Product Description

Customer Reviews (7)

Tread Lightly
This is definitely required reading for theatre students.It will help you better understand the shift in modern and experimental theatre that has transpired over the course of the last century.It will also help you better understand the basis for a lot of horrible theatre concepts staged by overzealous students and professors, the world over.... Be wary of people throwing around the Theatre of Cruetly catchphrase as if they know what it means....

Essential
Antonin Artaud's forward thinking and innovatiove views on the theatre are an essential read for any practisioner of the theatrical arts. Wade through the madness and see the light.

Signaling furiously through the flames
Antonin Artaud's obsession -- and I don't think that's too strong a word in this context -- lay in building a new philosophical framework for live theater, one that would give audiences unmediated access to powerful metaphysical truths. This book is keystone text that illuminates the rest of his life's work. Ultimately, it's not a satisfying one because of its repetitive and mystical nature and because, placed in historical context, Artaud's conception of what should constitute living theater seems somewhat constricted to later, media-saturated generations.

Let there be no mistake, however. The theatre francais of Artaud's day was hidebound by convention, a convention that surrealism took as somewhat of a challenge to overturn. Artaud's plea for a theater that would de-emphasize the spoken text and accord more emphasis on light, sound, movement and elaborate combinations of anything non-verbal that could be brought to bear on audiences is part and parcel of the surrealist rejection of theatrical convention. It is striking that Artaud, himself a marvelous film actor, dismissed out of hand the notion that motion pictures as an art form could do what live theater could not. In this respect lies the most obvious example of his limited vision. Film would eventually provide the director with all the tools that Artaud dreamed of for his Theatre of Cruelty. Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and Tarkovsky would all draw heavily on the notion of subordinating conventional dialogue to image and sound. Artaud's notion of theater is further undercut by the rise of television, its ubiquity and, in the age of digital electronics and computers, its raw immediacy. Television gives us unmediated images of real violence and conflict, of death on a horrendous scale, but many of us would rightly question whether being directly confronted by the unreasoning cruelty of the world we live in is especially ennobling or enlightening. In fact, many of us might argue the opposite, that it coarsens us, that it hardens the soul against outrage.

So, why give Artaud three stars for this book? Because there are some very crucial things that he gets right in this collection of essays. Most importantly, Artaud draws repeated attention to the flaws of complacency in theatrical production. It took an Artaud to remind Western civilization that theater's roots lay in public spectacle and religious rite and that its estrangement from those roots was killing theater as a living form of art. It took an Artaud to take theater off the stage and put it into the public space surrounding the audience, breaking the plane of conformity that separated actors from audience. Artaud, perhaps most ironically, reminds us that we call theatrical performers "actors" for a very good, but forgotten, reason -- their art at its peak acts upon the audience with a transformative power.

This very dense and, at times, mystifying collection is worth the effort required to read through it and come to grips with intellectually. I would especially encourage anyone interested in film as an art form to read Artaud and ponder how his insistence that a wide range of sense data can reconnect an audience with vital truths could be adapted to the cinema. For here, in a new art form that is still willing to tap into daring innovation, is where Antonin Artaud's passion is most likely to find a permanent home.

"The only cure for madness is the innocence of facts" (150).
I'll admit that this is the first time I've read Artaud. And I'll admit that when I began reading the first section, The Theater and the Plague, I thought on numerous occasions, "Where is this guy going with this?" Upon concluding this section, and after picking myself up off the floor, I returned to the beginning for a another read through, and again, afterward, found myself floored. Artaud presents a take on theatre like none other. A take that many may disagree with, but few can deny the illuminating profundity of his analogies, correlations, and general theatrical philosophizing. But don't think Artaud is without a sense of humor.With a blurt like, "I saw some sort of human snakes, otherwise known as playwrights, explain how to worm a play into the good graces of a director...", whose not going to let out a chuckle? (Especially if you're guilty). In addition, this book boasts some of the best writing that I've ever read. His writing is crisp, unmasked, and intellectually and visually stimulating. And as an added bonus, nine "I'm an ugly man smoking a cigarette" black and white photos precede the text. At $10, "The Theater And Its Double" won't disappoint.

Decimation and Re-birth
Artaud's words are sharp and violent and essential.They are glass shards, they are bullets, they are flames from the primordial fire.Yesthis work is about the theatre but it cuts to something more elemental;Artaud, like Whitman, like Camus, wants us to open our eyes.He seetheswith disdain for Occidental complacency, yet he seeks to do something aboutit, to foment revolution. He desires to confront us with our tired andrepugnant cowardice.I've never encountered a text like this, one thatshakes and quavers and dazzles and combusts with such maniacal fervor, suchcruel poetry and apocalyptic delirium.After reading Artaud, you cannot bethe same. ... Read more

Product Description
A revolutionary figure in the literary avant-garde of his time, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is now seen to be central to the development of post-modernism. His writings comprise verse, prose poems, film scenarios, a historical novel, plays, essays on film, theater, art, and literature, and many letters. Susan Sontag's selection conveys the genius of this singular writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

At the Extremes of Creativity
Difficult to read cover to cover but at the same time, the ideas here every creative person needs to recon with. Artaud is at the outer limits of creativity. This is what you get when you turn art or human creativity into religion. Artaud produced works in nearly every genre of human creativity attempting to fill the void. What most of us feel as a vague sense of lack or a desire for connection, Artaud felt as agony. His was a search for that place where mind meets body, where soul meets matter.

Best Overview of His Work
Stricken with congenital syphilis which Swiss-cheesed his brain, this genius was still able to articulate his own madness and mental suffering with beautyand conviction, and to dream up a new mode of artistic expression that has yet to be realized. His writings transfigure him into a patron saint of misunderstood artists, drug addicts, the mentally ill, the moribund: anyone who is marginalized.

Tome essential to all theatre artists
Studying Artaud is one way of taking a deep dive off into the realm of the unknown.His struggle to fully comprehend and describe lucidly his thought process and the clockwork of his soul; his obsessive desire and drive to break beyond the mundane level of median psycological theatre to rediscover the fiery roots and potent magic of the theatre event; and his visionary words---all of these combine to give us a man who was deep, profound and troubled---hence, utterly human, and truly inspirational to any theatre artist or artist in general. This translation of some of his most essential writings is essential to anyone who wishes to study the avant garde theatre.His influence is at times lucid and clearly defined; at other times, one sees that the myth of Artaud has distorted what the actual man wanted and worked for. In dealing with any artist who has created such a controversy (in his own time as well as in our time), one has to approach his work with the discipline of a tightrope walker. And Sontag's work provides the researcher with a straight, keen and powerful translation. Among the other translations of Artaud, this one is the best anthology available for the experienced researcher and the burning initiate.Read it as an athlete of the heart.

The theatre, life and writings of a brilliant lunatic
This isn't a book that you read from cover to cover. Find a subject that interests you. Then another. And then another. Soon you'll find yourself caught in his web of genius. His madness came from his endless spring of sanity that could no longer hold up under the insanity of the world he lived in. Genius suffers. He suffered too much. Years ago I saw a one man play "Artaud's Project" in Chicago. Best piece of theatre I've ever seen. This was my introduction to Artaud. This book captures this brilliant lunatic's crystal clear vision and pain. His letters are prehaps the highlight of this collection. This book is not for the masses, though, I wish it were. So much insanity and ignorance could be wiped out in a single stroke if people understood this man. Of course the sane appear to be insane in an insane world. If any of what I've said makes the least bit of sense to you this book is for you!

Artaud: what and where and how were you thinking?
Selected Writings isn't an easy read.I jumped around a lot.This stuff is the most intense stuff I've ever come across.Artaud is one of the most important writers to rationalise beyond logic.His ideas on Van Goghprove, beyond doubt, that his sense of aesthetics was far more acute thanhis contemporaries. They always said weird stuff about Neitszche, how hewas more 'in touch with himself' than other writers or, indeed, society atlarge.But Artaud explodes that idea, since he continually toys with hisown sense of himself to the extreme. Reading Artaud for prolonged periodsis like going beyond this (his) sense of self to another place, somethingcompletely new and agonizing. His ideas abouty the theatre are quite wellestablished but there is other stuff here. The poems, monologues and justthe sheer variety of 'inner scenarios' at play here really astounds you. 'To have done with the judgement of God' must be the most extreme form ofself expressed mental torture around!(incidentally, am I correct inthinking there is a recording of this piece knockin' around?) Anyways,please take a slice of the insanity, you never know where it will leadyou... ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Each Page Is An Exercise In Theater (From Ahadada Books)
This volume is a moving and challenging compilation of drawings executed (irony intended) between 1946 to 1948 in elementary school exercise books.The selection of drawings was done by Artaud for a publication planned by Loeb Gallery in Paris, and the poet wrote a text (his last) to accompany it.Artaud died before the project could be brought to fruition.The design of this book is wonderful: the cover accurately reproduces the blue of the student notebooks of the time along with its cloyingly sentimental drawing of fields and haystacks, and on the verso tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.We also see the smudges, tears, stains that will be mirrored on the yellowing, blue-gridded pages within.What strikes us is the utter poverty of the poet forced to use such humble media for his writings and designs.We witness his meat machine--even then secretly sapped and undermined by cancer--as the vision trembles through the muted explosions of chemical-induced electricity to cause the muscles to expand and contract with varying degrees of delicacy.We see the piercing of the page--stabbed 11--perhaps 12 times--in ecstacy, frustration, or as part of a private "gris-gris" ritual--by the poet, who includes nails, thorns, and other emblems ofritualistic transfixions in his cruel drawings.The drawings themselves give us glimpses of the poet's [...], of his thyroid, of lung-like sacks collapsed upon a scream; of bodies dissected and exploded and simplified to maps of layered graphite, and of electrical armature-like processes connected by sinister, exfoliating wires.There is also a heroic landscape of words written, smeared, struck through, that encase the drawings.

Now I know
the objective plastic power
of the breath

says Antonin Artaud, and in our contemplation--our encounter--with this wonderful volume--we know it too.


... Read more

Product Description
essays, tr David Rattray, Jack Hirschman ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Curiosity Kills the Cat
Too much absinthe, too much opium to make these ravings coherently and cohesively legible.
However, central and humorus when thinking special interest or literary curiosity.

NOT madness, but an asphyxiating dive into reality
So many seem to associate the name of Artaud with madness, decadence, the postmodern "I'm-too-hip-to-care-but-I-still-think-deeply" attitude.Nothing could be further from the truth.Antonin Artaud was a man interested in nothing less than the violent exhumation of real life from the cold, icy tomb that civilization has attempted to seal it in.

As we see here in his letters to the sympathetic, but ultimately helpless Jacques Riviere, Artaud's suffered from a kind of hypochondria of the mind which resulted from his scorching intensity of thought.He explicitly rejected happiness as the goal of human existence, and this is what separated him not only from the surrealists but from other thinkers of his age and ours.Perhaps he put it best himself in his own strange, archaic language:

"For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness."

There will be nothing in this anthology that the Artaud admirer has not already seen, although the whole text (particularly the photographs of Artaud starring in Dreyer's "Joan of Arc" and Gance's "Napoleon"), comes together like a bizarre little work of art.I have referred to it repeatedly, given it away, purchased it again.The most important piece that this little publication has to offer is "I Hate and Renounce As a Coward"..., which is at the very end:the closest thing we have to a coherent philosophical position from Artaud.Also, "Van Gogh:The Man Suicided By Society", which is more about Artaud than Van Gogh, gives us an indispensable glimpse into the psyche of the genuinely tortured, doomed artist.

There are moments in which Artaud becomes as important in his commentary on the human condition, as thinkers like Nietzsche, Plato, Pascal, and all of the greats.Unlike in their work, though, it is not maintained consistently.This is also the case with his poetry.His internal anguish did not allow him to consummate his enormous potential.His value lies in the threat he poses to our complacency simply by virtue of his memory.

Read "The Theatre And It's Double" first, and then tear through this.Savor Artaud's sentences as you would a delicate meal you'd never tasted before.

May the looming shadow of this demented renaissance man never stop haunting us.

Artaud's thoughts on fire.....
This book really puts Artaud's thoughts into perspective. The wonderful madness that inspires one to escape reality and see over that edge of sanity is written here.

Cruel World
Of all twentieth century dramatists, Antonin Artaud is perhaps the most enigmatic. The facts of his life are stark and austere, and his work is a painful movement through many silences and journeys.

Even the less initiated student of Artaud will know this writer as someone who deals with uncomfortable and taboo subjects. Among more established critics, too, Artaud continues to attract highly polarised critical opinions. When faced with Artaud's works, the critic's approach seems to be either resolutely textual, bracketing off the human element and referring only to the language on the printed page, or it is predicated on the notion that the biography of the writer must be taken into account in showing how Artaud's texts came to be written. In the first kind of reading, Artaud's texts aredehumanized. In the second, Artaud's works are bracketed off as symptoms of the dramatist's deviant mental or spiritual state, and the labels that have been attached to him (from gnostic to schizophrenic) are taken as reliable pointers to his works. While textual readings offer a definite advantage, in that they approach Artaud's writings without preconceived ideas about the writer's life, aspects of Artaud's life, in particular his scabrous attitude to the traditions of the literary world, seem too important to leave out of account in any discussion of the dramatist's works. Within Artaud's writings here, there is a specific, reflexive relationship between art and life, the one illuminating the other. One can see there is no convenient distinction to be made between Artaud the man and Artaud the writer, he was one and the same, these writings are an ejoyable entrance into that sphere... ... Read more

Product Description
intro, annotations & tr Clayton Eshleman w/B Bador ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

To much of a good thing?
Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends and Rack Screams (Exact Change, 1995)

Will Exact Change ever put out a bad book? I fervently hope the answer to that question is "no." That said, Watchfiends and Rack Screams suffers from much the same problem as most ponderous tomes of selected works from major poets; it's simply too much of a good thing.

The translation here is in the hands of the always capable Clayton Eshleman, who treats Artaud with all the reverence the man deserves. Eshleman is certainly no stranger to translating Artaud's later work (the translation of "Artaud le Momo" which appears here first appeared in Eshleman's fantastic anthology of translations Conductors of the Pit, which I cannot urge you enough to seek out), and he does the same fine job as usual here. Almost three hundred pages of it, however, tends to be a bit much all at once. This is a book to be lingered over for months, perhaps years, going back to it again and again as time passes and absorbing another bit of it at a time, rather than one to be read straight through. As well, Eshleman's introduction runs close to fifty pages. While it's certainly interesting enough stuff, fifty-page introductions are, in general, bad form. If you're going to add a fifty-page essay to a book of poetry, please, for the sake of the reader's sanity, make it an afterword, not a preface.

All that said, the influence of the work of Antonin Artaud on modern poetry cannot be understated, and any serious aficionado-- and certainly any serious poet-- should have a copy of this on the bookshelf. It is a fascinating, disturbing portrait of a man's mind torn not only by the inner workings of his own nature, but also by a convergence of brutal external forces that cannot be comprehended by most living human beings. *** ½

They don't translate Artaud like they used to....
I am a huge Artaud fan.He was a true visionary, a prophet of brutal truth in a lazy, complacent world.So I was really looking forward to reading this new anthology of works from his ultra-disturbing late period.But I have to say I found it disappointing.The translations, by noted language poet Clayton Eshleman, sound stilted and wooden to my ear, favoring cleverness over raw power.The exhaustively researched notes don't quite make up for this poetic deficiency.I turned to my beloved copy of City Light's "Artaud Anthology" (one of my all-time favorite books) and did line by line comparisons of Eshleman's work with the brilliant Ferlinghetti and David Rattray translations in the older book, and there was just no comparison.It really isn't surprising that the 60's beat-era poet-translators just had a much better grasp of Artaud's earth-shattering radicalism than poets of today.The City Lights one is the keeper for sure (it's still in print): take that one with you to a desert island and I guarantee you won't even want to be rescued and brought back to "civilization."

I have come to offer judgment on your brain
Artaud's genius was too much for his head, and it spilled out like corkscrews into a series of spiralling texts and flickered in a shower of sparks across the oceans, from France to the rest of the planet. Here Clayton Eshleman, the great translator of Artaud, assisted by another less successful translator, brings us a number of the more arcane texts. This book doesn't have everything in it, but what it does have is choice. You have to hand it to Exact Change. They may not do everything they do for the first time (although there are many texts in WATCHFIENDS previously available only in French, if at all) but when they do something, baby, it stays "done."

Ideally this book would come with a DVD in which we could watch the recorded performances of the living Artaud, for even though he was not, as an actor, the very best exemplum of his theories, some memorable glimpses of him linger on via film.

Artaud the Momo
This anthology documents work from Artaud's final period spent mainly in a mental institution.The poems are by far the strangest that I have encountered.Filled with odd incantatory stanzas fashioned in Artaud's own language, the poetry and prose in this collection requires some patience from the reader.Some of the poems/prose in this collection I found virtually impenetrable (e.g., "Artaud the Momo") but this only seems to heighten and augment my appreciative awe for Artaud as an artist/poet/prose magician.Even Artaud's letters venture into strange and unknown territory as they combine prose, poetry, and Artaud's own creative argot to produce an inexplicably chaotic amalgamation that can count as a literary genre unto itself.

Although incredibly weird and convoluted, Artaud's work from this tumultuous period still manages to shine by dint of its strange qualities and inherent loopiness.If you happen to be interested in this type of enigmatic, dada-esque poetry/prose pick up this volume ASAP.

As Beautiful As The Burning Intestines Of A Diarrheatic Cow
here it is. the greatest collection of artauds poetry ever translated. of course it isnt as complete as that susan sontag one, but it is the best translations of his best poems and you dont have to drag your eyes throughall that theatre theory even though it is brilliant some of us are moreintrested in the none dramatic aspects of artaud. One of the highlights ofwatchfiends is the inclusion of parts of Suppots et Supplications, artaudslast book length work, dictated to his secratery at the height of hismadness. it has yet to be translated in full so to be able to read parts ofit is a real treat. when i go to the park...when i think of all the pulleysand levers that are a complicated system which helps me to pray, i...listen, do you like poetry that creates a life or death situation for theauthor as well as the reader?im going to tell you a secret...this is oneof the 3ree or 4our books that i would like to tear up into tiny pieces andinject into my hippocampus. ARTAUDARTAUDARTAUD. have i made myself clear? ... Read more

Product Description
Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Araud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence.

Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself. -- Stephen Barber ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

YAWN!
If you buy this book, be prepared for DULL.Lots of boring filler about the religious landscape at the time and not that much content about Heliogabalus until the second half of the book.I actually tried to read this book but eventually gave up and turned to skimming it.It's now in the pile of books heading for the used book store.

Incredible Book
This book is Antonin Artaud's prose-history of the emperor Heliogabalus in which he explores philosophically the world of sperm cults, sun-worship, castration rituals, sodomy and extravagant theatrics in which the child king rose to his bizarre and decadent reign. This book has only recently become available in the English language - a tremendous contribution for anglophone readers. Rest assured that Artaud's arcane poetry has been translated with mastery by Lykiard. An excellent read for anyone interested in themes of anarchy, mysticism, or avant-garde theater. ... Read more

Product Description
The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains a constant source of seminal inspiration, astonishment and provocation across contemporary visual art, film, performance, choreography, digital media, and critical theory, throughout the world.In ARTAUD: TERMINAL CURSES, Stephen Barber explores the newly-revealed set of 406 notebooks which Artaud used in the final years of his life in Paris, after his release from a decade of asylum-incarceration, to carry through his projects for corporeal transformation and social refusal. Artaud's notebooks are designed as an autonomous work in their own right, through which he distils his pre-eminent preoccupations: the envisioning of a new, organ-less human anatomy (crucial for Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical work), his conception of the time and space of gesture, his raw fury against society and all of its manifestations, his visualization of a ruined and supplanted natural and urban world, his intensive confrontation between text and image, and his reflections on the fluctuating parameters of life and death. Those preoccupations retrospectively illuminate Artaud's earlier Surrealist work and theories of film and performance.This eye-opening and original university-level text will be of major significance for all readers interested in the extreme zones of art, literature and media, as well providing critical new revelations for those engaged with Artaud's work.Stephen Barber is a leading authority on Artaud's work, and author of "Artaud: The Screaming Body" and "Artaud: Blows and Bombs". ... Read more

Product Description
translation and preface by Mary Ann Caws

"[T]his short book will be extremely useful for scholars of theavant-garde, particularly those who are interested in Artaud." -- RobertT. Ivey, Library Journal

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)--stage and film actor, director, writer, drugaddict, and visual artist--was a man of rage and genius. The SecretArt of Antonin Artaud is the first English translation of two famoustexts on his drawings and portraits. In one, Jacques Derrida examinesthe works that he first saw on the walls of Paule Thévenin'sapartment. His text, as frenzied as Artaud's, struggles with Artaud'speculiar language and is punctuated by footnotes and asides that reflectthis strain ("How will they translate this?"). The more straightforwardtext of Paule Thévenin describes the history of Artaud's drawingsand portraits. ... Read more

Product Description
Addicted to drugs from an early age and incarcerated in a series of mental asylums throughout his adult life, Antonin Artaud was nevertheless one of the most brilliant artists to emerge from the twentieth century. His writing influenced entire generations, from the French post-structuralists to the American beatniks. He was a key figure in the European cinema of the 1920s and 30s, and his drawings and sketches have been displayed in some of the major art galleries of the Western world. Possibly best known for his concept of a 'theatre of cruelty,' his legacy has been to re-define the functions and possibilities of live performance.
This unique resource brings together for the first time a selection of the best critical writing available on the key themes of Artaud's life and work from critics such as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, Herbert Blau, Leo Bersani and Susan Sontag.
Containing some of the most intellectually adventurous and emotionally passionate writings on this classic and controversial figure, this book is an essential read for Artaud scholars working in a number of arts disciplines, including theatre, film, philosophy, literature and fine art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The unknown Artaud
This third volume of A. Artaud for whom Sartre siad that he is "the new poet of horror" continued the complete edition of his works. It is not as important as the "Theatre and its double" or Artaud'spoems, but includes some of his Scenarios, views on the Cinema, Interviewsheld with Artaud, as well as his correspondance with Mademoiselle YvonneGilles, Madame Yvonne Allendy, Louis Jouvet and others. Although thisvolume might not be as significant as those containing his poetry and viewson the theatre, it is an important link if we want to understand - as faras this is possible - the inner world of a man of tragic insolubilitywithout gaining a distance of safety - that of an audience. Despite beingknown for his thetre of cruelty, Artaud is more a poet of sharp realizationof existence; this volume adds to this understanding. ... Read more

Product Description
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), perhaps best known as a dramatic theorist, is an important but extremely difficult writer. This book studies the development of his thinking, from the early texts of the 1920s through to the acclaimed but lesser known 1940s writings, on such issues as the body, theology, language, identity and the search for an elusive and unsayable self-presence, and then uses this as a framework in which to read his late texts. New attention is paid to the processes by which his texts generate meanings, the logics that hold these meanings together, and the internal contradictions of the late poetry. This allows a new picture to emerge that accounts for the coherent if unequal development of his ideas as well as the drive towards systematization to be found in even his most opaque writings. By returning to the texts and focusing on the specific terms of Artaud's writing, as well as their gleeful resourcefulness and ludicity, it is argued that Artaud needs to be considered not as a contestatory psychotic but as a writer of the first magnitude. Accessible to both scholar and newcomer, this illuminating and original study will refocus critical thought on both the development of Artaud's thinking and the significance of his oft-neglected later work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

POET WITHOUT WORDS
This unrelenting study of Antonin Artaud by Naomi Greene (University of California - Santas Barbara) was published in 1970 but is no less rewarding and iconoclastic today. The literature on Artaud has multiplied since with a stellar essay by Susan Sontag yet to be eclipsed, not to mention Derrida and the poststructuralist wake theoretical theatrics. However no book out there today is capable of tracing the development of the major themes in Artaud's creative intensity. As a young man Artaud complained that he could neither find the words to express his inner being nor succeed in making language and reality coincide. Towards the end of his life this complaint gave way to a violent and apocalyptic denunciation of literature and language. His work refelcts the dilemma of our culture, which has lost all faith in ratonality and yet continues to analyze the sickness with the voice of reason, for it has found no other.
Artaud's debt to certain movements and philosophical currents - notably Surrealism and Eastern mysticism - is acknowledged, yet this study of the author of "The Theatre and its Double" is most significaqnt for how it ilustrates the agonized sensibility that drove Artaud to become par excelence a poet maudits, an infernal creator endowed with creative gifts and intellectual distress, beauty and violence, the other side of reason, the culimation of truth and the truth of the impossible ability representative art is deceiveing itself that silence will in the end not prevail, each trace and all shadows quivering to a wavelength and a frequency few dare to tune into...
An extraordinary introduction by Janet Flanner makes this title an xcellent introduction for the novice and a valuable philosophical treatise for the more seasoned student of asethetics or literary theorists. As much as it provides invaluable reads on Antonin Artaud's sensibility and poetic stronghold, the study does not satisfy as a survey of Artaud's ideas on Theatre and participation, violence and the horror of a void within no one may hope to fill with truth reality and the suff of life. The insanity is a way to make sense of it all.... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

amazing and thought provoking
this book floored me. this was the first of artaud's books that i have picked up. what a fascinating guy! in this book he writes of his experiences with some red skinned indigenous people in the mountains of mexico. the people he encounters are so 'unevolved" from an ignorant western perspective. they are without technology or science as we know it and yet they have existed untouched by modern man for eons. how could this be? well, like many indigenous peoples they use shamanic healing ceremonies in which their leader eats peyote in order to reach an altered state of being. in this altered state profound visions are seen, visions that can help and heal the community. artaud gets initiated into their tribe over the course of his visit, takes peyote, starts tripping, and all the while keeps on writing....his words, his thoughts definately span the entire spectrum: from intriguing diary-like passages, to all-out madman raving, cursing at our sophisticated society that by his comparison is the weaker, un-evolved and lost to no end. he also writes with little punctuation in a stream of consiousness style that is fluid and mind-blowing. this is a brilliant mind, a troubled soul, a questioning spirit. read his words. get lost in his visions. he is seeking, as we all our at some time in our lives. read this book. you'll forget where you are. you'll remember something deeper. on the "other side of the veil" before life and after death, there is much to be gained. whether that state of being is achieved through psychotropic drugs or meditation or dreamstate...there is something to be gained. start your search here, with this book, and keep going deeper. ... Read more

Product Description
Antonin Artaud is one of the great cultural legends of the 20th century. His Theatre of Cruelty altered the course of modern theatre and his experiments with the Surrealist movement have proved inspirational throughout Europe and America. But Artaud's life was one of terrible failure and confrontation, an exploration of the extremes of agony and joy. At the end of a long series of journeys - both physical and spiritual - aimed at creating a magical culture of the human body, he was arrested and interned for nine years in a succession of French lunatic asylums, where he suffered starvation and was subjected to 50 electroshock treatments. This book is a faithful portrait of his life and work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent bio.
Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (Faber and Faber, 1993)

When I grew up, I wanted to be Antonin Artaud. I first discovered his early poetry in Michael Benedikt's must-own anthology The Poetry of Surrealism early on in my high school career, discovering his late work and film work in college. Artaud's expressive, antagonist writing style captured me from the beginning, and the surface details of the tortured artist were immensely appealing. It is only now (I'd flirted with this book for some time, but didn't get round to picking it up until after seeing it receive the greatest acclain Clay Eshleman could give it-- he used it as a reference in the introduction to the English-language version of Artaud's Watchfiends and Rack Screams a few years later) that I get the full story. I still want to be Antonin Artaud when I grow up, but there are some pieces of his life I'd rather avoid, if possible.

Barber's biography, weighing in at less than two hundred pages, is like to be looked on by some folks as spare-- after all, we live in an age where some folks get biographies that are longer than L. Ron Hubbard's never-ending Mission Earth. And to some minor extent, those folks do have a point; there are some odd omissions here (Barber never even glosses over, for example, the commonly-levelled charge that Artaud was "abandoned" at Ville-Evrard, and the privations which followed-- not even to say "these allegations cannot be confirmed or denied," or to refer to the sources of those allegations in Artaud's own work). That said, the amount of space given seems otherwise just enough.

Barber is presenting a "just the facts, ma'am"-style biography here, with only as much cultural context as is necessary to explain Artaud's actions every now and again. Because of this, the reader familiar with the actions and lives of the main characters of the surrealist movement, especially Andre Breton, are likely to be able to mentally fill in some gaps that others will probably notice. Having been relatively immersed in the life and culture of the surrealists for two decades, it's hard for me to look at this and see it as someone who'd only heard the name and seen, maybe, a few of the paintings would approach it. I do think, however, that Barber's sparse prose style will make for a readable, if somewhat dry, biography even for those without much experience of the life and times of its subject before they pick it up.

Not something I'm now aching to have go into my permanent collection, but I'll likely pick it up again at some point. Antonin Artaud's life is a stunning mass of contradictions, and they're well-presented by Barber; a good book about a great artist. *** ½ ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Artaud From the Inside
I have been reading, disecting, and deconstructing Artaud for well over ten years and find this volume to be indispensible.Well worth theprice.The immedicacy and visceral quality of Artaud's words are captured on paper, and where as tapes of his anguished voice might crackle and fade in time, this first hand document of his perceptual experience is truly timeless.This is not only a firmly woven tapestry for those in the know, but also a good starting point for those wondering what all the fuss is about. ... Read more