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".
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Professor Stephen Barber. Stephen is Research Professor of Media Arts at the digital arts research center at Kingston University in the UK, and, in 2008, a Visiting Professor at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of nineteen books, and the recipient of major awards from the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Program), Ford Foundation, Getty Program (World Art Program), Japan Foundation, Daiwa Foundation, among many others.
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Part One: The Last Words of Antonin Artaud Antonin Artaud's work has a unique determination to excavate the material of the visual image and the nature of language to their most profound strata, unearthing horrors as well as revelations in the violently charged act of gestural fury which propels that search. And the element of Artaud's work which most demonstrates that process takes the form of the numerous school-children's notebooks which he used as his preferred creative medium for the last three years of his life. Artaud was the supremely obsessed artist of the twentieth century, and a body of work as resolutely fragmentary and incendiary as his was never likely to accumulate into a final masterwork able to distil his essential obsessions into a streamlined form - encompassing his Surrealist preoccupations, Theatre of Cruelty projects and asylum-incarceration experiences - in order to elucidate the infernal; it is, instead, the multiple, wound-strewn, confrontational form of his notebooks which allows those obsessions still to reach us in their most intensified and unscreened state of corporeality, with the least degree of interposition. If Artaud's presence may be materialized and conjured in its most authentic state, resilient and uncompromised, it is in the form of those notebooks. Artaud's work is at the heart of contradiction. For the fifty years after his death on 4 March 1948, his work was little-seen and little read, but exerted a converse, phenomenal impact, his name endlessly invoked and cited in the context of innumerable films, performances, books, theories, anti-psychiatry initiatives, and libertarian or nihilistic movements. His status as a seminal and inspirational cultural figure - whose work determined the forms of contemporary performance, choreography, visual art, experimental literature, and inflected the perception of drug use and definitions of madness - rested worldwide on a viral contagion of citation and distortion that only skimmed that work's surface. But Artaud's work irresistibly enters into such contradictions, since it resists everything that approaches it, and remains intolerable, too volatile to assimilate, too profound to appropriate. It is unreadable and unseeable as a whole. Artaud knew this and intended it to be so. On preparing his final extended poetic work, Henchmen and Torturings, for publication, he noted in January 1947 that it was an 'infuriating book that is absolutely impossible to read....
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