Excursions In Artaudian Culture

Edgard Varese and Antonin Artaud, 1933. Photograph by Rogi André

Excursions In Artaudian Culture

By Alan W. Moore

Artaud’s was the life of a mythic. mad genius, rich in passion, ambition, failure and disease. He is renowned as an expressive and influential figure: Peter Brook staged a play by Marquis de Sade in an asylum, Richard Schechner’s Performance Group smeared themselves with blood for Dionysus, and most famously, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre closed their Paradise Now with a revolutionary march into the streets. The war horror of those times called for screams.

The texts in The Theater and Its Double—in which Artaud famously wrote of the actor “signaling through the flames,“—came from a man who played the priest in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, who was an expelled Surrealist and an imprisoned madman.

The “Specters of Artaud” rose again at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, with a difference: Artaud as inspiration for a movement of artists working beyond language, and those haunted by his “specter” are painters, poets, filmmakers and therapists; from Yves Klein to John Cage, Isidore Isou to Lygia Clark. The exhibition’s most important contribution is a wide-ranging and long-overdue exposure of artists from the Lettrist movement.

Lettrism was started in 1940s Paris by Isidore Isou, an admirer of fellow Romanian Tristan Tzara. The Lettrists worked in every mode of art and in doing so created a close-drill avant-garde highly resistant to public understanding. As its leader, Isou was uncompromising, conceited, and dictatorial. (He put out a journal in ’46 called Lettrist Dictatorship). But, just as Andre Breton supplanted Tzara’s leadership of the Dada group, so Guy Debord usurped Isou with his Lettrist International in the early ’50s. Although the movement continued, it was effectively eclipsed.

Cabañas—who edited the “Specters of Artaud” catalogue—explains that, while Dada poetry broke down language to the phoneme, the Lettrists sought to take it further into the body; to the level of intonation. This is the root of their relation to Artaud, the poet of digestion and disease. Clicking, growling, panting, coughing, gagging, and screaming in favor of pure human sound and its impact. Even more than the anti-script cries of actors in theater  (“to the tumbril with the wordsmiths!”) Lettrist François Dufrêne’s epigraph, cribbed from Artaud, was “all writing is pig shit.”

In Isou’s film Venom and Eternity (1951), Isou, as “Daniel” leaves a debate at the Cinema Club to wander the streets. The debate inside the club is heard as a voiceover, with participants jeering Isou’s speech. “I like film when it is insolent,” this is movie as manifesto. The speaker calls for a new kind of cinema: a “discrepant cinema,” made from images of decay. The cinema should be “living off the offal of its own photography,” like the Marquis de Sade swallowing the shit of his mistress. “Sound and image, the two wings of the Cinema, must be torn asunder.”

Throughout there is a low background sound like a unison fever chant, repetitive and annoying. There follows a love(less) story and found footage of workers, as the film gradually turns into an animated collage painting. It’s easy to see the roots of a lot of experimental film here. Venom seems like an outline for the work of Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage: documents of mundane life, reassembling existing footage, scratching and painting stock, etc.,

How did Artaud influence these avant-garde film shows? Artaud’s thinking was dominated by the “competition between theater and cinema,” and the unwanted subsumption of cinema into the realm of literature. For Artaud, silence was the essence of cinema. If it was to include sound, it should not be speech. Film in the Lettrist age was a physical fact, ready to be painted and projected from a booth behind the audience. Artists took the opportunity to add to the movie-going experience with assaultive theatrics.

The exploration of silence and body noise inspired by Artaud reverberated at Black Mountain College in the U.S. in the 1950s. In the gallery, I rebelled against this connection forged between the viscerally eloquent, tortured figure of Artaud writing his magic spells, and John Cage, the smiling, cryptic, grand heresiarch of U.S. postmodern art. Cage in his  performance work dropped script, rehearsal, and narrative, broke the single focus of attention, and put the audience inside the action. The “cacophonous effect,” or “state of incoherence” accorded with Artaud’s dicta.

In a charmingly delirious essay, Antonio Sergio Bessa relates early 1950s concrete poetry (particularly the Brazilian Noigandres group) to architecture, modern sanitation and the “buzz” of filth beloved of Rimbaud, the Paris Commune, rubble, Anarchitecture, and the ruins in Europe after WWII. He analyzes Öyvind Fahlström’s poem MOA (1)(1954)—“highly opaque and utterly impenetrable”—as an example of, well, whatever you choose! Finally, both set forth “a new relationship with the real in which the reader becomes an active participant in the poetic production.”

Cabañas frames this exhibition using the Derridean notion of a “hauntology.” For her, “Artaud’s howls and screeches haunt the spaces” of Lettrist cinema, while his influence in concrete poetry is “a whisper, rather than a cry.”

In the catalogue, Cabañas describes the exhibition she did not make, one which could include Patti Smith. Jacques Rancière observed that vanguard modern theater has oscillated between the twin poles of Brecht and Artaud, the “epic theater” with its “distanced investigation,” and the “theater of cruelty” committed to “vital participation.” After this citation, Cabañas briefly references the other part of the Artaud “hauntology,” the “Friday the 13th” part —Carolee Schneemann and Nancy Spero, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Hermann Nitsch and Otto Muehl—the subject of work by co-curator Frédéric Acquaviva and the broad theatrical legacy, Living Theatre, the Chilean Tentativa Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski’s archetypes, etc., etc. But with that we walk out of the museum and into the theater…

The figure, thought, and ravings of Antonin Artaud, which wend their twisted way through art, cinema, literature, music and psychiatric ministry, make up the “hauntology” of this exhibition. It is both with and against the normal lines of descent, the “artistic filiations” of cultural history. In relation to Artaud, artistic experience not an anxiety of influence, but a kind of infection, the strange hand and breath of a phantom contagion.