It’s Antonin Artaud‘s Birthday. Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)
Antonin Artaud on the Allen Ginsberg Project – see here, here, here and here,
An update seems due today, particularly in the light of the recent publication (in English translation) of the “late Artaud”
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Jay Murphy, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, back in August 2023, on Artaud’s enhanced stature:
“..to hail Artaud’s position within the most experimental ranges of high modernism still underestimates his significance”.
He explains:
“..(the) newfound recognition of Artaud as an artist in his own right (and one of the mid-20th century’s most seminal ones), as important as that acknowledgment may be, is perhaps being surpassed (now) by that of Artaud as a kind of sign of civilizational passage… Artaud marked epochal transitions as editor of the surrealist magazine La Révolution surréaliste in 1925, which proclaimed “The End of the Christian Era” and foreshadowed his titanic and harrowing struggle in the asylums – when he definitively rejected God at the close of World War II. (His) most far-reaching assaults on representation and repression are in these “final” texts after his release from Rodez asylum in May 1946, in his elaboration of what his biographer and translator Stephen Barber dubs his “corporeal poetry,” and in his project for transformation of the human anatomy. It is in these last writings that Artaud announces his goal of a “true organic and physical transformation of the human body” – and sometimes claims, as in a December 1947 notebook, to “have made / a body.”
He goes on:
“Artaud at the end of his life wrote that his “present body” would “fly into pieces / and under ten thousand / notorious aspects / a new body / will be assembled.” This prediction of wildly fragmentary appreciation proved true – from the Beat poets who passed around tapes of To Have Done with the Judgment of God, and, in doing so, sparked parts of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956); to the circle around composers David Tudor and John Cage at Black Mountain College that led to the first “Happening” in Cage’s Theatre Piece #1 (1952) and the first English translation of The Theatre and Its Double by M. C. Richards; to the explorations into language and materialism by the journal Tel Quel after 1968; to artists like Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark in Brazil exploring sculpture as movement and the dancers who invented Butoh in Japan. The exhibition of Artaud’s drawings, first at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1987 and then at New York’s MoMA in 1996–97, followed by showings in Madrid, Vienna, Marseilles, Milan, Düsseldorf, and London, opened up an entirely different dimension to the theater theorist and poète maudit who had been thrown into asylums, as did an even more thorough retrospective at the Bibliothèque national de France in Paris in 2006–07, which sought to show Artaud’s enormous output in all its “surprising coherence” and “globality.”
Artaud can thus be defined, in Murphy’s words, as “a kind of epochal soothsayer”, his true significance and stature is only now coming fully into focus with these later works.
Stephen Barber’s commitment to the Artaud translation project, taking up the mantle left by the late Clayton Eshelman (1935-2021), needs to be highly commended.
Likewise, more recent work by others, notably, Peter Valente – maverick scholars
Barber notes:
It is a virtue of Barber’s and Valente’s translations of these most crucial statements that they take Artaud at his word. Unlike some of the curators of Artaud exhibitions, who cite psychiatric nomenclature as if it had not been severely challenged by critical and anti-psychiatry movements for several decades already (not least quite brilliantly by Artaud himself), Barber and Valente follow, consciously or not, a basic anti-psychiatry position, taking seriously the context Artaud is establishing and the jangly, intense fluctuation of Artaud’s “corporeal poetry.”
Valente’s translations and observations are published by the intriguing experimental Infinity Land Press –
The True Story of Artaud Mômo – Face To Face (The Colombier Lecture, 1947) is their most recent title. More on that title – here
Obliteration of the World: A Guide to the Occult Belief System of Antonin Artaud is an earlier Infinity Land Press title – see here – a series of essays which endeavor to explore the hermetic side of Artaud’s thought
Jay Murphy’s observation:
“Valente summons Hermetic and magickal traditions – the Kabbalah, the work of Aleister Crowley, Western interpretations of Hinduism. This is a highly risky maneuver given that Artaud, by the 1930s, was completely immersed in various mystical literatures and practices, especially alchemy… At the end of his life, though, (he) hissed his contempt toward these traditions: “The extreme point of mysticism, / I hold it now in the real and in my body, / like a toilet broom.” Maintaining that “(t)he occult is born out of laziness,” Artaud seemed to totally reject anything to do with the “spirit.”
and
“It is further “complicated by the fact that he had already, in the 1930s, made fun of words like “alchemical” and “metaphysical,” and would often use terms from Hermetic disciplines with a twist that belied their origins”
Nonetheless, he recognizes the validity of the attempt:
“Valente acknowledges the delicate line he is walking. Granting that the “late” Artaud was “fully aware and often skeptical, if not furious, about the many aspects of a hermetic tradition that included the Tarot, Qabalah, and Eastern mysticism,” (he) argues nevertheless that pragmatic prognostications such as Crowley’s version of the Kabbalah are compatible with Artaud’s thinking.”
Murphy’s review also notes several other recent Artaud and Artaud-related books, notably Joel White‘s Revolutionary Messages – “(F)or the first time in their entirety in English, of the various addresses, lectures, and articles Artaud composed in Mexico City before he trekked up the Sierra Tarahumara, also including recently found articles by Laurine Rousselet from Artaud’s time in Havana (the author having passed through Haiti and Cuba on his way)”
and
“a new translation of Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double, by theater scholar Mark Taylor-Batty“. “..with the rationale that Artaud’s language and concepts in the book can be better understood in terms of what we now know about his life and writings. Batty’s planned series of further translations focuses more on Artaud’s early theater writings in the 1920s and his 1935 production of Shelley’s The Cenci, but also on a thorough, interdisciplinary examination of Artaud’s lifelong struggle with the medical/psychiatric establishment.”
