Antonin Artaud: From Center to Periphery, Periphery to Center

I

It is winter, 1947, less than one year from Artaud’s death from rectal cancer. He has given his last performance, Tête à tête, par Antonin Artaud, at the Théâtre de Vieux-Colombier in Paris; mounted his last exhibition, Portraits et dessins par Antonin Artaud, at Galerie Pierre; and written his last two poems, published together as Ci-gît, précédé de La Culture indienne. He is in Paris, resting, perhaps after visiting the exhibition of van Gogh’s paintings at the Orangerie which inspired, earlier in the year, the essay Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society. Georges Pastier, of whom and of whose family Artaud has drawn portraits, snaps the photograph. This photograph is prominently featured in the exhibition “Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (October 5, 1996 to January 7, 1997) and in the accompanying catalogue edited by Margit Rowell.

Artaud is split, doubled. In the top image, he scratches his neck, apparently oblivious to the camera; in the bottom one, his pose is more studied—it is of a man, handsome still at fifty-one, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette. All the while, the world changes behind, whirling around in a speedy blur. This photograph encapsulates for me the relationship of Artaud to himself and to the exterior world: unsettled between the dual impulse of, on the one hand, alleviating his own pain, and on the other, figuring as an anointed prophet for a society without perspective, he at once folds inward and maneuvers toward center stage. Intensely repulsed by the fabric of conventions, he nonetheless committed his life to alter such conventions: he “read his own sick body not only as if it were a map of the universe but saw himself as capable of biting into the tumor that was devouring him and using the poison therapeutically on a cancerous culture.” ¹ Yet from the vantage of society, his flaunted abnormality appeared as but that: flaunted—a futile self-justification of a man who knows himself to be degenerate, diseased, and self-divided. And so the world whirled around, first bestowing on Artaud fame and its attendant attention, then subjecting him from 1937 to 1948 to another kind of scrutiny altogether: that of various psychiatric institutions.

It was exactly this constant surveillance, this agent of convention, which Artaud paradoxically wished to obviate. To this end he deployed a veritable panoply of defensive and offensive systems: in youth (1910–15) and in his earlier confinement under medical supervision (1918–22), he attempted to deflect it through immersing himself in literature and in art; in mid-life (1923–36), he espoused the stage as an alternative reality in which the revolt from it could be both played out and viewed; and in his later years (1937–48), disillusioned by the operative powers of the theatre, he lashed out at it in his spells—written and sketched notes which he circulated—and drawings in the hopes of annihilating its grasp on him and on his acquaintances. And so this photograph foregrounds Artaud in another way: it is a metaphoric compendium of Artaud’s response to social codes and their constabulary, surveillance. Confronted with a camera, Artaud first looks away in an attempt to escape, then inverts into a private world which is also posed as an exemplar, and finally slips off the glossy flatness of the photograph entirely, refusing the capture of the “exigencies of spatial form, of perspective, [and] of measure.” ²

The two motifs in this photograph—one which announces an internal rift and a subsequent alienation from society, the other which develops art as an instrument for, on the one hand, re-integration and for, on the other, social change—bespeak a story as old as modernity itself. It is that of the existentialist, the man who sees too deep and too much, the result of which is a conscious tension between the être-pour-soi and the être-en-soi. ³ And indeed, Artaud has often been cited as paradigmatic of such a man; certainly, his...