjured. Milledge, who conjures a ‘religious mood or attitude’ with her work, often returns to Bataille’s essays on Lascaux. I’ve seen this book on her shelf. It is rare to find a human form in her work that is not also part bird, or beast, or plant, or witch."