Remembering Artaud

Author(s): Gautam Dasgupta

Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 1-5
Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3245858
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 REMEMBERINGARTAUD

Gautam Dasgupta

WrTT
ere it not for the Museum of Modern Art's mounting of Antonin
Artaud's drawings, concurrent showings of films in which Artaud
appears as actor at theatres in New York, including a documentary on
his life, and art world panels organized by the Drawing Center, the centennial of his
birth in 1996 would largely have gone unnoticed. Inexplicably, very little attention
was paid to him by members of the theatrical community, both in New York and
elsewhere in the country. A strange fate, indeed, for an artist who must, by any and
all accounts, be considered one of the foremost theatrical minds of this century, and
whose own writings place him firmly in the tradition of theatrical modernism. Such
utter disregard, bordering on contempt, is yet another indication of the lack of
historical understanding in which American theatre culture operates. Or is it that
Artaud's understanding of theatre, cruel or not, has little or no relevance to the
theatrical arts of our time?

It wasn't that long ago, after all, particularlyin the fifties and sixties, when Artaud's
ideas, together with those of Brecht, were indispensable to the making of theatre.
With the publication in France in 1938 of The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud's
reputation as a theoretician of theatre was established and the book was heralded as
a seminal work in its field. In 1948, at the instigation of John Cage who was then at
Black Mountain College, that vital breeding ground of avant-garde experimenta-
tion, it was translated into English by Mary Caroline Richards and eventually
published in 1958. Its impact had been felt not only in France, where theatre artists
such as Charles Dullin and Jean-Louis Barrault came under its spell, but even in
distant America artists from different fields who were nonetheless committed to
advanced artistic creation, such as Cage, Carolee Schneemann, Rachel Rosenthal,
and others were deeply influenced by it. Later, of course, it was mostly due to The
Living Theatre's anarchic and physical theatrical daring that Artaud came to the
forefront of American theatre. Through them, Artaudian ideas percolated down to
the vibrant off-Broadway movement of the sixties in plays and productions that
demanded from actors an alternative way of acting where gestural and non-verbal
approaches to characterizationwere valued over traditional Stanislavski-basedacting
methods. Eventually, toward the end of that decade, owing to the experiments of
Jerzy Grotowski in Wroclaw, Peter Brook in London, and Richard Schechner in

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New York, Artaud's intensely physical and psychically-strenuous methodology
prevailed.

Artaud's dominance during the sixties was certainly abetted by factors that had to do
with social issues as much as aesthetic ones. Protests against the Vietnam war had
physicalized the culture to a large degree, while the general tenor of the times was
permissively open to overt physical behavior.The body, once wrapped in the cocoon
of Puritanism, was displayed with abandon, and liberation on the political front was
synonymous with freeing the body as a sexual and social instrument. Physical
culture and the cult of the body strong and beautiful, once an adjunct to fascist
ideology during Artaud's lifetime, was now viewed as a path to social and political
liberation and a companion of democratic impulses. Just as in Artaud, where the
body becomes the carrier of thought, a process of transubstantiation manifested
through physical prowess, America's body politic was undergoing a shift where the
body was politicized both in public and in art.

From an artistic point of view, precursors to this trend could be glimpsed in the
strategies of the abstract expressionists, "action"-painterswho implicated the body
and its contingent emotions in the process of painting. Whether or not these
painters were familiar with Artaud, the fact remains that beginning with them,
works of art embodied meanings that had to do with a physical act, and an act that
was not pre-thought, but where action and thought were synchronous entities. This
was the same attitude that later generated Happenings and, most significantly,
Conceptual Art, which was perhaps the closest in strategy to Artaud'slifelong desire
to give shape and substance to the very nature of thought.

It is this nexus of thinking and its physicalized attributes that distinguishes Artaud
from other theorist-practitioners in the theatre, for even though he was emphatic in
valuing the physical over the literary on stage, he was far from denying to spectacle
the attributes of serious mystical, mythical, and philosophical import. Resolution of
Cartesian dualism was integral to his thinking, unlike that of other theorists, such as
Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose biomechanics was inspired by Cubo-Futurist aesthetics
and Soviet work ethics, and the radical Polish thinker Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz,
whose ideas on theatre, art, South Sea island mythologies, even drugs, not unlike
that of Artaud's, was linked to his concept of "pure form." Artaud was, finally, a
metaphysical thinker, his spirituality formed by a native Catholicism even as he
flirted with spiritual notions from other lands and cultures, including Balinese,
Indian, Tibetan, Persian, Mayan, and Aztec.

In his transposition to the theatre in America, it was the philosophical element of his
thinking that suffered. More often than not, Artaud's ideas about the actor resulted
in this country not so much in rigorous intellectual stagework as in abandoning any
attempt at rigor whatsoever.There were indeed exceptions, evidenced in the work of
Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre, the early creations of The Living, and in the
experimental works of Andre Gregory, Lee Breuer, and Schechner. His name was
invoked with regularityin much of the work done off- and off-off Broadway,but in

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most such instances, it was paying lip service to Artaud's emphasis on the physical
aspects of performance. His spiritual stance went mostly unrecognized, other than in
the works of those avant-gardedirectors who saw themselves addressing though the
craft of the actor/performer an essential grammatics of the very nature of perform-
ance aesthetics. The new stage language that was being proposed was seen in a
spiritual light, for it was creating a new grammar of images and meaning that
bypassed traditional channels of value imbedded in the spoken word, a medium
hugely suspect in the charged political atmosphere of the sixties and seventies. It was
Nietzsche who said that as long as we continue to believe in grammar we cannot rid
ourselves of God.

It can be argued that the substitution of the word performer for actor was itself an
Artaudian act, as presence opposed to representation became the catchword of that
time. It spoke to an authenticity of being, later on in critical theory to be spoken of
as unmediated experience, a Rousseauist natural self, as it were, in defiance of the
artifice erected by the generation of our parents and our insincere politicians.
Artaud's revolt against Western rationality and his embrace of Asian models of
wisdom was seen as a comrade-in-arms' effort to overthrow existing systems of
power. Brecht was fine in this regard, but his was still a traditional revolt, an old-
fashioned Marxism that had played itself out in an earlier time in the American
theatre of social rebellion. Artaud's revolt was inward, an interiorized reshaping of
the self that sat well with an innately American sense of transcendence, of personal
upliftment, of being born-again. In him could be found a recipe for both personal
and social revolution, a psychic tremor strong enough to embrace spiritual and
political longings. Not only did the self become political through Artaud, it also
became spiritual. Witkiewicz's revolt, on the other hand, was entirely subjective,
while Brecht's was adamantly sociological.

On the face of it, it might seem that Artaud's ideas about theatre, representation,
and the self is ideally suited to the American temper. It was true for an era when
much group work was going on, with the groups committed to either a spiritual/
metaphysical or a political end, for in Artaud the private can only attain fulfillment
within a social matrix, and only through communal myths can the personal hope to
attain transcendence. To be true to Artaud's vision, and to deploy it in any
meaningful way, a group and its members have to be communally joined with a
revolutionary purpose, whether that be political or spiritual. It is work that is
predicated on an adversarialrelationship to the larger culture and its regnant myths.
In the absence of such friction, which is the situation today, it is understandable why
theatre artists have little to derive from Artaud'svigorous system of artistic practice.
The only exceptions in the eighties and after of work committed to Artaudian
practice were those by the Wooster Group under Elizabeth LeCompte's direction
and Reza Abdoh's productions for his Dar a Luz company, both groups energized by
a resentment of and a resolute questioning of the dominant culture and its practices.

It is also why much of Artaud'sideas have been embraced by solo performances, but
that is again only a truncated use of Artaud's comprehensive vision and one which

DASGUPTA / Remembering
Artaud * 3

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serves him partially. It allows performers to embrace personal mythologies, without
addressing the core of Artaud's philosophy, which is predicated on a communal
ethos. That aspect of Artaud is not only evident in his many writings and the
"double"of his most theoretical work, it is also amply on display at the Museum of
Modern Art, where Artaud's many portraits of friends and the "spells"that he cast
on various people bespeak a community. To merely emphasize the individuated
body as the site of a political or mythological system is not sufficient in Artaudian
terms; Artaud demands work within the space of a theatrical system. Once those
parameters have been established, he then asks for a highly intensified personal
commitment that, in the final analysis, must be sacrificed to a larger purpose.

That purpose in Artaud is not only spiritual and metaphysical, but it is also
strenuously universal,with similaritiesto what currentlyis termed "multiculturalism,"
although in his case it is built around a syncretic worldview, and not the synthetic
variety that is the norm today. Given his interest in world cultures and religions, one
might have hoped that Artaud's case would continue to have special relevance. But
there again, Artaud's understanding of cultural difference is uniquely organic and
flies in the face of what contemporary artists consider multicultural. His is a form of
universalism that seeks to absorb difference rather than show up the lines of
demarcation. Theatre's "double" is the Platonic ideal, that ultimate truth which is
under constant attack in our time.

The art world's embrace of Artaud either through solo performances or in painterly
works has also reimagined him as a theoretician of the body and its absence, "the
body without organs" in Derrida's phrasing. That, too, is only partly true, for
howsoever much Artaud insisted on the actor "signalling through the flames," the
dissolution in an act of martyrdom was inextricably linked to a spiritual transcen-
dence. The absented body in Artaud is not a formal principle but a necessary rite of
passage that leads to a body of thought. Artaud'sbody decomposes into thought; for
him, the body encases thought, entombs it, and it is only by making the body
transparent and by giving up its ghost that its innate knowledge can be made self-
evident. The sole purpose in Artaud to eviscerate the body, to tear limb from limb,
to turn it inside out is to make visible the ceaseless activity of thought that lies
buried within. To understand the nature of thought and thinking is to understand
the body and all its varied functions. Hence Artaud'srelentless emphasis on the body
and its parts in his writings and in his drawings. To be cruel to the body is not, in
Artaud, an act of sado-masochism or an artistic ploy; it is an existential act with
grave metaphysical consequences.

Perhaps it is Artaud's stringent artistic demands and his vital philosophy that have
kept most theatre practitioners at a safe remove from his overpowering visions. The
commitment he seeks in art is so extreme that not many current theatre artists are
likely to engage him in his task to remake theatre as if it were the very purpose and
end all of life itself. A theatre that merely depicts life is not sufficient for this
visionary artist. To celebrate his philosophy is to question the very fundamentals of
life and its relationship to art. That is no easy matter in our comfortable times, and

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yet it would have been honorable if, in addition to the recognition he received from
the art world, some members of the theatre community had seen it fit to stage his
plays or arrangefor a symposium to debate Artaud'sinestimable contribution to the
essentials of theatre.

GAUTAM DASGUPTA co-edited, with Bonnie Marranca, the forthcom-

ing PAJ book Conversationson Art and Performance,published by The Johns
Hopkins University Press.

PERFORMING ARTS JOURNAL, NO. 56 (1997) PP. 1-5: ? 1997

The Johns Hopkins University Press

DASGUPTA / Remembering
Artaud * 5

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