_____________
Maria Marshall When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Cooker, 1998
‘Marshall’s mesmerizing scenarios of maternal fear and dread strike at the heart of Western culture’s commodification of childhood. For this work, she shot film footage of her two-year-old son playing with a fake cigarette and added wisps, rings, and puffs of smoke, generated using Hollywood special-effects software.’

Watch it here

 

_____________
Jac Leirner Lung, 1987
‘Lung was made at the time Brazilian sculptor Jac Leirner gave up smoking. 1200 Marlboro packets (three year’s smoking) were dismembered into their constituent parts: each part, massed together, became a distinct sculptural entity and metaphor for the Lung. Together these made up the ensemble of the exhibition. One was made of the cellophane strips that you pull off first. another with the foil inner-wrappings. another with the price tags. and so on. Only the cigarettes were not there: they’d ‘gone up in smoke’.

 

_____________
Gabriel Kuri sorted, resorted, 2019
‘The odor of Gabriel Kuri’s ” sorted, resorted” precedes it. The Brussels-based, Mexican artist has meticulously installed at least 1,000 cigarette butts (plus coins and chewed gum) into two large piles of sand which are parted like a sea.’

 

_____________
James Benning Twenty Cigarettes, 2011
‘The 20 shots in Twenty Cigarettes, which (in theory) each begin with the action of lighting the cigarette and end with its stubbing-out, average a fraction over 4:38 each. But while Benning could technically be termed an academic, it would be a stretch to interpret his project as a form of scientific research.

‘Benning has stated that the film is “about duration.” And in theory the length of the shots is determined not by the director but by their subject—in interviews, Benning has stated that he started the camera running, then departed the scene and left his “collaborators” to the business of enjoying their cigarette (we gauge how much time is left by observing the length of the burning, diminishing stub).’

 

_____________
Xu Bing Tiger Skin Rug, 2011
‘Made from more than 660,000 individual cigarettes and weighing an incredible 440lb, this mock tiger skin rug is the creation of master artist Xu Bing.’

 

_____________
Tony Smith Cigarette, 1967
mild steel with vaporblasted surface

 

_____________
Xinyi Cheng Various, 2017 – 2020
oil on canvas

 

_____________
Rose Eken Forever Is A Slow Moment, 2012
ceramic

 

_____________
Jon Pylypchuk I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again, 2021
‘I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again is an exhibition of ten bronze cigarettes all languishing in various poses throughout the gallery. The cigarette motif is not new to Pylypchuk’s work, but whereas before Pylypchuk’s cigarettes were made of found materials, reinterpreting the bricolage of the Art Brut tradition, their reincarnations are now solely in bronze. These new cigarettes are metaphoric for change – the intention to change and longing to return to a flawed normal. Pylypchuk’s cigarettes remind viewers of our false perceptions of control—a fact that has only become more poignant after a year of the pandemic—and of how strongly we might long for those things which we know we shouldn’t, and which ultimately impede our flourishing.’

 

_____________
Lucian Freud Boy Smoking, 1950
‘Boy Smoking is an up close cropped portrait of Charlie Lumley, whom Freud first encountered when the boy, alongside his brother, tried to break into his studio.’

 

_____________
Tony Oursler Cigarettes, 2010
‘A series of oversized, tubular screens with high-definition projection. The effect is that of a smoldering, virtual forest of various Western brands of cigarettes.’

 

_____________
Lucy Sparrow Smoke the Rainbow, 2008
Felt, Acrylic and Thread in Perspex

 

_____________
Yang Yongliang Cigarette Ash Landscape, 2007
‘Yang Yongliang’s latest installation represents the tip of a huge cigarette sculpture hung vertically. The form of cigarette ash is taken from three-dimensional collages of photographs. Below, a pile of ash, composed of small rectangular image cutouts, sits upon a length of fake grass scattered with artificial flowers. Seen in profile, the ash creates its very own landscape.’

 

______________
Robert Larson Various, 2005 – 2015
‘Streets, sidewalks, empty lots, and back alleys—this is the urban landscape that artist Robert Larson navigates in order to source materials for his works. The artist has spent more than 20 years searching for particular types of cigarette packaging, which he uses to create patterned, geometric, and as of recently, metallic, works that engage the history of tobacco and its crucial influence on our culture. The painstaking act of collecting means that it takes months and sometimes years to complete just one work.’

 

______________
Frieke Janssens Smoking Kids, 2011
‘Smoking Kids is the title of Frieke Janssens’ somewhat controversial photographic project. Fifteen children aged between four and nine pose in a startling adult way in front of the camera, each smoking a cigarette, cigar or pipe. Looking like they have stepped right out of a 1960’s TV show adds a modestly theatrical, retro quality but also something whimsical and unreal to the images.’

 

______________
Camilo Rojas Flavor, 2011
‘This piece was created using over 3,400 cigarettes that spell the word flavor. The cigarettes are half smoked showing the nicotine in them; in total, this piece has a size of 28″ H x 44.5″ W.’

 

______________
Robert Motherwell Untitled, 1974
‘Photographic plates. 203×305 mm; 8×12 inches. 14 pages. Oblong 8vo, wrap-around lithograph and collage wrappers by Motherwell with Gauloises cigarette packaging.’

 

______________
Maggi Hambling Hangover, 2016
Oil on canvas

 

______________
Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboys), 1982
‘First conceived in 1954, “Marlboro Man” aimed to convert a male public to filter-tip cigarettes, which had previously been targeting women. To inject virility into the product, the cigarettes were shown being smoked by strong, free men, epitomised by the cowboy. The cowboy figure was popular in film and advertising aimed at men, and was emblematic of the success of North American popular culture immediately after the war. This archetypal figure evokes conquest, frontiers and the taming of nature in a reworked version of European romanticism. Prince borrowed this advertising icon and reframed it. He cut out the text and logo and enlarged it to reveal the grain of the photo. In doing so, he deconstructed the image while maintaining its power of seduction. The mechanisms of advertising were revealed, but the attraction remained present.’

 

______________
Urs Fischer Bad Timing, Lamb Chop!, 2005
Cast aluminium, polyurethane enamel

See it here

 

______________
Sarah Lucas Is Suicide Genetic?, 1996
‘Lucas’s terrifying sculpture Is Suicide Genetic? consists of a motorbike helmet covered in cigarettes resting on a burnt-out armchair.’

 

______________
Tom Wesselman Smoking Cigarettes, 1998
Liquitex and collage on white card stock

 

______________
Alberto Korda Fidel Castro, 1962
Photograph

 

______________
John Norwood Untitled, 2011
‘Another sculpture made of Marlboro cigarette butts and glue. This piece is slightly demonic.’

 

______________
Christian Marclay Cigarettes, 2016
Single-channel animation, silent, continuous loop

 

______________
Unknown Lucky Strike Cigarette Pack Prison Tramp Art Handmade Umbrella, 1987
‘Overall good condition. A few of the ends broken off.’

 

_______________
Liz Magor Smokey, 2008
Polymerized gypsum

 

_______________
Jordi Benito Action on Cigarette Paper, 1972
‘Jordi Benito’s radical Actionism, as well as his active participation, together with a whole generation of artists, in the development of Conceptual practices in Catalonia throughout the 1970s, secured his standing as one of the most significant representatives of this movement in Spain.

‘Benito’s early practice consisted of simple actions in which the body was used as a pretext to construct a language related to the environment, to occupy and vacate the space, to measure the body or its impact when colliding against a static and hard volume. Here he tested the physical resistance of the body, pushing it to the limit and learning to control it. In Acció sobre paper de fumar (Action on cigarette paper), he made the paper disappear by blowing on it.’

 

______________
Steve Carr Annabel, 2007
‘An epic single take of one-hour-and-ten-minutes duration—a portrait of a young woman chain smoking. Annabel is slender, with high cheekbones, and long chestnut hair, cut in a fabulous fringe. She has bedroom eyes and full lips. As she smokes, she works though a repertoire of acquired gestures: holding her cigarette like this, like that, bringing it to her mouth, sucking on it, inhaling, exhaling, blowing smoke, looking bored, thoughtful, pensive, eyes watering slightly. The already sedate, flattering lighting is only enhanced by the accumulating haze—a subtle veil of smoke.’

______________
Barton Lidice Benes Tobacco Road & Untitled (Book with Cigarette Butts), 1972 – 1974
mixed media book construction

 

_______________
Hans Haacke Helmsboro Country (unfolded), 1990
‘This work by Haacke, a large scale model of a cigarette pack, makes a direct reference to Jesse Helms, a conservative member of the Senate, who was tied to tobacco lobbying. During his time, Helms not only wanted to close down the National Endowment for the Arts, but also censored and suppressed artists and their exhibitions. Haacke’s giant cigarettes are rolled up reproductions of the Bill of Rights, and the work calls for freedom of speech while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that tobacco companies had become one of the most prolific donors of museums in the 1990s. Haacke proposed, “art works are no longer private affairs,” and that art institutions and museums were “on the slippery road to becoming public relations agents for the interests of big business and its ideological allies.” For Haacke, art for art’s sake no longer existed as he saw art institutions and museums as biased political bodies.’

 

_______________
Claimsofmyshymphony Smoke Machine, 2019
animated gif

 

________________
Hong Yi-chen, Guo Yi-hui & Zheng Yu-di Polluted Popsicles, 2020
‘Hong Yi-chen, Guo Yi-hui, and Zheng Yu-di from National Taiwan University of the Arts, created an incredible ‘inedible’ design project from polluted water — a series of popsicles, each unique in colour as a result of industrial dyes and chemicals pumped into the island’s waterways. They include an additional ‘bonus surprise’, such as cigarette butts, bugs, and plastic trash such as wrappers and bottle tops.’

 

________________
Ni Hao Small Smoke Sculptures, 2011
cigarettes, ash, adhesives

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Thanks for the link. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein kindly hooks us up with an essay on Artaud by Susan Sontag, and it’s here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I, of course, loved and swooned and titled back and forth at inordinate speed to your new Play Therapy. Thank you! Oh, interesting: the doc. Everyone, And _Black_Acrylic kindly hooks us up with a documentary on Artaud with English subs that he recommends, and it’s precisely here. Wow, you’re coming close to making me want to get in on the Leeds ‘David vs. Goliath’ battle. Nice! ** Misanthrope, Is that right? Yeah, weird, but I remember finding out that all sorts of supposedly foreign things were actually American inventions with fake foreign inflections, although I’m blanking on examples du jour. Oops, I hope Rigby gets reconnected lickety-split. ** Dominik, Hi!! Indeed, and the blog was just the lucky homestead. Ouch, cutting the lobes off, ouch, but, hey, maybe that would look … cool? Tattoos, that’s a different situation, I think, or so it seems to me. I think of tattoos as being really personal, connected to the heart or something, and I guess I think ear gauges are more … just decorative? I could be wrong though. Halston, ha ha, wow. I don’t even know what he looks like. Wait, … okay, he has a really long face, and he looks very aristocratic or something. Love convincing Apple to put CD slots back into their laptops, G. ** R**n / A******ZE, Hi. Okay, cool, glad things got sorted out. Oh, Kent. I went there once, but I didn’t see the sea. I went there to go to that weird amusement park where the rides are made out of earth moving equipment. I think it’s called Diggerland? It’s very spring-like here too, and the streets are packed, and no one wears masks anymore, and it’s kind of like heaven. Thank you a lot for the link to the Rosalia album. I’ll get all over that. Didn’t know there was a Che biopic, but of course there is. Again, I’ll try to locate and imbibe it. I’m good. Weekend was mostly very good and productive. Work progress, saw an astoundingly great film and a grisly bad play. And other okay stuff. Sounds like yours was a tonic. May the week ahead live up to your promise. xo. ** Billy, Hi, Billy. I’m trying to imagine a great experimental novel that ‘refines your brand values’ and having no success so far. I’m good. No, we’ve gotten rid of every restriction except wearing masks on public transport, so it’s almost normality central over here, although the new cases are, naturally, skyrocketing, so we’ll see. Are you freed up? Is your week dawning enticingly? ** Thomas Kendall, Hi, T! So excited for your novel. Don’t forget I want to do a ‘welcome …’ post for it if you’re game. Awesome that you liked ‘TIHYWD’ so much. Thank you! It seems have gotten really savage reviews that are kind of hilariously uptight/British, i.e. ‘what the hell is this thing that makes no sense?!’ Weird. Great to see you, my friend! ** Bill, Dental work, urgh. I hope you’re on the mend and no longer mouth-impaired. Week off!!!! ‘Bestia’: news to me. I’ll find it and find out. Thanks, B. ** Steve Erickson, Definitely will try the Rosalia album. Haven’t heard the Charli XCX, but I will. I used to be kind of thrilled by her, but that kind of wore off. I’m sorry that your mom’s pain battle is still an unpleasant tilted draw. ** Brandon, Hi, Brandon. Awesome! If you really like what you wrote, that really means something. That’s the golden rule, if you ask me. So that’s fantastic. I kind of vaguely understand your description of it, and it certainly sounds promising. My Sunday was okay, mostly a lot of figuring stuff out re: our film, and I saw a really great film on Saturday — James Benning’s ‘The United States of America’ — and that was circling in my head. This is your week off? Well, that’s excellent news. Hope you can max the freedom out. What’s first on your agenda? Take care! ** Okay. Today the blog is doing the cigarette. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, or the opposite? See you tomorrow.

 

A Sinister Assassin presents new translations of Antonin Artaud’s largely unknown final work of 1947-48, revealing new insights into his preoccupation with the human anatomy, sexuality, societal power, creativity and ill-will.
—-That last work – mostly undertaken at a pavilion in the grounds of a convalescence clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the south-eastern edge of Paris – is the most extraordinary element of Artaud’s entire prolific body of work. It is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud, through its fiercely exploratory and combative forms.
—-Drawing from extensive archival consultations of Artaud’s manuscripts, and from many original interviews with his friends, collaborators and doctors of the 1940s, this book brings together translations of the many manifestations of Artaud’s final writings: the contents of his last, death-interrupted notebook; his letters; his two final key texts; his glossolalia; the magazine issue which collected his last fragments; and the two interviews he gave to national newspaper journalists in the final days of his life, in which he denounces his work’s recent censorship.
—-Edited, translated and with an Introduction by Stephen Barber, A Sinister Assassin illuminates Artaud’s last, most intensive work, for the first time.

Illustrated by Karolina Urbaniak and Martin Bladh

Supported by

Hardbound, 224 pages, 190 x 148mm

Available from:
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/a-sinister-assassin

 

 

Introduction by Stephen Barber (extracts)

Antonin Artaud’s very last work, prior to his death in March 1948, is the most extraordinary element of his entire body of work – and is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud – through its fiercely exploratory, extreme and combative forms, along with its dissolutions and negations of forms, focused above all on the human anatomy, as well as on sonic experimentation and on provocations for innovation in dance and performance. This book assembles Artaud’s crucial work from September 1947 to March 1948, when that work was concentrated spatially into its location at his pavilion in the grounds of a convalescence clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the southern edge of Paris – and especially on the insurgent, fragmentary work of the final weeks of his life.
—-The now-vanished two-room eighteenth-century pavilion, where Artaud spent the final part of his life, was located within the clinic’s extensive and heavily-wooded parkland. At the same time, it held an urban location, positioned directly against a high street-wall at the southern edge of the clinic’s grounds, directly across the rue de la Mairie (now the avenue Georges Grosnat) from Ivry-sur-Seine’s town-hall, as is evident from a series of photographs of the pavilion taken by Artaud’s close collaborator Paule Thévenin and her brother Georges Pastier, in which the pavilion appears an abandoned, lost-in-time edifice, its exterior walls decayed and decrepit. Of the pavilion’s two rooms, only one was used by Artaud; as documented in photographs by Denise Colomb, it held a wooden bed pushed close to the large ornate fireplace, an armchair, and a side-table piled with notebooks, manuscripts and empty bottles, directly alongside two blocks of wood which Artaud hammered and hacked while writing and reading-aloud his work. The main room’s walls held Artaud’s own drawings, either pinned into them, or else enclosed in glass frames propped against the base of the walls.

…

In the last months of his life, Artaud appeared ancient, toothless and emaciated, though he was only 51 years old and his new friends, such as Paule Thévenin, perceived him as a still-young man, enduringly holding the residues of the startling facial beauty he had as a film actor twenty years earlier; he worked incessantly, and was able to out-distance anyone with his fast walking pace. Artaud appears to have been ill at the end of his life, either with intestinal or rectal cancer. He unequivocally told the Combat journalist Jean Marabini, in their interview a week before his death: ‘I know I have cancer’. The specialist Professor Mondor told Artaud at their consultation at Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital on 6 February 1948 that he had severe intestinal infections and needed rest; Mondor may have wanted to avoid giving Artaud a diagnosis of late-stage cancer. By contrast, Gaston Ferdière, Artaud’s doctor at the Rodez asylum, told me – perhaps implausibly – that he believed Artaud had no cancer at all (since he would have been able to identify it himself at Rodez in 1946), and that, in examining Artaud, Mondor must have mistaken compacted intestinal residues of long-term drug abuse for cancerous formations. In any case, no specific programme of treatment was proposed for Artaud, even if he had allowed it. His letters of his last weeks indicate that he was experiencing blackouts and haemorrhages at his pavilion. In a letter from Ivry-sur-Seine to another of his publishers, Marc Barbezat, on 16 February 1948, he writes that he has ‘just had 3 attacks here and I was found bathing in my blood,/a great pool of blood…’ Artaud appears to have died from an overdose of chloral hydrate; it’s uncertain if the dose he drank was intentional, and it probably was not. A lethal dose of chloral hydrate is variable and unpredictable; Artaud never regulated his intake, often taking very large nocturnal doses, as he confided to Prevel, and he could very easily have died on numerous previous occasions. Artaud’s approach to drugs was always to have the absolute maximum amount available to him at all times; often, in his notebooks, he demands the immediate delivery to him of drugs in quantities of many ‘tons’, and he continued in February 1948 to travel to Montmartre to acquire drugs from illicit dealers even after Mondor had given him a prescription authorising him to have an unlimited ‘official’ supply of opium.
—-It was unusually cold in the Paris region around the end of February 1948, with snowstorms. On Artaud’s last night, 3-4 March, Ivry-sur-Seine was still frozen, with snow on the ground. Artaud appears to have died suddenly while getting dressed in the middle of the night, and was found in the morning with a shoe in his hand, stretched-out on the floor of the pavilion’s main room. He was initially buried in the local municipal cemetery of Ivry-sur-Seine, a short distance from his pavilion, wearing an old blue overcoat donated by a friend and with a bunch of violets placed between his fingers, but was disinterred in 1975, his bones mechanically crushed into fragments by a funeral company so that they could be transported in a small box, and moved from Ivry-sur-Seine to the Artaud family grave in Marseille’s St Pierre cemetery; in 2021, he remains there.

 

 

Final Fragments (extracts)

All of us are enveloped by a secondary humanity
a humanity that is malevolent and sinister
which draws its roots from within the bodies of everyday human beings
who at certain moments
realise they have become vampires
and brutally start to act as vampires.
Those people are among the ones who didn’t kill the beast in themselves as it was being born
they’re the ones who refused to detach themselves from the beast
because they were too attached to it.
That beast is a bottomless eroticism,
arising from the grim day of an eroticism of the world’s abysses
that you can discover, just by shutting your eyes.

It’s there that you can see the hideous world of lubricity convulsing
without any hole, without any distinction
all of it striated by lubricity.

it’s there that you can see emerge the obscene proposal
for a world without evaluation, nor morality
and that would be entirely occupied by evil.

It’s there, that the beasts
– who are wedded to the entire spectrum
of an over-colourised, sinister passion –
are endlessly born,
each of them out of the other,
through gaps in the air,
through drifting emptinesses in space,
it’s there, that sex unleashes its own laws
and liberates itself from the law,
you are not going to be able to see all this
unless you yourself exude and sweat-out a vile liquified atmosphere,
unless you weep from your anus and from your eyes,
unless you snort out an unidentifiable snot
which exudes from your nose as it does from your eyelids
which hurls out screams that are suffocated and beaten back as though being buried under the earth
screams from a swelling-up eczema suddenly dislocated from its state of ease.
November 1947.

…

The body is the body
it’s alone
and has no need of organs,
the body never is an organism
organisms are the enemies of the body
whatever things are created then go on all alone without the intervention of any organ
every organ is a parasite,
it covers up a parasitic mission
intended to enable the birth of a being which should never have existed there
Organs have only ever been made in order to give beings something to eat, while beings have been condemned in their very conception and have no reason to exist in the first place
Reality itself has not yet come into existence because the true organs of the human body have still not yet been created nor positioned into place.
The theatre of cruelty was created in order to complete that putting into place and to accomplish – through a new dance of the human body – a crushing of this world of microbes which is nothing but a coagulated abyss.
The theatre of cruelty is intended to make eyelids dance in intimacy with elbows, with kneecaps, with femurs, and with toes and you are now going to see all that

November 1947

…

I do not accept
I am never going to forgive anyone
that I’ve been whored alive
throughout all of my existence

and that
happened solely because of the fact
that it’s me
who was god
really, verifiably, god

me, a man
and not that so-called spirit
who was never more than the projection into the clouds
of the body of a man other than me
and he
proclaimed himself the
—Creator of the World

And the hideous story of that Creator of the World
you know it

It’s the story of that body
who pursued (he didn’t follow behind) my own body
and who, in order to appear foremost and to be born
projected himself through my own body

and
—was able to be born
through the eventration of my own body

from which he kept a fragment upon him
in order
—to be able to pass himself off
as me

Him
—a malevolent body
which all spatial dimensions wanted nothing of

me
—a body in the act of creating itself
and consequently not yet having reached the state of completion
but which was evolving
towards integral purity
and not towards integral impiety
as with that impiety of the so-called Creator of the World
who knew himself to be inadmissible
but wanting anyway, at any cost, to be able to live
could find nothing better
—in order to take on being
than to live at the cost of
—my assassination

In spite of everything, my body remade itself
against,
and by passing through, a thousand assaults of evil
—and of hatred
which, each time, deteriorated my body
and left me for dead

 

 

The Theatre of Cruelty (extract)

The human body was forced to eat,
forced to drink,
only in order to avoid
making it dance.
It was forced to fuck the occult
only in order to make it exempt itself
from pressurising
and from tormenting occult life.

Because there’s nothing
so much as that so-called occult life
that is in need of being tormented.

It’s there that God, and his being,
thought that they could flee from the demented man,
there, in the domain of occult life that is more and more absent
that’s where God wanted to make human beings believe
that everything can be perceived, and seized, through the mind,
when all that there is, that is existent and real,
is the physical exterior life
and everything that flees from that life or diverts itself away from it
cannot be other than the limbo of the world of demons.

And God wanted to make human beings believe in the reality of that world of demons.

But, the world of demons is absent.
It is not going to coincide with what can be proven.
The best means to cure yourself of it
and to destroy it
is to accomplish reality’s construction.
Because reality is not accomplished,
it’s still not been constructed.
The return of an eternal health
in the world of eternal life
depends upon that act of accomplishment.

The theatre of cruelty
is not the symbol of an absent void,
of some kind of horrendous incapacity of human beings to accomplish their lives for themselves,
It’s instead the affirmation
of a terrible
necessity that is, moreover, inescapable.

Upon the never-visited mountain slopes
of the Caucasus,
of the Carpathians,
of the Himalayas,
of the Apennines,
there take place every day,
night and day,
– and already for years and years –
horrendous corporeal rituals
where the blackened life
life that is forever beyond any control, and blackened
devotes itself to horrendous, repulsive feasting.
There, limbs and organs
– those reputed to be in some way abject
because they’re perpetually being expelled,
and forced away
beyond the capacities of external lyrical life –
are put to use in all the delirium of an unconstrained eroticism,
and in the middle of an outpouring
– more and more compelling
and virginal –
of a liquor
whose nature it’s never been possible to classify,
because, more and more, it is beyond the created, beyond the self.

(I’m not speaking especially about the sexual organ, or the anus
– which, moreover, are going to have to be hacked off and liquidated –
but also the tops of the thighs,
of the haunches,
of the loin-meat,
of the stomach, total and sex-less
and of the navel)

At this instant, all of that is sexual and obscene
because that’s never been able to be worked-at, nurtured, to render it beyond the obscene
and the bodies that are dancing there
cannot be separated from the obscene,
they’ve systematically wedded themselves to obscene life
but it’s now imperative to destroy
that dance of the obscene bodies
in order to replace them with the dance
of our own bodies.

For years now
I’ve been driven frantic
and been malevolently frozen
by the dance of a horrendous world of microbes
– exclusively sexualised microbes –
among which I’ve been able to recognise,
in those particular spaces’ life of forced coercion,
men, women
and children of modern existence.

I have been endlessly tormented by being eaten-up with intolerable eczemas
through which all of the abscess-bloated states of the erotic life of the coffin
accorded themselves a total freedom of action.

 

 

Artaud’s Last Letters (extract)

To Paule Thévenin,
24 February 1948

Tuesday 24 February 1948.

Paule, I’m very sad and disheartened,
my body is hurting me, everywhere,
but above all I have the impression that people were disappointed
by my radio broadcast.
Wherever the machine is
there’s always the abyss and the void,
there exists a technical interference which deforms and annihilates whatever you have created.
The poor opinions of M. and of A. are unjustified but they must have had their point of departure in that transition’s weakening of my work,
that’s why I’m never again going to get involved with Radio,
and from now onwards will devote myself
exclusively
to theatre
that is, in the way I conceive it,
a theatre of blood,
a theatre at which, at every performance,
corporeally
something is gained
not just for the performer but also for whoever comes to see the performance,
moreover,
you are not performing,
it’s an action.
In reality the theatre is the genesis of creation.
That is going to happen.
I had a vision this afternoon – I saw all those who are going to follow me and who still do not totally have their bodies because pigs like those at the restaurant last night are eating too much. There are those who eat too much and there are others who, like me, cannot eat any longer without spitting.
Yours,
——————-Antonin Artaud.

 

 

Last visit to Antonin Artaud (extract)
interview by Jean Desternes, published in
Le Figaro Littéraire, 13 March 1948.

On a grey morning: Ivry. A wedding party is coming down from the old church stuck up on the ‘Monument to the Dead’ hillside. In a blue mist, the procession disappears behind the huts of the fairground, the bride lifting her dress’s train above the mud.
It’s Saturday morning. For the first and last time, I am going to meet Antonin Artaud, four days before his death, alone, in a bare room, deep within a garden.
I hammer at the window. Knotted fingers pull up the blind and the mask of Artaud stares at me through the glass.

– What is it!

He’s holding his head inclined on his hand, and the enormous forehead tilts forward like a helmet made of frail skin. Everything, in that face, appears to throb, the two swollen veins on the temples, the black wings of long hair, the pinched nose. He opens the door to me, a little taken aback.
He apologises for the squalid state of his room, with a gesture of weariness which sweeps across the dirt-encrusted walls, the stains of damp, the desolate void surrounding the bed which takes central place in the room.
An icy sweat drenches me when – in a ragged voice of sudden bursts, with tragic stammerings like sobs – he explains to me how he has known and touched death:

– Yes, I’ve seen the hideous face of Death. When I was at the asylum of Rodez, I fell into the abyss. When I entered the office of Dr Ferdière and asked him for twenty-five drops of laudanum – because I was suffering atrociously with my stomach, and piercing pains were sawing away at my back – he replied to me: ‘Not only I am not going to give you your twenty-five drops, but now I’m also going to cure you of your desire to have them, by subjecting you to electroshocks.’*

– Yes, I was in Death’s waiting-room. It’s claimed by some that you remember nothing of electroshocks. But not me: I say: ‘I remember’.

– I was aware – I was perfectly aware – of horrendous visions that I was able to attribute without any possible error to those black and bottomless pits, to that artificial coma. Visions that were infinitely painful, and which fled from me whenever I tried to scrape them away intact from that terrifying magma. Visions that I cannot describe now, because they have become submerged into the uncertain, and there is nothing I detest so much as imprecision, as the glueing of that agony into the beyond. And I plunged into Death. I know what Death is.

 

 

Artaud’s Last Notebook (extracts)

two fingers up against the forehead
—(the forefinger and the middle finger)
two fingers against the
—chest
the middle finger and the forefinger
comprise the action able to push away
—the evil of those
—low-down agitators

and I’m going to be remembering that

as for the sign that I’m
going to accomplish in order to recog
nise myself for myself,
that’s never had anything to do with anyone
except myself
because beyond the rare individuals that I’ve
chosen – because I myself
made them – I am the universal enemy
of all men
having, moreover, spiked all of them down.

…

god is going to be
—blown into oblivion
—by
an act of disintegration
—exerted in
—collaboration
—with
—my right
—ear
—and
—all that it holds
—by way of
—putrefaction

 

…

And they’ve made me
plummet
—into
—death
there, where I’m ceaselessly
eating
—cock
the anus too
—and
—shit
for all of my meals,
all those of the cross

…

so, the same figure
returns every
morning (he is an other)
in order to accomplish his
—revolting, criminal
—and murderous, sinister
—mission— which is to
—maintain
the state of bewitchment cast upon
me

and to continue to
make of me
this eternally
bewitched man
———-etc etc

 

——

—-

 

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog dresses up in its red carpet costume to greet and host the introductions for a new book of the late and previously non-English-ified writings of that literature exploding rapscallion Antonin Artaud via a book stunningly designed as always by Karolina Urbaniak and Martin Bladh at Infinity Land Press. It’s a serious keeper, and do spend the local portion of your weekend absorbing the hints and pieces on display plus buying it if that’s what your inquiries’ suggests. Thank you for the gift, Martin and Karolina. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi Ben. Oh, gosh, yay, my ears, my ears! Everyone, ‘The new episode of Play Therapy is online here via Tak Tent Radio! Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson returns to bring you classic Italo, Dutch Acid and some Electroacoustic delights too.’ If you haven’t yet joined us enlightened members of the Play Therapy cult, wait no longer. Have the finest weekend humanly possible, maestro. ** Misanthrope, Thanks. Right, St, Patrick’s Day. They must celebrate it here, but it must generate much less merch and re-theming because I had no idea. Please pass along my utmosts to the great Rigby and Mieze please. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Hm, I don’t think I have a favorite witch. Maybe Witchy-Poo? ** Cal, Hi, Cal! Thanks, and obviously your creative juices bubbling cauldron-style would be that post’s benchmark. For some reason the cute.superficial visual approach to gore in Guro is really interesting and effective to me, and I still figuring out why. I’m doing good, a little unsettled, but all right. And you? I’m sorry for my mess-ups with us talking. There’s too much going on my head of late, and it’s waylaying me. Very warmest greetings! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Wow, thanks, awesome, I done good, yay. Yeah, I couldn’t pinpoint Hate’s identity in that equation either. Sky’s the limit, I guess. I hope and trust your love wasn’t inspired by a real life incident involving you. Love making people who are thinking of piercing their earlobes and fitting them with huge, lobe-destroying gauges realise what they’ll look like when they’re not young and foxy anymore, G. ** liquouredgoat, Howdy, Douglas! Thanks, pal. I’m very excited to read your new book, which I believe is winging its way to me as I type. How are you, my friend? What’s going on? ** Bill, Thank you kindly, Bill. I watched that folk horror doc last night. Quite good and interesting. And, yeah, I came out of it with a ton of fascinating seeming films I’ve never watched and am determined to. How’s your weekend looking and hanging? ** Brandon, Hey, Brandon. Awesome that you got to write. Are you happy with it? What is/was it? I had that same kind of experience with an actor friend being a good trooper in a disastrously awful play just the other day. Same ‘tude. I’m hoping to catch at least two seemingly good things this weekend myself. Compare notes come Monday? Have a great one! ** Billy, Hi, Billy! How are you? Thanks a bunch. Designing a department store window sounds kind of quite exciting in theory. Hard to get right, but I’ve seen a few bogglers. Right, Dorothea Tanning would have made sense in that post. I spaced on her. Your Kye Christensen-Knowles <-> Derek McCormack comparison is super interesting. Yeah, that makes the weirdest, best sense. I hope you are the Tarzan of your recent and ongoing life. ** Right. Have an Artaudian weekend, gang, and I’ll see you back here come Monday.