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Antonin Artaud was born in Marseilles in 1896; his family were ship-owners with their origins in a number of Mediterranean countries, including Turkey and Greece. Artaud was an unruly child and spent much of his youth confined in convalescence clinics, where he was first introduced to laudanum, triggering life-long addictions to a vast range of drugs. In 1920, he moved to Paris, wrote his first collections of poetry and began to work as a theatre and then film actor; in 1924, he joined the Surrealist movement and was director of its research bureau before being expelled in 1926 in a dispute about the nature of revolution.
In the second half of the 1920s, Artaud began to write film scenarios, with the intention of becoming a film director. He developed many film projects, but the only one actually made into a film, The Seashell and the Clergyman, was directed, not by Artaud, but by the filmmaker Germaine Dulac. Disagreements and jealousies over the film led to a riot at its premiere. Artaud also developed a theory of Surrealist cinema which envisaged a profound perceptual transformation and impact upon the film spectator. He wrote his final film scenario, The Butcher’s Revolt, in 1930, before abandoning cinema. In that same year he also wrote The Monk, an evisceration of Matthew Lewis' gothic novel which Artaud transformed into an astonishing exploration of the far edges of death, sexuality, terror, language and the body. Artaud then turned to a series of theatre projects, which he eventually grouped under the title ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’ – though the projects were largely conceived in the form of raw bursts of manifesto, letters to friends, notes and fragments, rather than in the form of a coherent overall plan. Artaud envisioned an enveloping sensorial spectacle that would expose his spectators to vital, all-engulfing imageries and cacophonies, to bring about a corporeal as well as perceptual mutation in his audiences. His subjects matters included a vast spectacle around the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, and many of his projects were designed to be staged in open spaces such as derelict factories, rather than conventional theatres. During the same period, he wrote a biography of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus that reflected the author’s preoccupations of the time with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions.
Following the collapse of his theatrical plans, Artaud began a series of journeys which he intended to put him directly in touch with cultures of fire and transformation. He travelled first to Mexico, in 1936, and visited the Tarahumara people in the northern mountains, in order to participate in their rituals around the peyote plant. A collection of writings, The Tarahumaras, emerged from that journey. Back in France, in 1937, Artaud became preoccupied with ideas of imminent catastrophe and apocalypse, and wrote a book of prophecies, The New Revelations of Being. He then travelled to the isolated Aran islands, off the western coast of Ireland, in order to witness his apocalypse take place. On the ferry back to France, Artaud was arrested, then incarcerated in a succession of insane asylums, where he suffered years of acute starvation and beatings. At the final asylum, Rodez, in southern France, he was subjected to electroshock treatment. On his release, in 1946, he returned to Paris and worked incessantly for the period until his death in 1948, from an overdose of chloral hydrate. In that final period, while living in an abandoned pavilion in the park surrounding a convalescence clinic in the city’s periphery, Artaud worked on drawings, manifesto-texts, screams and gestures, plans for a transformation of the human anatomy (to render it a ‘body without organs’), and radio recordings, notably To have done with the judgement of god. The main medium he used for that astonishing final work was a collection of 406 schoolchildren’s notebooks, which he saturated with confrontational amalgams of image and text, and multiply pierced with knife-blade incisions.
Artaud's work remains a constant source of seminal inspiration, astonishment and provocation across contemporary visual art, film, performance, choreography, digital media, and critical theory, throughout the entire world. Recommended Reading: ARTAUD:
BLOWS AND BOMBS (A Biography) by Stephen Barber ARTAUD:
THE SCREAMING BODY (Film Projects, Drawings, Sound Recordings)
by Stephen Barber ARTAUD:
TERMINAL CURSES
(The Final Notebooks 1945-1948) by Stephen Barber HELIOGABALUS
by Antonin Artaud THE
MONK by Antonin Artaud WATCHFIENDS
AND RACK SCREAMS by Antonin Artaud ARTAUD
ANTHOLOGY by Antonin Artaud
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