Other than this one figurative drawing, Artaud concentrated on his return from Rodez exclusively on his exploration into the matter of the human face. He created an irrepressible swarm of heads, such as the writer Henri Michaux hallucinated about and began to paint himself during the same years. In part, this obsession with the human face emerged from the sheer number of new people Artaud was meeting after his return to Paris: the drawings catalogued them as staring beings with warriors’ faces. Occasionally, Artaud would lose track of who exactly he was drawing – one drawing, showing a disembodied head in empty space and simply entitled Portrait Of A Man, is of a young writer named Robert Michelet who had visited Artaud unannounced at his pavilion.
Artaud encountered many young poets and writers during the final period of his life, and a portrait he made of the twenty three year old poet Henri Pichette (a drawing which Artaud alternatively titled a “gris-gris” or fetish object) shows the youthful envelope of the face assailed from underneath itself by an incipient, lifelong mass of scars and bruises; Pichette and Artaud had discussed the nature of the human scream during their encounters, and one side of Pichette’s throat appears lacerated and spiked, as though involuntarily emanating visual screams of resistance. The textual element of Artaud’s drawings, which had been integral to those done at Rodez, remained strong in these portraits – in Artaud’s portrait of Arthur Adamov, the sprawling inscription over the drawing, in thick red crayon, threatens to overwhelm the head with its meticulously scarified nose and forehead. The early Paris drawings had mostly been done in graphite pencil alone, but Artaud’s vivid use of coloured chalk crayons became predominant in the portraits from the early summer of 1947: in the portrait of Paule Thévenin’s sister-in-law, Minouche Pastier, the gestural spurts of orange, blue and red crayon used for the woman’s hair spin fiercely out from the head and amass into dense, autonomous blocks on the edge of the drawing’s surface.
Artaud viewed this population of aggrieved and astonished portrait heads as having the power of an army, able to protect him from arrest by the police and from the new asylum incarceration which he feared could happen at any time. He decided to exhibit the drawings in Paris, and accepted an invitation from the celebrated collector of Surrealist art, Pierre Loeb, to show them in his gallery, the Galerie Pierre in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In part, Artaud conceived of his own exhibition as a repudiation and negation of the International Exhibition of Surrealism, curated by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, which was taking place at the Galerie Maeght in Paris at the same time, the summer of 1947. Artaud wrote to Breton – who had invited Artaud to participate in his exhibition, despite the fact that it was now over twenty years since he had expelled Artaud from the Surrealist movement – denouncing what he argued would be the Surrealist exhibition’s “stylized, limited, closed, fixed character as an attempt at art”[14], when set against the sensation of explosivity which he wanted to give to his own exhibition. For Artaud, his drawings were not art, but unique weapons that resisted all social culture while interrogating the material of the human body.
In order to realize his aim of imparting an explosivity to his drawings, Artaud decided to stage two performances in the Galerie Pierre space during the run of the exhibition. Apart from one improvised performance of screams and denunciations against psychiatry which he had undertaken earlier that year, at the Vieux-Colombier theatre in Paris, these events were to be Artaud’s only public performances between his release from Rodez and his death. The events involved the reading of specially written texts, the beating of percussion instruments with pokers, and, most essentially, the performance of Artaud’s own scream – the scream which he would also perform in the following year for his recorded work, To Have Done With The Judgement Of God. Artaud’s Galerie Pierre events took place within an intricately determined space: they were held in front of a specially chosen audience, with Artaud surrounded by what he considered to be the protecting force of his portraits.
When the Galerie Pierre exhibition closed on 20 July 1947, Artaud had less than eight months left to live. The drawings of his final months are formed of collections of human heads, amassed on top of each other, laced with filaments of text. The faces in his drawings become progressively more autopsied: they emanate death. Artaud’s gestural strokes and furrowings of the image are ground further and further into the drawing’s surface, to cancel out that emanation of death and to create a new life through the transformed, skinned and boned faces which he projects in their wildness and resistance. In a self-portrait from December 1947 that is mistakenly inscribed with the date “December 1948” (and so appears retrospectively as a refusal of death, since Artaud would be dead by then), Artaud’s head appears composed of the hardest bone, his twisted and erect hand dominating the portrait, with an oppressive head of death fixed at his shoulder. A further self-portrait from the same moment is skeletal in another way: unfinished, it appears constructed from the minimum number of gestural strokes necessary to bring into existence the architecture of a face that cannot then be completed or represented, and must be left openly raw and staring in its refusal of representation. In his last drawings, Artaud drew figures from his past life in Paris, from as far back as the mid-1920s when he was still a member of the Surrealist movement, and juxtaposed them with the heads of the people most important to him in his contemporary world, such as Paule Thévenin and Minouche Pastier. As in Artaud’s film projects, diverse temporal layers are abruptly compacted together into an immediate space of the body. Every head that forms part of these populations shows evidence of being attacked and scarred: heads are impaled with huge nails, throats are gouged, mouths are distorted and wrenched with cries. The area surrounding the principal human figures is occupied by a scrawl of gestured strokes – like that with which Alberto Giacometti surrounded his painted figures – through which assemblages of human heads ascend and descend, forming elongated totem poles of bodies and scars. Artaud believed that everyone who had ever befriended him in Paris had been either covertly silenced or murdered (and in fact, many of Artaud’s friends were indeed killed in strange circumstances or else died in wartime concentration camps), and these last drawings form a great project of visual resuscitation, in which the faces of Artaud’s obliterated friends reappear, infused with furious life.
Although Artaud habitually worked with cheap sets of children’s coloured chalk crayons and graphite pencils, two of his final works from 1948 take the form of paintings. On both occasions, this change of medium happened accidentally, since Artaud was visiting Paule Thévenin at her apartment in the suburb of Charenton, close to Ivry-sur-Seine, and, at the invitation of her six year old daughter, Domnine, used the watercolour and oil paints which the child herself had spread out on the kitchen table. Artaud had painted during one previous period, in his late teens and early twenties, in particular executing a series of vivid landscapes – reminiscent of those of Edvard Munch – during the years 1919 to 1920, before he had escaped to Paris from his family home in Marseilles. The surfaces which Artaud employed for his 1948 paintings were also those which, like the paints themselves, were at hand and offered to him. For the first of the paintings, Artaud used a large, blank medical form (discarded by Paule Thévenin’s obstetrician husband) that was printed with columns for the names of patients and of the medicines to be prescribed. Artaud’s image is that of a body in movement, initially sketched in pencil, and then overlayered with flurries of green and brown watercolour paint – the hair is mountainous, expanding out from behind the body in a proliferating rush. The body itself is transected by a rapidly scrawled text in pencil, which reads in part: “I will eat/a raw child/before all/the world/I the/childish fool”. The second painting was also done with Domnine Thévenin’s paints; this time, the surface was the cover of a copy of Artaud’s recently published book, Here Lies, which had been bound in parchment. Artaud painted the front cover of the book, and Domnine Thévenin painted the back. Artaud’s dense image, in red, black and blue oils, is that o
f a body dancing, arms flailing out, the head a mass of coagulated, over-worked red colour; a second head fills the lower right-hand corner of the saturated image. Artaud’s two paintings are exceptions in his work in that they are made from a gesturally applied agglomeration of colour that rises from the surface, rather than from the point of a pencil or crayon that aggressively indents its way into the surface. They use paint as their medium to clot together and palpably unleash their images of the human figure.
The most extraordinary of Artaud’s last completed visual works is the one entitled The Projection Of The True Body, which he had begun at Rodez and carried back to Paris with him. He had worked on the drawing all through the period after his return to Paris; he pinned it up on a wall of his pavilion and intermittently added new figures and textual elements to it. By the time of Artaud’s last work on it at the beginning of 1948, the surface of the drawing was dense with amassed inscriptions over inscriptions, bodies over bodies, gestures over gestures. The drawing’s space shows Artaud’s own figure at one side, and a skeletal figure of bone and fire at the other side. Artaud’s own head and eyes, drawn in pencil, stare out of the image, while his body is being shot by a group of soldiers with rifles. His kneecaps are edged in flame and worn to the bone. The skeleton of fire is attached to Artaud’s figure by a chain, ending in handcuffs that restrain his wrists. The skeleton is a figure in a state of feral eruption, crayoned in great streaks of blue and orange colour from the black arrangement of bones, and projecting the violent physical transformation that was Artaud’s pre-eminent – his original and final – obsession. Artaud predicted in one of his last texts that at his death: “you will see my present body/burst into fragments/and remake itself/under ten thousand notorious aspects/a new body/where you will/never forget me.”[15]
The spectator of Artaud’s drawings has a unique visual experience to undergo. Artaud’s drawings – in their two sequences, at the asylum of Rodez and in Paris – project a body in utter disintegration and in lucid gestural movement. The first imagery is one of physical collapse and torture; the second imagery is one which gives an absolute pre-eminence to the body as the site of all human transformation, liberation and independence. Artaud’s drawings, with their bodies stripped to the bone and taking multiple but shattered trajectories through space, force their spectator into an intricate, magnetic relationship with them, like that Artaud had envisioned for his film work. The response demanded is multi-dimensional in its ocular intensity, rather than linear; it is also visceral and compulsive. To be receptive to Artaud’s drawings, it is necessary to come to terms with them combatively, with the entirety of the body, while also exposing to them a sensitivity such as that which emerges at a most vulnerable or unknown point of experience. Temporally, the drawings exist at a borderline moment: one of awakening from unconsciousness with the eyes burnt clean and jarred by the drawings’ visual force – a process involving “an unsticking of the retina”[16], as Artaud described it – with a resultant, painful awareness of the fragile or embattled, but integrally resistant, material of the body. In space, Artaud’s drawings exist in an arena of seizure.
Years have passed since Artaud’s drawings emerged from their seclusion of forty years in Paule Thévenin’s apartment, and the beginning of their public existence, which, she believed, Artaud at the end of his life had opposed. Even before the drawings began to be exhibited, reproductions of a number of them (and the occasional exhibition of the few drawings which were not in Paule Thévenin’s collection) had been primary inspirations for projects by a number of contemporary artists: Georg Baselitz, with the figurative paintings, including a portrait of Artaud, which he undertook around the time of his Pandemonium manifestos of 1961–62; Nancy Spero, with her sequence of works from 1969 to 1972 entitled Codex Artaud, investigating the manifestations of a proliferating threat to the body which is so insistently present in Artaud’s drawings; Marcus Reichert, with his sequence of paintings of crucifixions beginning in the late 1970s, in which the face of the godforsaken Christ screams in an ultimate abjection and misery; and Julian Schnabel’s work, Starting To Sing: Artaud, from 1981, which replicates an Artaud self-portrait from December 1947, giving it a vastly iconic scale, but retaining the original image’s stark gestural power.
All of those projects – and many others – drew from fragments of Artaud’s visual work, glimpsed accidentally or partially. It is impossible to know what new experiments the appearance of the entirety of Artaud’s drawings in exhibitions will precipitate; but those drawings possess a vital contemporary emanation which provokes, incites and horrifies, as the response to their showing has demonstrated. That contemporary emanation has multiple resonances and implications. Art around AIDS, for example, has dealt with an endangered human body in the state of radical internal upheaval which Artaud projected with his early drawings from Rodez. The final Paris drawings of an insurgent, explosive human figure of anger and transformation embody the tension between a virtual world of simulacra and of invisibly orchestrated social oppression, and an enduring obsession in contemporary art with the body as irrepressibly disruptive or revolutionary in its impact with all structures and institutions.
Artaud wrote a number of texts about his drawings throughout the period when he was working on them, both at Rodez and back in Paris. The texts about the drawings done at Rodez during 1945 and the first months of 1946 are almost always “explanatory” commentaries which had been requested by Ferdière; although Ferdière had no interest in the drawings themselves, he remained insistent that Artaud should write regularly and coherently, and considered the idea of an “artistic commentary” to be a suitable genre for Artaud to adopt.
However, Artaud’s texts almost always veer resistantly away from the matter of his drawings. When he does directly address them, he emphasizes the intentional clumsiness which he has given to the act of drawing – his images are multiply thrown onto the drawing surface with the explicit will to deny the spectator the possibility of forming a fixed impression or idea about them. He has created his drawings in defiance of their judge, “in order to throw contempt on the idea taken, and to make it fall.”[17] But one intention in Artaud’s visual work remains constant. He writes that, with his drawings, he has worked “in the sobbing, bleeding music of the soul to reassemble a new human body.”[18]
After his return to Paris, Artaud wrote two texts about the new sequence of drawings which he undertook there. The contrary of the Rodez “commentaries”, these are texts written of his own accord, concerned with the attempted welding of their own language to his drawings. Visually, the texts – in dense, skeletal lines – form a counterpart to the images of the body which they probe. The first of the two texts, Ten Years That Language Has Been Gone, from April 1947, traces the trajectory which Artaud’s drawings take through his body before emerging onto the drawing surface. For Artaud, the drawings are infused with his physical substance as it projects them violently out from his chest, with all the force of an expelled scream. And like the scream, the drawing exerts a blow – which impacts multiply, on the drawing’s surface, on society and on representation, and also on the spectator’s consciousness. It is: “a blow/anti-logical,/anti-philosophical,/anti-intellectual,/anti-dialectical/of language/supported by my black crayon/ and that’s all.”[19] The “ten years” of the text’s title refers to the period during which Artaud has felt written language alone to be utterly inadequate to his demands on it; he has turned to the image in order to project his preoccupations, and also to amalgams of the image with a textual language that is reactivated by its proximity to the propulsive image. But in Ten Years That Language Has Been Gone, Artaud is using an entirely written language to evoke the nullity of an entirely written language. He is grating ferociously and stubbornly against his own medium, testing it and looking insistently for the points at which – with his text of sparse bursts of corporeal imagery that aim only to seize the body in form and content – language can be contradictorily metamorphosed into
image. In its new manifestation, this language will act, with immediacy, not like lightning, but as lightning: “I say that the lost language is now a lightning which I make reappear through the human fact of breath: lightning which my pencil blows on paper sanction.”[20]
In the catalogue of his exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in July 1947 (a cheaply produced, nine-page publication which contained no reproductions of his drawings), Artaud included a second text about his drawings – in particular, the portraits – entitled The Human Face, which he had written during the previous month.[21] This text articulates the set of intentions he worked with in executing his excavations of the human figure. He writes: “The human face carries, in effect, a kind of perpetual death on its face/from which it’s for the painter alone to save it/by giving back to it its authentic features.”[22] Writing of his own drawings, Artaud notes that: “All of them are attempts: that is to say, blows or thrusts, in all of the directions of hazard, of possibility, of chance, or of destiny… That is why a number of the drawings are amalgams of poems and portraits, of written interjections… So, you will have to accept these drawings in the barbarity and disorder of their technique, ‘which is never preoccupied with art’, but with the sincerity and the spontaneity of gesture.”[23] As with his assertions about his Rodez drawings, Artaud again stresses the necessity for an intentionally clumsy style, which will assault the drawing from every direction – including using the exploratory combination of language with image on the drawing surface – to make it release its essential matter. Art, for Artaud, is stagnantly antithetical to this liberatory gesture; where Artaud had, to Breton, denounced the Surrealist exhibition of 1947 as ineptly limiting itself by allying itself to a pre-existing idea of art, here he attempts to generate a limitless space between his own work and art (even typographically placing the repudiated word within double inverted commas, as though to protect his own language and portraits from it). Even on one of the very first of his Rodez drawings, Never Real And Always True… , Artaud had emphasized that it was “not art”, but allied rather to the gestural beating of African tribal drums. Artaud’s work of drawing is an unfinishable struggle with the body and with representation; his most exact and authentic image of the body is the one caught rawly and suddenly in willed suspension or abandonment, before the malicious process of representation has time to set in. Artaud adamantly scars and batters the drawing with his body’s gestural production of it, cancelling and dissecting the face he creates, searching for an image of the body with an infinite physical presence.
Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948 Page 6