Remembering Artaud

Were 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, particularly in 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 experimentation, 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 characterization were valued over traditional Stanislavski-based acting 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 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”-painters who 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’s lifelong desire to...