Artaud

1. Julie Kristeva on the abject:

“A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.”

2. Artaud’s theater constitutes a movement towards a truly corporal theater; one that is almost perversely concerned with the body and its various functions; additionally to mine these functions (which are always a kind of utterance) and turn them into signifiers which can evoke unconscious feelings in the spectator; the emphasis is on spectacle, naturally. The reversion to the abject is a means of forcing a confrontation with the Real (the surreal).

3. From Andrew Marvell’s ‘Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’:

SOUL

O who shall, from this dungeon, raise

A soul enslav’d so many ways?

With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands

In feet, and manacled in hands;

Here blinded with an eye, and there

Deaf with the drumming of an ear;

A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains

Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;

Tortur’d, besides each other part,

In a vain head, and double heart.

BODY

O who shall me deliver whole

From bonds of this tyrannic soul?

Which, stretch’d upright, impales me so

That mine own precipice I go;

And warms and moves this needless frame,

(A fever could but do the same)

And, wanting where its spite to try,

Has made me live to let me die.

A body that could never rest,

Since this ill spirit it possest.

4. The unconscious is structured like a language, says Lacan. Artaud’s aim was to create a theater which is structured like the unconscious, in which every element is a part of a language; to expand the vocabulary of theater; to take full advantage of its sensory resources (sight, sound, sympathy), to do away with the superficial vision of the theater that centers on narrative, and actors performing the words; a kind of abstraction or distillation to the pure elements of the art.

5. Sontag:

“Thus, Artaud does not so much free writing as place it under permanent suspicion by treating it as the mirror of consciousness-so that the range of what can be written is made coextensive with consciousness itself, and the truth of any statement is made to depend on the vitality and wholeness of the consciousness in which it originates.”

6. If surrealism sought to expand the consciousness of the mind in order to expand the potential of physical and sensual pleasure, Artaud with his ‘contempt’ for life, sought to expand the perception of life as being rife with pain and turmoil.

7. Writing with the body; poetry in space; sculpting in time.