The intersection between the image and the text is the site where Artaud excavates the human body. In his notebooks, it is through the interpenetration of image and text, on the damaged, over-inscribed and effaced surface of the paper, that the human body which is Artaud’s obsession becomes gesturally captured. But, at the end of Artaud’s visual work, a further, explosive dimension is added to this endless seizure of the body: the scream.
NOTES
The most comprehensive catalogue of Artaud’s drawings is Antonin Artaud: Dessins Et Portraits, by Paule Thévenin and Jacques Derrida, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1986; a German-language edition appeared, also in 1986, with Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, Munich. Catalogues of the drawings were also published to mark the exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1987, at the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1995, and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1996.
(1) Interview with Paule Thévenin, Paris, July 1987.
(2) Interview with Gaston Ferdière, Aubervilliers, February 1987. Even in the last years of his life, in the late 1980s, Ferdière was still working as a psychiatrist, at the Polyclinique d’Aubervilliers, a public hospital for poor people in the northern suburbs of Paris, where I visited him on a number of occasions; he specialized there in treating children with “nervous disorders”. The asylum of Rodez was closed down in 1948 – the year of Artaud’s death – and the site was used for the construction of a high school, but a square in the town – the “Place Antonin Artaud” – commemorates its unwilling inhabitant. On the closure of Rodez, Ferdière opened a private clinic in south-western France, but moved back to Paris in 1961. He spent his final years writing pornography and died aged eighty-three in Hérisy, a village south of Paris, in December 1990.
(3) Max Fink, Convulsive Therapy: Theory And Practice, Raven Press, New York, 1979, page 159.
(4) Interview with Gaston Ferdière, Paris, March 1987.
(5) Antonin Artaud, interviewed by Jean Desternes (28 February 1948), Le Figaro Littéraire, Paris, 13 March 1948, page 2.
(6) Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, Antonin Artaud Torturé Par Les Psychiatres, Éditions du Lettrisme, Paris, 1970, pages 141 and 144.
(7) Interview with Leo Navratil, Vienna, September 1986, and interview with Johann Feilacher, Klosterneuberg, February 1992; interview with Gaston Ferdière, Paris, March 1987. Navratil set up the “House of Artists” within the grounds of an Austrian asylum, the Niederrösterreichen Krankenhaus in Klosterneuberg, near Vienna, in 1981; he retired in 1986 and his successor, Johann Feilacher, ran the “House of Artists”, until 1998, when he was “re-deployed” by the asylum authorities. The “House of Artists” is open to the public.
(8) Interview with Gaston Ferdière, Aubervilliers, March 1987. The sale of the drawings was motivated, according to Ferdière, by his poverty at the time, following the closure of Rodez and his only partly successful attempts to establish a private practice.
(9) Colette Thomas (under the pseudonym “René”), Le Testament De La Fille Morte, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1954, page 151.
(10) Ferdière himself noted this dual resemblance. He also remembered that Artaud was intent on incessantly reworking the drawing until he would have obliterated the image of the face (and would then have thrown the drawing away, according to Ferdière); he asked Artaud to give him the drawing as a present (which he later sold), and credited himself with having thereby saved it. Interview with Gaston Ferdière, Manchester, May 1990.
(11) Jean Dequeker, Naissance De L’Image (1950), collected in Artaud Vivant, ed. O. Virmaux, Oswald Éditeur, Paris, 1980, pages 155–156.
(12) Interview with Paule Thévenin, Paris, July 1987.
(13) Jacques Prevel, En Compagnie D’Antonin Artaud, Flammarion, Paris, 1994, page 171. The young poet Jacques Prevel kept a journal of all of his many meetings with Artaud in Paris; it was made into a film, starring Sami Frey as Artaud, in 1993. The British-born Jany de Ruy was Prevel’s girlfriend.
(14) Antonin Artaud, letter to André Breton, first draft, 28 February 1947, L’Ephémère, Paris, issue 8, winter 1968, page 5.
(15) Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre De La Cruauté (November 1947), in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XIII, Éditions Gallimard, 1974, page 118.
(16) Antonin Artaud, commentary (April 1946) on the drawing La Mort Et L’Homme, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XXI, 1985, page 233.
(17) Antonin Artaud, commentary (February 1946) on the drawing La Maladresse Sexuelle De Dieu, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XX, 1984, page 173.
(18) Antonin Artaud, commentary (September 1945) on the drawing Couti L’Anatomie, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume XVIII, 1983, page 73.
(19) Antonin Artaud, Dix Ans Que Le Langage Est Parti (April 1947), in Antonin Artaud, Dessins, Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987, page 22.
(20) ibid, page 22.
(21) The organization of the Galerie Pierre event, as well as the poor quality of the unillustrated exhibition catalogue, give the distinct impression that Artaud was treated insensitively by Pierre Loeb. Their arrangement was that Artaud had to forfeit a number of his drawings to the gallery in return for being given the exhibition, which took place during the summer holiday season. The framing, hanging and removal of the drawings appears to have been done with little care, and a number of drawings – including a portrait of Paule Thévenin – were stolen from the gallery during the hanging, never to reappear.
(22) Antonin Artaud, Le Visage Humain (June 1947), in Antonin Artaud, Dessins, page 48.
(23) ibid, page 50.
(24) Antonin Artaud, L’Arve Et L’Aume Suivi De 24 Lettres À Marc Barbezat (letter of 21 August 1947), L’Arbalète Éditeur, Décines, 1989, page 82.
(25) Balthus speaking in the film Balthus The Painter, directed by Mark Kidel and transmitted on BBC2’s “Omnibus” programme, 1997.
(26) Antonin Artaud, Exposition Balthus À La Galerie Pierre (1934), in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume II, 1973, page 287.
(27) Antonin Artaud, Balthus (February 1947), in the catalogue Balthus, Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1983, page 47.
(28) Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh Le Suicidé De La Société (January–March 1947), Éditions Gallimard, 1990 (illustrated edition), page 81. In his essay, Artaud derides and insults a sexually obsessed psychiatrist, designated as “docteur L.”, whom he had encountered during his incarceration. The doctor who had helped Ferdière to administer Artaud’s electroshock treatments at Rodez, Jacques Latrémolière, claimed in the early 1960s that he was the target of Artaud’s anger here, but Paule Thévenin comments in her notes to this edition of the essay that Artaud told her that the target of his wrath was actually the infamous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
(29) ibid, page 110.
(30) Antonin Artaud, 50 Dessins Pour Assassiner La Magie (January 1948), in the catalogue Antonin Artaud: Oeuvres Sur Papier, Musée Cantini, Marseilles, 1995, page 63.
(31) Artaud did succeed in including eight pages of images and texts from his notebooks as a plate section within his book of poems, Artaud Le Mômo, which was published in 1947 as a small, luxuriously printed edition by Bordas Éditeur in Paris. Artaud had initially attempted to persuade Pablo Picasso to illustrate his poems, but finally decided that he would use his own notebook pages, since, as he wrote in an unpublished letter to the publisher Pierre Bordas on 6 February 1947: “Picasso would never be able to understand me as I understand myself.” In the same letter, he describes the content of his notebook pages as “totems… mysterious operating machines”. (The manuscript letters of Artaud’s correspondence with Bordas are stored in the “Grande Réserve” section of the National Library in Paris.)
3 : The Screaming Body: Artaud’s Sound Recordings 1946–48
Artaud’s work in recordings – created over two short spans of time at the beginning and end of his final period of freedom in Paris – is an intense visualization of the human body. At this extreme point in Artaud’s work, the body is compelled to become visual material: its ap
pearance is the result of a disciplined but ferocious invocation. The last of Artaud’s recordings – To Have Done With The Judgement Of God – forms a vast project for physical transformation: a project that uneasily inhabited the medium of the radio broadcast, which Artaud adopted as the sole means that would enable him to transmit his work to a mass audience. In sound alone, the visual body is integrally absent, and Artaud’s screaming body is an intricate amalgam of linguistic and physical elements that counter that absence of the body, while enforcing its materialization explicitly for a large audience. Where Artaud’s drawings were seen publicly by only a small number of friends and exhibition-goers during the weeks in which they were installed at the Galerie Pierre, his recorded work was intended to be experienced by an audience of millions.
Radio played a powerful and dominant role in the lives of virtually all of the citizens of Paris (and throughout France and Europe) in the years after the Second World War. An evening programme on the national radio station – which, while nominally independent, was under the indirect control of the French government – would invariably have a huge and indiscriminate audience. In addition to news bulletins and reports, the content of a night’s broadcasting would typically range from crass entertainment quiz programmes, to medical and psychological advice programmes, to programmes of work by poets, writers and musicians, including those associated with the Parisian avant-garde movements (even under the German Occupation, experiments in radio as an innovative art form had continued to flourish). As a medium for the dissemination of information, entertainment and culture to a mass audience within the home, radio was pre-eminent. In this sense, Artaud’s recordings – conceived within the context of the late 1940s French radio system – are popular culture of an utterly shattering and unique kind.
In the case of the last of his recordings, Artaud’s work was suppressed in its entirety (by the radio station which had commissioned it, rather than by a governmental body, although the border between the two institutions was blurred). That final recording is Artaud’s most advanced and furious work on the human body. It is also the work in which he most strategically and actively aimed to elude the process of representation: a process that he had railed against in his film writings, and combatted with fury in his drawings. For Artaud, it is representation alone which makes the body absent. Into the process of representation are subsumed the forces of society, religion, psychiatry and medicine in general, and also the work of censorship which summarily prevented the broadcasting of Artaud’s work – a broadcast which he perceived literally to be a physical transmission. On a further level, the recording is a highly sociological denunciation – accentuated by an element of hallucination – of the consumer culture of post-war France and, especially, of the United States’ use of Cold War hysteria to assimilate Europe to its political, military and cultural influences. This was the era of the Marshall Plan and its economic subjugation of parts of Europe, including France, to the domination (simultaneously both financial and cultural) of the United States. And Artaud’s last work, finally, is theology of a virulent and pure kind – an anti-religious language of the scream made new, vivid flesh.
On his return to Paris in May 1946, Artaud had no plans for recordings. His projects for gaining a mass audience for his work were focused on his desire to publish it in mass-circulation newspapers such as Combat. But although several short extracts from his work in progress would indeed appear in that newspaper, which was under the direction of Albert Camus and Pascal Pia during Artaud’s final period in Paris, he came to perceive it as an inadequate site for his work.
In the format of the newspaper, Artaud’s preoccupations were swamped; and the intrinsically temporal and fixed nature of a newspaper clashed reductively with Artaud’s aim for an expanding, launching space for his attacks and for the incessant transmutations of his work. His adoption of the radio recording as an alternative space for this work occurred through an outside intervention. He made the first of his recordings for radio in the month following his return to Paris, at the moment when he was still about to resume his drawing work, with the first sequence of facial portraits that were begun in that summer. The producer of a programme devoted to innovations in radio form, “New Experiments Club”, had sent Paule Thévenin to Artaud’s pavilion in Ivry-sur-Seine to request a contribution from him (this was Thévenin’s first meeting with Artaud). He was initially reluctant, his prescient suspicion being that the medium of radio was not one which would give him the freedom to express exactly what he wanted to. But, since he immediately liked and trusted Paule Thévenin, he agreed to her request. On 8 June, Artaud recorded a text he had written especially for the occasion, entitled The Patients And The Doctors; it was transmitted on the following day.
The text denounces his treatment in the asylums of France, and offers a radical reworking of definitions of health and sickness. The text polemically demands a reversal of the positions of the doctor and the patient. For Artaud, the person who is ill has experienced the hideous beauty of life. This experience gives the patient the absolute right of access to drugs such as heroin and cocaine. In the aural space of the recording, Artaud’s voice grates and grinds over his words and glossolaliac exclamations, which are hammered and whistled out of his body and mouth. But, on listening back to the recording, Artaud was unhappy with what he saw as its ponderous speed and heaviness. He decided to record another text, and the radio programme agreed to transmit it. This second recording, Madness And Black Magic, recorded on 16 July and transmitted on the following day, dealt with the tortuous absence of identity experienced by the awakening electroshock patient. This recording accuses the French psychiatric hospitals of magical practices that involve the sexual butchery and robbery of patients’ bodies while they are held vulnerable and defenceless through such treatments as insulin shock comas and electroshock comas. Skinned naked in a bath of electricity, each electroshock patient is exposed to an artificially-created death – and at this stage in Artaud’s work, all manifestations of death are states of black magic that have to be overturned. Again, Artaud was unhappy with his work as it appeared within the medium of radio, and abandoned the form for the next sixteen months.
At the beginning of November 1947, Artaud received an invitation from the radio programme “The Voice Of The Poets” to prepare a broadcast on whatever subject he wanted. His broadcast was intended to form the first of a new series of works which the programme’s editor, Fernand Pouey, had instigated. Most of the textual material for To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, as Artaud entitled his project, was written urgently, within the space of two weeks, since the main part of the recording sessions had been scheduled for the end of the same month. Artaud chose three collaborators to work with him on the project: Roger Blin, Maria Casarès and Paule Thévenin.[1] Casarès had replaced Artaud’s original choice, the actress Colette Thomas, who found the project too exhausting and suddenly withdrew from participating in it. Artaud prepared his collaborators intensively but very briefly: the texts to be performed had only one rehearsal, on 22 November. All of the material was performed and recorded on 29 November in the salubrious studios of the French national radio station, in a highly tense atmosphere which Paule Thévenin remembered as one of “violence”.[2] Both she and Casarès were deeply disturbed by the demands of their contributions to the recording; only the more ironical and detached Roger Blin was able to take the session more in his stride. What Artaud called the bruitages or “noise effects” of the recording – screams, cries, dialogues in invented language, percussion and bangs – were then recorded by Artaud, together with Blin, on 16 January 1948, and edited into the pre-existent material. The date of the recording’s transmission (which was to be only in the Parisian region, not throughout France) was set for 2 February.
Artaud’s final recording is a polyphony of screams and language, of assonant and obtuse rhythms, of insurgent elements of chance, and of outbursts of a black, apocalyptic laughter which mocks religion. In its projec
tion of imageries of the human body with sound alone, the work recalls Artaud’s declarations about the presence of sound at his Studio 28 lecture on the nature of cinema, almost twenty years earlier. As Artaud had emphasized then, in 1929, sound underlines its real inhabitation and fracturing of space as it engulfs the room in which it is heard, creating its own visual emanation; in Artaud’s recording from 1947–48, sound is the real mark of the body. During the final stage of his involvement with cinema, with his film project The Butcher’s Revolt, Artaud had explored the potential for an arrhythmic collision of sound elements against the film image and its space, resulting in a hostile and compulsive impact on the spectator. In To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, sound works as both aural and visual assault, with the virulence and precision of Artaud’s vivid language acting as the propellant for the visual component. The recording constitutes Artaud’s ultimate struggle with language – the interrogation, the fragmentation and the concentration of language to discover a way of viscerally conveying the body through language.
Although Artaud wanted to shorten the completed recording on listening back to it, the work otherwise met with his complete approval. He asserted that it accomplished his aim of meshing the body with language, and he believed that the resulting work would be experienced by the spectator’s entire nervous system. The recording’s “noise effects” are interspersed throughout its five textual elements. The long first section of the recording is performed by Artaud himself, and denounces American capitalism and imperialism: it deals with an imagined American government practice of stockpiling sperm from schoolboys, to be used to generate soldiers in the future – for the financially-motivated Cold War, a mutually beneficial confrontation between Stalinist Russia and the United States. It is to be a conflict of simulation, bluffs and artifice. Artaud’s voice tears at his words, hysterically and coldly humorous. The second text, Tutuguri, The Ritual Of The Black Sun, performed by Maria Casarès, details the dance of the Tarahumara Indians which Artaud had watched in the isolated northern mountains of Mexico in 1936; in Artaud’s interpretation of the dance within the preoccupations of his recording, it serves to exact the abolition of the Christian cross and the institution of a new, physical sign which negates religion and is uniquely forged from bleeding flesh, cries and violence. The third text, The Search For Fecality, performed by Roger Blin, projects an imagery of excrement posed against bone; the text taunts human beings for having cowardly bodies of soft, pliable meat when “to live,/you have to be somebody,/to be somebody,/you have to have a BONE,/and not be afraid of showing the bone,/and losing the meat in the process.”[3] Excrement and “god”, together with all thoughts and ideas which enter or leave the body, are excess organs for Artaud. He denounces all languages and signs which betray and lose themselves within the pull of time and in the repetitious process of representation – in his notes written during his preparations for the recording, Artaud had noted: “I abject all signs. I create only machines of instant utility.”[4] His text affirms that an army has now revolted to end the judgement of “god” by creating a body totally without organs: a tree of walking will. The fourth part of the recording is performed by Paule Thévenin. This text, The Urgent Question… , attacks the status and prestige accorded to ideas (elsewhere, Artaud wrote that ideas are only the voids of the body), and examines the concept of “the infinite” as a liberatory gesture, rather than as an idea: “the infinite”, for Artaud, is “the opening/of our consciousness/towards possibility/beyond measure.”[5]
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