Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948

by Stephen Barber

  Now, when Artaud burned holes in his letters, the textual content made it clear that he believed that he was literally inflicting wounds on the bodies of people in Paris whom he felt had abandoned or betrayed him; by contrast, several friends received letters whose textual content indicated that the burns and visual damage were there to protect them physically from danger, or to warn them of the imminence of danger.

  Sometimes, a gestural line of sudden cancellation would be driven across the textual element of the letters. These “spells”, as Artaud called his letters from Ireland, were designed to embody his sense of anger and isolation, and to exact retribution on their recipients, whom he accused of having failed him.

  Once it became clear that the apocalypse he was eagerly expecting was not, after all, going to happen immediately, Artaud crossed Ireland to Dublin, and was arrested there for “vagabondage”, in a public park, on 23 September 1937. After being imprisoned for several days in Mountjoy Prison, he was then deported to France. On the boat – in a justifiably paranoid and deeply delirious state – he attacked two stewards and was placed in a straitjacket; on his arrival in France, he was institutionalized in an asylum on the outskirts of Rouen. Certainly, Artaud’s behaviour in the preceding two months had been exceptionally bizarre and – to some degree – violent, but many of his friends in Paris saw his internment as pure misfortune, since his habitual eccentricities had been eminently permissible in the Parisian milieu he had inhabited before his journeys. What Artaud experienced in the next nine years would be agonizing. He had been one of the most elegant and dandified of the Surrealists, his intensely handsome features hauntingly captured in the films in which he had worked as an actor, particularly in Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. Now, he was starved and beaten in communal wards, transferred from asylum to asylum across France, and under threat of deportation to a concentration camp after the German invasion of France in 1940. His teeth fell out and he became emaciated. Impossible to diagnose with precision, even by Jacques Lacan whose asylum – Sainte-Anne – he passed through in 1938 to 1939, Artaud was in a state of institutional limbo: in one asylum, Ville-Évrard, an immense complex on the eastern fringes of Paris, he spent time successively in wards intended for “maniacs”, “cripples”, “epileptics”, and “undesirables”. Most of the psychiatrists who saw him simply dismissed his case as being one of incurable insanity.

  It was at the asylum of Ville-Évrard, in 1939, that Artaud constructed a new sequence of his “spells”. Although the doctors at Ville-Évrard knew nothing of Artaud’s history as a writer, they were intrigued by his spells, and initially encouraged him by giving him a wide range of different coloured inks to use. (After the German invasion, the already dire asylum conditions worsened; the doctors had more pressing preoccupations, and Artaud simply disappeared for a period of three years into the huge asylum’s ocean of insanity.) As with the spells which Artaud had sent from Ireland, the intent of these new objects oscillated between assault and protection. At the start of the war, in September 1939, Artaud decided that his apocalyptic preoccupations of two years earlier were now being realized, and he addressed one of his spells – with a mocking and caustic textual content – to Adolf Hitler.

  Other spells pleaded for heroin to be brought to him, or warned his friends (such as the painter Sonia Mossé, who would die in a concentration camp) of the imminent danger of death. As with the spells sent from Ireland, the cigarette burn is the primary, negative medium with which the Ville-Évrard spells are made: burns, and the gestural tracks in yellow and brown of the cigarette’s burning ash, circle and partly obliterate the textual and figurative elements of the spells. In several spells, such as that intended to be sent to Grillot de Givry (an occultist who had actually died a decade earlier), it is the gap inflicted by the cigarette burn in the dead centre of the paper which forms the object’s visual core. The spells are intricately designed and lacerated instruments of destruction or protection, possessing their own, strange and deadly, beauty.

  The history of twentieth century visual culture is one encompassing a multiplicity of experiments with the status of the surface of the art object, from Yves Klein’s paintings executed with a flame-thrower to Lucio Fontana’s sliced canvases. But Artaud’s spells, in their survival and their exhibition, have a uniquely contradictory existence. Artaud certainly never saw them as art objects. They were intended both to incite an upheaval, and to disappear. Artaud’s explicit intention was that the spells would achieve particular ends in the world outside the asylum: causing the deaths or incapacitation of people he saw as his enemies, and protecting the existence of people whom he saw as threatened. They also constitute an insistent individual demand: for the delivery of heroin (the word “heroïne” is one of the few that fortuitously tend not to be burned into illegibility in the spells), and for the end of his incarceration. At the same time, the spells are secret documents, subject to nullification if their contents become assimilated in the social world. They are intended to work like an instantly effective poison that diffuses invisibly in the victim’s body, leaving nothing behind. Artaud, in the textual content of the spells, incessantly emphasizes the required immediacy of their action – the spells can only act once, and that action must be simultaneous with their construction, in order to achieve the impact on the body which Artaud desires (injuring the body of the addressee, for example, in the same moment as burning the surface of the spell with a cigarette): otherwise, they fall into the void of representation. The very process of intermediation – handing over the spells to be posted, allowing them to be scrutinized (and their constituent materials to be supplied) by the asylum doctors – necessarily destroys that immediacy. The spells, despite the intricacy with which they were designed and the visual power they possess as extraordinary objects, were not meant to survive. (The asylum doctors often failed to transmit them to their addressees, and, contrary to Artaud’s intentions, kept them for themselves, out of professional curiosity, resulting in their eventual re-emergence, almost fifty years later.) Artaud, in his subsequent work, would develop less flawed strategies against the process of representation. The existence of the spells as an integral part of his visual work sets them in acute tension with all of its other elements. They are the presence which both originates that subsequent work – in the form of the series of drawings, often also burned and lacerated, that would follow them and eventually be publicly exhibited with them – and which also envelops all of that visual work in an inescapable aura of violent self-annihilation.

  At the beginning of 1943, Artaud was transferred from Ville-Évrard to the asylum of Rodez in remote south-western France, and it was there that he began the series of drawings which would continue until his death. The hilltop town of Rodez was in the backward, rural area of France known as the Aveyron. The large asylum of noisy, communal wards, full of farting and raving shepherds and farmers, had a prominent position in Rodez, located alongside the town’s sportsground at the end of an avenue which ran down from its huge cathedral. The asylum buildings were surrounded by a large terrain of gardens. The director of the asylum, Gaston Ferdière, was thirty five years old when Artaud arrived there; he considered Rodez to be a tedious provincial appointment and aspired to return to the metropolitan culture of Paris, where he had spent much of the 1930s. In addition, during the first year of Artaud’s stay at Rodez, Ferdière had to spend most of his time engaged in delicate negotiations with the occupying German authorities of Rodez and the French bureaucrats who were complicit with them, making sure he had enough food to feed his inmates, and he also participated in some Resistance work, by hiding people from the German forces. This ambiguous situation sometimes led to threatening situations in which he was in danger of being shot both by the Resistance and by the Germans. He was himself a Surrealist poet who had self-published several volumes of his sexually-oriented work.

  He was intensely interested in pornography and drug addiction as well as in innovations in psychiatric treatment; a f
urther interest he was beginning to develop at the time was in the art work produced by uneducated and untrained people, especially those detained in asylums.[2] Ferdière had been approached by the Surrealist poet, Robert Desnos, who had been a friend of Artaud’s at the time of the Ursulines cinema riot over The Seashell And The Clergyman, and who knew that the starving Artaud would at least have more to eat in the rural farming surroundings of Rodez; he would also be in less imminent danger there of deportation to the German concentration camps, since Rodez was in the area of France which had, up until that time, been less directly under the administrative control of the German forces than northern France. (Desnos himself would be deported in the following year for his Resistance activities in Paris, and would die of typhoid at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.) In contrast to Artaud’s doctors at the other asylums he had passed through, Ferdière knew exactly who Artaud was. Ferdière’s political preoccupations were those of a libertarian anarchist, and his position of authority in a social institution created a lifelong dilemma for him. One of the strategies he adopted to attempt to reconcile this dilemma was always to explore the use of what he considered to be the most radical and contemporary treatments upon his patients. Artaud became the trial subject of two of these treatments: art psycho-therapy and electroshock.

  Ferdière and his assistant, Jacques Latrémolière, applied fifty-one sessions of electroshock to Artaud between June 1943 and December 1944. The treatment had been invented only five years earlier, by the Italian doctor Ugo Cerletti, who had observed the pacifying effect of electric shocks applied to the skulls of pigs awaiting butchery in a Rome slaughterhouse, and had adapted the procedure for human application. The treatment was surrounded by an aura of discovery and excitement at the time Ferdière began to use it (although no-one could work out how exactly it managed to produce a beneficial effect), and he embraced it completely, as did many of his contemporaries. The American doctor Max Fink, who documented the origins and history of the treatment in Europe and the United States, commented: “The resolution of the men who introduced convulsive therapy is astonishing.”[3] Latrémolière included an account of the treatment Artaud underwent in his unpublished doctoral thesis, Incidents And Accidents Observed In The Course Of 1,200 Electroshocks. He writes with unintentional irony of the “theatrical reactions of the subject in the face of his hallucinations”, and notes that one of Artaud’s vertebrae was shattered by the third of the unanaesthetized sessions. Artaud himself would write of having been literally killed by this same session, and of undergoing an out-of-the-body experience – watching from above the treatment table as the orderlies prepared to take his own corpse to the mortuary, before he suddenly awakened, back in his body, after a dangerously long coma of ninety minutes (the electroshock patient was usually expected to re-awaken from the state of unconsciousness precipitated by the shock after around ten or fifteen minutes).

  When I asked Ferdière about this incident, he noted that it might very well have taken place according to Artaud’s timescale, given the experimental nature of the treatment, but with such a volume of electroshocks being applied in those years – thousands upon thousands at Rodez alone – it was impossible to remember this particular one.[4]

  Artaud’s response to the treatments fluctuated between abject pleading for their cessation and threats of violence against Ferdière. He complained of acute memory loss, and of the unbearable intrusion of the electric current into his living consciousness. He described the experience of undergoing electroshock to a newspaper journalist just before dying in 1948: “I plunged into death. I know what death is.”[5] Ferdière was to defend – and to continue to apply – electroshock treatments until the end of his life in 1990. He believed that Artaud had been withdrawn and unable to write before the treatments, although the volume of Artaud’s letters at the time contradicts this. Ferdière was eager to claim the responsibility and glory for all of Artaud’s future work. But Artaud’s own public denunciations of Ferdière after his eventual release from the asylum would be so virulent and livid that the mention of them alone could reduce the psychiatrist to tears in his old age.

  Ferdière, building on his reputation as the “rehabilitator” of Artaud to literary society, would subsequently become the psychiatrist of the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer and of his companion, the poet Unica Zürn (who committed suicide in 1970 while under his care, jumping from an apartment terrace to her death in front of the entrance to a supermarket). He also treated the leader of the Lettrist art movement, Isidore Isou, during the street riots of May 1968 in Paris. Isou claimed that because he was absent during the riots and unable to direct them (Ferdière made him undergo a sleep cure, so that he was simply unconscious for a number of days), the riots had failed to develop into their expected revolutionary form. Isou and his fellow Lettrist, Maurice Lemaître, subsequently wrote an entire book of outrageous insults against Ferdière, entitled Antonin Artaud Tortured By The Psychiatrists. They asserted: “Dr Gaston Ferdière is one of the greatest criminals in the entire history of humanity: a new Eichmann”, and demanded his immediate arrest, claiming that he was directly responsible “for all of the social and individual disasters which have taken place in France since May 1968”.[6]

  In the case of Ferdière’s second radical treatment, art psycho-therapy, he found that Artaud was very far from being an ideal subject, since he believed that the therapy functioned well only with patients who had no artistic training. Artaud did not fit this profile: he had drawn intermittently since his childhood years, having taken classes in life drawing at one of the Swiss convalescence homes where he had spent much of his teenage years (his family having sent him there because he was unruly and was suffering from vaguely-defined “nervous problems”). He had drawn theatre sets and costumes, and his working journal for the “Theatre of Cruelty” production of The Cenci in 1935 is constellated by gestural tracks of colour from his plotting with a set of crayons of his actors’ movements around the performance space. The “spells” which Artaud sent in the form of letters from his journey to Ireland, and again from Ville-Évrard, are a further stage in his compulsion to introduce a dense, interposed image to convey his concerns whenever his written language proved inadequate to the demands he was placing upon it. In Artaud’s drawings, images and texts are meshed together with a tense intimacy. The first three of Artaud’s drawings at Rodez, undertaken directly at Ferdière’s request in around February 1944, after Artaud had been at Rodez for a year, were sparse charcoal depictions of weapons: machine-guns and swords (Artaud had attached great importance to a sword he had been given during a stop-over in Cuba on his way to Mexico in 1936, and which had been lost or confiscated on his journey to Rodez). In two of the drawings, skeletal human faces appear, but they are completely enveloped within a mesh of machinery, human organs and Christian crosses. At this point, Artaud, who had been brought up as a Catholic, was oscillating between adopting his own bizarre variant of Catholicism and a livid rejection of all religious systems; by the following year, he had settled definitively on the latter option. His first drawings at Rodez are a direct manifestation of his most urgent preoccupation of the time: creating implements with which he could violently liberate himself.

  In later years, Ferdière would claim to have been one of the great pioneering figures of art psycho-therapy, and of the associated “Art Brut” movement of works by culturally indifferent or marginalized artists; he was involved in organizing one of the first exhibitions of art by asylum patients in February 1946, at the Sainte-Anne asylum in Paris (one of the asylums through which Artaud had passed on his long trajectory of incarceration). “Art Brut” was always a faction-ridden movement. In opposition to the prominent promoter of “Art Brut”, the artist Jean Dubuffet, and more contemporary proponents of “Art Brut” such as the Austrian psychiatrist, Leo Navratil, Ferdière’s position was that the work of the asylum patient should function primarily as diagnostic evidence for the psychiatrist. Whereas Navratil gave his p
atients, such as Johann Hauser and Oswald Tschirtner, enclosed studio spaces and organized world-wide exhibitions of their work (which almost invariably had a figurative emphasis on the shattered human body), Ferdière dismissed the idea that the patient’s work could exist as an authentic or original art work – for him, it constituted convenient raw material for the psychiatrist to work on, though it might in itself possess very interesting decorative or formal elements.[7]

  Importantly, Ferdière never attempted to integrate Artaud into the “Art Brut” movement. Artaud was an enormously sophisticated refuser of culture and of cultural movements. His visual work was intensely resistant and irreducible to a movement such as “Art Brut”, just as his written work had been indigestible to Breton’s Surrealism. Even at the asylum of Rodez, Artaud’s visual work was in an incessant state of exploratory transformation and upheaval, mixing media with furious alacrity, impacting image with text, and strewn with a merciless invective against social institutions. In treating Artaud, Ferdière’s first therapy outlived his second – he abandoned the idea of instructing Artaud to draw long before he gave up on the electroshocks. Ferdière’s personal preference was towards the more benign, decorative elements of “Art Brut” – of which he acquired an immense collection over the years – and he told me that Artaud’s drawings were “of no interest whatsoever” to him. The first sequence of three charcoal drawings of weapons simply left him bemused, and he handed them back to his patient with little comment. However, he would confiscate many of the later drawings which Artaud undertook at Rodez, and sold them by auction in 1950, shortly after Artaud’s death.[8]