Cruel journey - Antonin Artaud's drawings, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Stephen Barber

Behind Antonin Artaud's drawings lies a harrowing tale of nine years' confinement in asylums and 51 brutal electroshock treatments. The author of recent biography argues for the power of Artaud's visual testament.

Few explorations of the human figure have been as obsessional and extraordinary as that undertaken, at the end of his tumultuous life, by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the legendary French Surrealist and theorist of the Theater of Cruelty. The recent exhibition of Artaud's drawings, paintings and manuscripts at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris has given this imagery the chance to acquire the eminence it deserves alongside the other elements of his work. Artaud's status as one of the great inspirational icons of 20th-century dissident culture was established in the mid-'60s, as theatrical innovators like the Living Theater and Jerzy Grotowski took up his ideas for a unique style of performance based around violent gestures, cacophony and a visceral impact upon the spectator. Similarly, his Surrealist writings of the late '20s--concerned with a disciplined "revolution of the body" which set him at odds with Andre Breton--proved to be fertile ground for a host of writers, filmmakers and artists attracted by Artaud's deliberate journeys into psychosis and addiction, and the extreme images he brought back with him.

It was only in the last few years of Artaud's life that his preoccupation with physical transformation led him to what is arguably the most powerfully enduring manifestation of his work: his drawings and paintings. He had been expelled from the Surrealist movement in 1926 after producing several books of poetic fragments and film scenarios, and his subsequent attempts to realize his theories of performance within a series of spectacles in the Parisian theater of the '30s--the project which he called the Theater of Cruelty--had left few material traces. The Theater of Cruelty was built on the idea of an unrepeatable, ferociously gestural event, which would combust itself in its act of realization. But, in fact, the ephemerality of Artaud's performances was due more to the ridicule and neglect they met in the Parisian theatrical milieu than to the author's intention that they survive only in the lacerated consciousness of their spectators.

Artaud left Paris abruptly in January 1936 after the collapse of his final Theater of Cruelty spectacle, The Cenci. He traveled first to the mountains of northern Mexico, where he participated in the peyote rituals of the Tarahumara Indians, hoping to find a revolutionary culture of fire and dance which would supplant his terminally jaded experience of European culture. After a brief period back in France, during which he became enthralled by apocalyptic ideas of an imminent global catastrophe, Artaud set out for the remote islands of western Ireland, where he intended to watch the end of what he saw as a corrupt and compromised world. He spent weeks in a state of destitution, and wrote innumerable letters to friends in Paris, covering the paper with vividly colored signs and fetish symbols, burning the surface with cigarette ends. These "spells," as Artaud called them, were designed literally to embody his sense of fury and isolation, and to exact retribution on their recipients, who, he felt, had abandoned him.

Arrested for vagabondage in a public park in Dublin on Sept. 23, 1937, Artaud was imprisoned for several days in Mountjoy Prison, and then deported to France. On the boat--in a deeply paranoid and delirious state--he attacked two stewards and was placed in a straitlacket; on arrival in France he was institutionalized in an asylum on the outskirts of Rouen. Certainly, Artaud's behavior in the preceding two months had been exceptionally bizarre and violent, but many of his friends in Paris saw his internment as pure misfortune, since his habitual eccentricities had been eminently permissible in the Parisian milieu he had inhabited before his journeys. What Artaud experienced in the next nine years would be agonizing. He had been one of the most elegant and dandified of the Surrealists, his intensely handsome features hauntingly captured in the films in which he had worked as an actor in the '20s, such as Abel Gance's Napoleon and Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Now he was starved and beaten in communal wards, transferred from asylum to asylum across France, under risk of deportation to the concentration camps after the German invasion of 1940. Impossible to diagnose, even by Jacques Lacan, head of the clinic at the Parisian asylum of Sainte-Anne through which Artaud passed in 1938-39, the writer was in a state of institutional limbo: in one asylum, he spent time successively in wards intended for "maniacs," "cripples," "epileptics" and "undesirables."

In 1943, Artaud was transferred to the asylum of Rodez in rural southwestern France, and it was there that he began the series of drawings which would continue until his death five years later. The young director of the asylum, Gaston Ferdiere, had been approached by the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who knew that Artaud would at least be able to eat at Rodez and would be in less imminent danger of extermination (Desnos himself would be deported to a concentration camp the following year for his Resistance activities in Paris, and would die of typhoid at Theresienstadt). Ferdiere had been a Surrealist poet, writing obscene, unpublished poetry before his change of career. His preoccupations were anarchism, drugs and pornography, and his role of authority in a social institution created a torturous dilemma for him. The resolution Fediere found, as he told me repeatedly in our meetings before his death in 1990, was always to explore the use of what he considered to be the most innovative and radical treatments upon his patients. Artaud became the trial subject for two of these treatments: art psychotherapy and electroshock.