Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948
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Artaud began drawing on his own initiative in January 1945, the month after his electroshock treatments had ended. By that time, Rodez had been liberated from the German forces. The following month, Artaud began writing again on a sustained, indeed incessant, basis. It was as though he had obstinately wanted to defy Ferdière and his treatments until the psychiatrist had despaired of “curing” or “socializing” him, before then bringing the new phase of his work eruptively into action. Artaud created his Rodez drawings in the open ward of the asylum he inhabited, in conditions of constant noise and interruption from the other inmates. Ferdière had recently offered Artaud the option of a room to himself off the main ward, but Artaud refused, believing himself a more vulnerable target for further electroshocks if he were to be placed in isolation. He drew, always standing up, on large pieces of paper placed on a table, using the remnants of a set of coloured crayons and pencils which had been left behind at the asylum by a Surrealist painter whom Ferdière had temporarily been hiding from the German authorities, Frédéric Delanglade.
At first, Artaud’s drawings – to which he gave titles such as Being And Its Foetuses and Never Real And Always True… – articulated the utter fragmentation of identity which he had endured through his incarceration and the electroshocks. The surface of the drawings became an arena in which Artaud dispersed an imagery of decapitated body parts and organs, screaming mouths and jagged scars. These elements of a physical detritus were set against a threatening proliferation of electrical instruments and machine parts, of nails and spikes.
The presence of the body in the drawings was in extreme proximity with what had already wounded and disassembled it, and threatened to do so again in the future. Every point of the drawings’ surface was saturated with objects – Artaud associated his electroshocks with the idea of an agonizing void, and his drawings painstakingly occupy all empty, and therefore threatening, space. The sheer expanse and complexity of the drawings’ forms suggest the construction of an entire cosmology of terror, simultaneously fully developed and cataclysmically aborted; but the drawings also constitute acutely physical documents. Rather than being the ritual protections and furious attacks which he had constructed with his spells, Artaud’s first Rodez drawings simply displayed visually what had been done to him: the elements of the body were shown as a kind of glaring visual evidence, spread out almost at random over the drawing’s surface, as though the body had undergone a forensic post mortem conducted by the victim himself. Artaud had been digging into his body to discover what was left alive. In a drawing such as Box Up The Anatomy, only the discarded bones are left of the body – but even this autopsied debris can be seen to contain the traces of new human figures within it. Artaud usually inscribed texts around the borders of his drawings, clearly attempting to suture the gaping expanse of his imagery with a carapace of language. However, in several drawings, such as Being And Its Foetuses, the visual forms and the inscribed words are intricately intermingled, as though only the random confines of the edge of the paper could bring closure to the limitless confrontation between image and word. It was the textual element, rather than the images themselves, which carried Artaud’s protest. The written language was one of furious invocation and resistance, partly made up from a glossolaliac vocabulary of invented syllables. As a protest against torture and as a display of torture, Artaud’s Rodez drawings form an exclamation of almost unparalleled intensity. The drawings are all the more powerful for the jarring incoherence and openness of their visual and textual arrangement. They are the work of a man intent on reassembling his identity, but only just beginning to grate together the instruments and materials needed for what would be a long and unfinishable process.
Around December 1945, with a drawing entitled The Totem – which shows a nailed human figure with a sawn-off leg dripping blood and a grotesquely elongated tongue – Artaud’s own name re-emerges as the signatory of the image. But the early Rodez drawings remain an imagery of the irreparable.
It is understandable that Ferdière could apply or devise no structure within which to judge Artaud’s drawings. One potential, retrospective parallel for those early drawings at Rodez would be with the drawings undertaken during the same period by concentration camp inmates. But where the surviving works from the concentration camps tend to show the inmates’ fellow prisoners and their surroundings – portraits of dying faces, sketches of the barbed-wire, the dogs, the guards – or else represent the homes and families which the inmates had lost, Artaud’s drawings are unprecedented dissections of internal agony. They demonstrate no human solidarity: no indication exists of Artaud having any empathy whatsoever with his fellow asylum inmates, whom he mentions in his letters or notebooks only in the form of complaints that they knock over his ink bottles as he writes and keep him awake at night with deafening flatulence. Artaud’s early Rodez drawings project an ultimate experience of solitude.
With the defeat in France of the occupying German army and the subsequent end of the war in 1945, that solitude partly lifted; Artaud’s friends from Paris were able more easily to travel by train to Rodez to visit him, and, in the first months of 1946, to discuss with Ferdière the possibility of Artaud’s release and return to Paris. The psychiatrist believed that he had done all he could with his dual therapy, and that although Artaud was still, in his view, a potential danger to society, he could now be released into a convalescence home. Allowing Artaud to be visible in Paris would, Ferdière believed, generate attention and prestige for what he considered to be the innovativeness of his treatments. The artist Jean Dubuffet had visited Artaud at Rodez in September 1945, offering him the first encouragement he had received with his drawings, and a visit by the writer Arthur Adamov followed in February 1946.
Adamov, in particular, was determined that Artaud should be liberated from his incarceration, and organized an auction of works donated by such eminent figures as Picasso, Braque and Giacometti, to provide Artaud with the sum of money which the Rodez asylum authorities stipulated as a condition for his return to Paris; in order to meet Ferdière’s requirement that Artaud should be lodged in a convalescence home, Adamov asked a young doctor’s wife he knew, Paule Thévenin, to locate the most suitable establishment.
Artaud’s drawings were transformed during his last months at Rodez, when he became aware that his incarceration was close to its end. His shattered fragments of human figures coalesced and became more substantial, powerful presences. The drawings were still constellated with images of exposed bodies and weapons, but those weapons – bullets, drills, screws – were now clearly under Artaud’s own control, to be deployed for his own ends rather than suffered. The drawings were now executed with a gestural assurance and fluidity, using a greater range of colours and a more confident use of space (the drawings no longer obsessively filled every last corner of the paper). The drawings also worked to encapsulate Artaud’s emergent preoccupations. A drawing from around February 1946, entitled The Sexual Clumsiness Of God, demonstrates the derision for religion which would become an increasingly prominent element of Artaud’s work, especially in his recorded work of the following year: in the drawing, the ludicrously small-headed deity strides ineptly and blindly through a landscape of decapitated human organs. A drawing from two months later, The Execration Of The Father-Mother, embodies the concern with self-creation which would also become vital for Artaud’s work after his release from Rodez. The drawing is of an upturned pair of limbs engaged in a monstrous act of birth. The head of the emerging infant is being instantly shot from three sides by enormous bullets; a vertical stream of compacted mechanical implements and body parts terminates in a crude pneumatic drill that penetrates the mother’s abscessed thigh. The sex act and the action of giving birth are made elements of the same violent amalgam, which, for Artaud, must be obliterated in order for him to take responsibility for his own life and work, and to fully generate his own identity.
The sense of utter dislocation which had haunted Artaud’s early Rode
z drawings became overturned in the final asylum drawings by an impassioned force of resuscitation. This was nowhere more evident than in a drawing of March 1946 which took its title from Artaud’s theatrical project of over a decade earlier, The Theatre Of Cruelty. The drawing showed a group of warrior girls whom Artaud, in the isolation and sterility of his internment, had elaborated as the embodiment of his desired liberation. He named them his “daughters of the heart to be born”, but his rapport with them was intensely sexual as well as familial. In his writings of the period, Artaud combined the identities of women he had actually known in his life with entirely invented characters – his two grandmothers, for example, were genealogically inverted, to become feral, erotic children ready to battle for Artaud’s release. In the drawing, the daughters are simultaneously dead and alive; they are confined within coffins, their bodies mummified and injured, but they have their eyes vigilantly open and attentive, waiting for their moment to strike. Artaud incorporated into this group of incestuous “daughters” a young actress named Colette Thomas who travelled to Rodez to visit him, and whom he would see again after his return to Paris. Colette Thomas had also been interned in an asylum and subjected to shock therapies there; she later wrote a book, The Testament Of The Dead Daughter, which demonstrated that Artaud’s friends could be very willing collaborators in his experiments in probing the zone between life and imaginative obsession. In the book, addressing Artaud, she writes: “If you don’t want me to be one of your actresses I will be one of your soldiers. If you don’t want me to be one of your soldiers I will be one of your daughters. If you don’t want me to be one of your daughters I will be your Unique daughter.”[9]
Among the final Rodez drawings, there appears a fiercely indented and hallucinatory image – entitled The Blue Head – of a woman’s face, the mouth distorted and screaming, the eyes witnessing absolute horror, one side of the head eroded away in a densely overlayered mass of pencil strokes and gestures; the names of Artaud’s “daughters” are inscribed as an incantation around the extreme edges of the paper’s surface. Artaud would describe the head to Paule Thévenin as being one that he had seen in a dream; its visual impact strongly recalls that of the image of the beautiful woman’s distorted face in his film scenario of almost twenty years earlier, The Seashell And The Clergyman. The very last drawing which Artaud made at Rodez before his release in May 1946 also excavated the human head; it was ostensibly a self-portrait, but it becomes evident from viewing photographs taken in the same month of Artaud and Ferdière sitting together in the asylum grounds that the drawing is a vehement struggle of the identities of Artaud and Ferdière within the image. The face in the drawing distinctively resembles both that of Artaud and of his psychiatrist.[10] One of Ferdière’s assistants at the asylum, Jean Dequeker, with whom Artaud was on good terms, watched Artaud in the process of making the drawing, and in his account underlined this sense of a battle of identity which the act of drawing entailed for Artaud. Dequeker wrote: “On a large sheet of white paper, he had drawn the abstract contours of a face, and within this barely sketched material – where he had planted the black marks of future apparitions – and without a reflecting mirror, I saw him create his double, as though in a crucible, at the cost of an unspeakable torture and cruelty. He worked with fury, shattering pencil after pencil, suffering the internal throes of his own exorcism… Through the creative rage with which he exploded the bolts of reality and all the latches of the surreal, I saw him blindly dig out the eyes of his image.”[11] For Artaud, the enduringly provocative idea of the “double” was always both that of a force which threatened to supplant and destroy his identity, and also that of a counterforce with which he could combatively reassert and transform his identity. In his final drawing from Rodez, Artaud compacts his identity and that of Ferdière together, in order to dissolve and finally negate the noxious presence of Ferdière and his power over Artaud’s life. Through the drawing, Artaud’s own identity visually and materially resurges.
Artaud left Rodez by the night train on 25 May 1946. Back in Paris, he worked at a frenzied pace. While inhabiting a large, semi-derelict pavilion in the grounds of a suburban convalescence clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine, he undertook a sequence of portraits of his friends and associates which, like the final Rodez drawing, appear to be dual, even multiple portraits. The contours of Artaud’s own face, of his bone structure and eyes, are incessantly present in his portraits of other people, as though impelled to break through another identity and to achieve the pre-eminent visibility which had been denied to Artaud in his years of compulsory internment.
Viewing a sequence of Artaud’s facial portraits exhibited together is like watching the irrepressible transmutation of the same head, accelerating into furrowed old age and confusion at one moment, suddenly becoming rejuvenated and lucid with the next drawing. Other, smaller heads often appear around the edges of the drawings’ surface space, like spectators watching the physical transmutation in operation at the visual core of the drawing. But it is always Artaud’s own head which is staring, in a face-to-face confrontation, at the spectator gazing in from outside the image.
Artaud was also involved in a constant confrontation with the sitters for his portraits undertaken in Paris. Paule Thévenin became the subject of three portraits, as well as being incorporated into numerous other drawings as one of the spectating heads at their margins. Paule Thévenin described to me the process of being drawn by Artaud as that of “being skinned alive”. As at Rodez, Artaud would execute his portraits standing up before a table on which the large sheet of drawing paper (almost always of the same size) was placed; he would scream, hum, and invent new vocabularies at the same moments that he incised his pencils and crayons into the paper. The sitter was forbidden to move about, but was permitted and encouraged to talk as much as he or she wished – to Thévenin, it seemed that Artaud was intent on drawing the gestural movements of her face, in particular those of her mouth as it disintegrated into a blur and then re-cohered in the process of forming and articulating words. The act of drawing, for Artaud, was that of a revelatory excavation into what he saw as the lost or neglected material of the human anatomy.
Thévenin was in her early twenties at the time, and she would remember the experience of witnessing Artaud create his portraits of her as being literally terrifying: Artaud relentlessly ground marks and lines into his drawing of her face, until, in a work such as Paule With Blocks Of Metal, she would suddenly encounter exactly the face she would come to possess as an old woman, almost fifty years later. Simultaneously, she felt that her face in the portrait had been imbued with an existence in another arena of space and time – it was a face of liberation that threw out all the anger, determination and ecstasy she could ever feel, through its eyes and mouth. Artaud said to her: “I have given you the face of an old empress from a barbaric era.”[12] Presenting a completed portrait to another sitter, a young woman named Jany de Ruy for whom the experience of being drawn by Artaud had been an extreme ordeal, he told her: “It’s a head of weapons.”[13] Colette Thomas sat for Artaud two times. On the first occasion, in May 1947, he drew a delicate facial portrait which is almost undamaged, apart from the mark of a cigarette burn at the point where the face meets the throat; the mouth is slightly skewed and the eyes’ pupils are enormously diffused, but the portrait overall emanates a tenderness that is rare in Artaud’s visual work. On the second occasion, around three months later – when he was evidently in a state of anger with his sitter – the image of the face is darkly bruised, bearing the evidence of gestural marks of erasure or obliteration from the flat of Artaud’s hand.
Striations cut down from the eye and the mouth. The drawing bears a textual element which is in a losing conflict with the image: the letters inscribed on the sitter’s forehead (a “c” and a “k” are discernible) collapse into blurred scars and jagged stitchings of the facial skin. A further, glossolaliac text is situated at the extreme edge of the drawing’s surface, away from the face. The im
age of the face is as disassembled and made as vulnerable as any of Artaud’s early Rodez drawings of his own body. In its incision of human matter, the portrait of Colette Thomas is an ultimately savage individual assault.
After working on his portraits for several hours in the presence of his sitters, Artaud would then habitually undertake the final element of his drawing process alone in his pavilion. This came in the form of a wounding of the image of such ferocity that he did not wish his sitters to witness it. With the particular portrait which Paule Thévenin described, her face became surrounded by blocks of metal, the face exuding blasts of nails and metallic shards. The facial skin is used as a surface space for the imprintation of an obsessional graffiti of objects and signs. The area around the edge of the facial image becomes used for the addition of a text, which evokes Paule Thévenin’s integration into Artaud’s group of “daughters of the heart to be born”. Artaud’s drawings are a creation of physical gesture so intense that they unerringly evoke his ideas and plans of the 1920s and 1930s for ideal films and performances composed of gesture. The drawings of the human face are a further embodiment, on a dense scale, of the interrogation and damaging of representation which Artaud’s work in cinema had envisaged; the image is immediately transmitted by the gestures that power it, and by the direct gaze of eye into eye between the image and the spectator. But in order to obliterate representation, Artaud’s drawings must always first destroy the bodies and faces of his friends, each time starting the process anew, with a brutal innovation.
Artaud’s portraits of his friends accumulated incessantly in the months after his return to Paris. He produced only one drawing that was not a facial portrait – in November 1946, the young theatre director Michel de Ré asked him to make a drawing of the main character in a play by Roger Vitrac which he was directing, Victor (a play whose first production Artaud himself had directed, in December 1928, in collaboration with Vitrac); the drawing was intended to be reproduced in the theatre programme, but, in the event, de Ré was unable to find the financial means to have the programme printed. The drawing, M. Victor, recalls Artaud’s final Rodez drawings with its intricately injured and threatened human figure: the body is suffocatingly bound by a rope of intestinal construction, the legs are assembled from nails and tiny human faces, the one visible arm is severed, and the grotesque head is under vertical attack from an implement resembling a drill or pencil. But the body, lost in its space of assault, is clearly distinct in its identity from Artaud’s displays of his own wounding at Rodez. Here, he uses the new visual means at his disposal to cruelly devastate what, by this time, he considered to be the failed experiment of his own distant theatrical past.