He had the conviction that demons had taken hold of him, and a fear of sexuality, which he associated with disease and microbes. He believed he was made of glass and breakable, had a fear of noises and identified with the dead. At the end of his life he habitually jabbed his head with the point of a knife, as though he were performing an instinctive form of acupuncture. But Artaud had no desire to be “well”. Just the opposite. He felt that illness gave his work a special quality. Much of his writing was an inquiry into the limits and definition of madness….
"With the development of film as a serious art form in 1920s France, Artaud saw an opportunity to hijack the medium, to use it as a tool with which to pierce the ‘skin’ of civilised reality. Thus, Artaud gave his cinema a purpose, outflanking the prized entertainment values of the 1920s film industry. When asked in 1924, “What sort of films would you like to make?”, he replied: So I demand phantasmagorical films...Read More: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/film-theory-antonin-artaud/ image: /2010/08/there-is-a-light-that-never-goes-out/
The contrast between reason and madness is one of the aspects of western culture that helps define its own originality. It is something that accompanied the culture out of the Middle Ages and into the realm of Hieronymus Bosch and has continued to follow it and evolve after Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud.As Michel Foucault stated, madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night’s hallucinations and the non-being of light’s judgment. Artaud ran with the idea that there was no credibility in our present pursuit of a five sense ecstasy; a utopian ideal built on militarism, racism, and consumerism, a Disneyland golden ghetto.
Does Charlie Sheen want to hijack the television medium for his own private vision? It seems that much of his acting and public persona is an inquiry into the limits and definition of madness. He may feel that only because he is ill, that he is able to create and his particualr problems give his work a particular quality.
Artaud felt that, in establishing and expanding civilisation, mankind had concentrated on the superficial through the construction of a spiritless, material world in which to exist. Consequently, we have repressed our primitive instincts and lost contact with our spiritual senses. In this sense he shared the Walter Benjamin view of the alternative negative or pessimistic utopianism based on shock and the element of the nihilistic.Artaud believed that the theatre should affect the audience as much as possible,and he, similar to Alfred Jarry, he would attempt to shock those viewing his plays;almost as an act of benevolence and hence the emergence of the theater of cruelty.
Jamieson:Artaud rejected ‘pure cinema’, an increasingly popular approach to filmmaking that laid emphasis on the film’s visual form (5), because he considered the approach to be devoid of emotion. Similarly, he considered the hybridisation of literary and theatrical conventions with filmmaking equally abhorrent. Rather, he proposed a cinema that aimed to engulf the spectator, to physically affect them on a subconscious level. Ambitiously, Artaud conceived of a cinematic experience powerful enough to project his viewer beyond their civilised self and rediscover their primitive instincts. Evidently, Artaud’s project significantly deviated from the conventional notion of film fiction. Rather, he theorised a cinematic experience capable of transcending illusion and acting directly upon (and altering) the viewer’s perception of material reality. Read More: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/film-theory-antonin-artaud/ image: http://www.keywordpicture.com/keyword/antonin%20arthaud/
Antonin Artaud: Sickness is one state, health is only another, but lousier, I mean meaner and prettier. There’s no patient who hasn’t grown, as there’s no one in good health who hasn’t lied one day, in order not to have the desire to be sick, like some doctors I have gone through. I have been sick all my life and I ask only that it continue, for the states of privation in life have always told me a great deal more about the plethora of my powers than the middle class drawing -AS LONG AS YOU’VE GOT YOUR HEALTH- for my existence is beautiful but hideous. And it isn’t beautiful only because its hideous. Hideous, dreadful, constructed of hideousness. Curing a sickness is a crime….
Like Artaud, Sheen sees a need to break away from the tedium and monotany of daily life, "the boredom, inertia and stupidity of everything" as Artaud said. Like Artaud, we see direct actions against social conformity needed to invoke change.
Throughout his life, Artaud was to plead for special consideration on the grounds that he was suffering, and different. Artaud the writer and should be allowed to publish and Artaud the actor to act, not only because of the merit of his work , but because it was the work of a man physiologically and psychologically stricken. “I used my mental illness, like a flag” , he wrote the editor of he Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Jean Paulham. He believed that illness gave an extra dimension to his acting.
Foucault:Artaud's madness does not slip through the fissures of the work of art; his madness is precisely the absence of the work of art, the reiterated presence of that absence, its central void experienced and measured in all its endless di-mensions. image: http://alexdeden.wordpress.com/2011/02/
We understand that the tragic hero-in contrast to the baroque character of the preceding period-can never be mad; and that conversely madness cannot bear within itself those values of tragedy, which we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical period, the man of tragedy and the man of madness confront each other, without a possible dialogue, without a common language; for the former can utter only the decisive words of bei
uniting in a flash the truth of light and the depth of darkness; the latter endlessly drones out the indifferent murmur which cancels out both the day’s chatter and the lying dark. (Foucault, Madness and Civilization)
"Artaud's spiritual being, which he equated with the artist in all mankind, was in a state of total anarchy. Yet, according to Zinder, he claimed he wanted to "give form to this formlessness . . . to find a way in which this chaos could be harnessed and reproduced under control." He wanted "to achieve on a grand scale the purification" being offered by the creative energy he felt was infinity within himself. ---Read More: http://www.cyberpagedd.com/gaffield_knight/academic/antonin_artaud.htm image: http://ombresblanches.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/a-funny-thing-happened-on-his-way-to-the-movies/
Artaud was strongly drawn to the era of the distant past that gave birth to the great myths. His characterization of these myths in the following passage from The Theater and Its Double is a crucial element of his thought:
. . . that is why all the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot image, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation.
He believed the raging forces of disintegration to be physical, sexual, beyond reason and even beyond the senses–metaphysical. “The body and all its saps are one with the mind and all its flights of images.” Read More: http://www.cyberpagedd.com/gaffield_knight/academic/antonin_artaud.htm
Messis:I love what he is all about, he is a huge inspiration to me, mainly because he is someone who has seemed to have understood the 'shit deal' that we are constantly living under. Artaud not only wrote some real heavy poems, he also was heavily into the occult and is one of the first playwrights of the 20th century to create the living personification of 'DaDa' in his plays, Also he had a philosophy which I heavily agree with and that was; That Imagination was reality; he considered dreams, thoughts and delusions as no less real than the 'outside' world with its realness and actuality. Reality according to Artaud appeared to a be consensus as if like one huge 'placebo' effect on the senses.Read More: http://itsmashedpotatotime.blogspot.com/2010/09/mad-mans-fate.html
ADDENDUM:
Artaud wanted his audience to experience theatre the same way it would if it viewed a painting or a sculpture, or an approaching hurricane, i.e., viscerally. By exploring the void within himself, this embodiment of Surrealism was probing a place within himself that had no center, circumference, or metaphysical limits. In his first letter to Jacques Rivière he wrote, “I would like you to realize that it is not a matter of the higher or lower existence involved in what is known as inspiration, but of a total absence, of a veritable dwindling away.” When he wrote this he must have sensed something, a place, a moment within himself which he felt existed even before the creative impulse he felt to write it. Until he was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic and institutionalized in 1937, Artaud’s reality, that is his life and fantasy, knew of no walls–no rules or restrictions. As this sort of god, to himself, he thought theatre could somehow be an instrument of healing the violence and cruelty of bourgeois society by persuading it to listen, look, feel and think past it’s paycheck, and to consider it’s part in maintaining the planet as a “. . . slippery world which is committing suicide without noticing it . . . .” Read More: http://www.cyberpagedd.com/gaffield_knight/academic/antonin_artaud.htm a
You have to wonder if Charlie Sheen is slipping into the world of Artaud. An alternative reality that asserts that the rational world is deficient; an abolishment of reason and a desire for shock that gives meaning to his proper alienation. Sheen seems to intentionally place himself outside the limits in which sanity and madness can be opposed.
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