into the clay and appeared again in the collectively achieved ten-day evolution of the artwork. In the case of IHME Project the lowering operation took place as action that aimed to break the monumental, mathematical structure of the clay cube. To be able to work in the hall, one had to lower oneself to the floor. The work of art took place on the floor, on this horizontal surface, and the task of working with the clay was highly physical. Even a brief period of working could be felt all over the body. Viewing the artwork also required that the visitor bend down to look more closely at the amazing landscape born on the floor, the symbols and patterns, and dodge the objects and forms made from the clay so as not to break them. The mathematical order of the clay was lowered by disrupting it, repossessing it, transforming it into something else, be it only traces left by the human touch in clay or a flattened lump of clay on the floor. Bataille was fascinated with obscene pictures and writings, graffiti and other marks explicitly because of the lowering operation they entailed, for example, on the wall of a building. For Bataille, the base materialism (le bas matĂŠrialisme) manifests itself through materials like feces, laughter, swear words, or any other obscenity or madness, but also operations like anything that could cut a conversation short, anything that could not be “dressed up in a frock coatâ€?, anything that could not be set in any form. Bataille also associates activity he calls excretion with base materialism, by which he means any activity where something is transferred from inside to outside the human body: laughter,
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