BWJoseph Artaud

Modernism Without Organs BRANDEN W. JOSEPH ON ANTONIN ARTAUD

Oppos i te page: I l lustrations f rom Antonin Ar taud and Roger Vitrac's brochure Le Theatre Alfred Jarry et I'hostilite publique (The Alfred Jarry Theater and Public Hosti l ity) , publ ished in Paris in 1930. Antonin Artaud and Robert Aron. Photos : Eli Lotar, ca . 1 9 2 9 .

Th is page: Abel Gance , Napoleon, 1927. Product ion stil l . Marat (Antonin Artaud) .

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, importantly inflected by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster, we have understood postwar art as conditioned by the progressive recov-ery of the legacies of avant-garde artists: Duchamp, Schwitters, Heartfield, Hoch, and Dada, on the one side, Malevich, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Tatlin, and Soviet Productivism, on the other.1 Currently, the situation is redoubled, for we are as distant from the postwar neo-avant-gardes as the neo-avant-gardes

themselves were from their prewar counterparts. Artforum's fiftieth anniversary places us just shy of five decades from 1963, the year Marcel Duchamp's retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum exposed the breadth of his practice to a generation of Pop art-ists, and almost a neat century from 1913, the year of Duchamp's first readymade, Bicycle Wheel. Yet despite decades of work devoted to the historical avant-gardes, one important figure remains relatively neglected: dissident Surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud.

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The exhibition "Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s," curated by Kaira Cabanas and Frederic Acquaviva at the Museo Naciona! Centra de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, aims partially to rec-tify this situation, taking as its starting point the generationally recursive structure of artistic recover-ies. As Cabanas notes in the catalogue introduction, "Contemporary art is . . . not so much contemporary, at one with its time, as it is perpetually out of joint with the present, engaged in a continual project of revisitation and critical elaboration of prior artistic practices, of which Artaud's specter forms a part."2

As the exhibition opens later this month, it occasions a broader reflection on Artaud's thorny presence in postwar art history.

Part of Artaud's neglect undoubtedly arises from the fact that his impact was somewhat refractory to the central concerns of the visual arts. In addition to theater proper, it manifested itself (as emphasized by "Specters") in French Lettrist poetry, cinema, and sound experiments; Brazilian concrete poetry; and the nascent multimedia practices pioneered at Black Mountain College, particularly the proto-Happening involving dance, music, poetry, and projected images organized by John Cage in 1952 with Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, and M. C. Richards. More problematic, however, is the fact that many of those postwar figures most closely associated with Artaud—including, in the United States, Cage, Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Wallace Berman, Dick Higgins, A1 Hansen, early La Monte Young, and Jack Smith—are still often regarded as apostles of aesthetic anarchy and a regres-sive, if at one time enthusiastically embraced, post-modern artistic relativism, a diffuse and unfocused attack on medium specificity. Artaud has long served as a symbol of this approach, a figure who, as Artaud biographer Stephen Barber put it, "worked effectively to annul the boundaries between [the] arts."3

But what if the primary reasons for Artaud's criti-cal inassimilability were wholly different? What if he and those close to him, such as Cage and Smith, did not merely indulge in a postmodern or—to use Rosalind E. Krauss's term—"post-medium" impulse or imperative? If we return to Artaud in the spirit of those genealogical returns of (and to) the 1950s and '60s to which Cabanas alludes, we risk encounter-ing a very different "specter," one who instigated and exemplified a strain of heterodox modernism that closely shadowed, even as it profoundly chal-lenged, the presuppositions of Clement Greenberg's better-known version even before the latter had been fully codified.

THE FOCUS IN "SPECTERS" on Lettrist "discrepant" cinema indicates that Artaud's modernism may be

best approached via his thoughts on film. Artaud's early views on silent film were nearly modernist orthodoxy; he sought in the medium "a language on the same order as music, painting, or poetry."4 In the preface to his 1927 screenplay The Seashell and the Clergyman, Artaud described his attempt to realize a "conception of a purely visual cinema" (which opposed the already by then conventional "adven-ture film"), proposing "a film that is based on purely visual situations, whose action springs from stimuli addressed to the eye only and is founded, so to speak, on the essential qualities of eyesight, untrammelled by psychological and irrelevant complications or by a verbal story expressed in visual terms."5

Artaud, however, did not categorically preclude sound. He glimpsed in Rene Clair's first talkie, Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), the prospect of a genre wherein sounds (including speech) would act not to subsume the image to narrative concerns but as "an amplification of the image, a means to get it moving or make it burst forth into a new domain."6 Artaud nonetheless realized that Clair's example would not win the day in the face of an ascendant diegetic use of sound in mainstream narrative cinema. He rightly predicted the advent of an "extracinematographic" (i.e., non-medium-specific) media practice that would absorb mainstream cinema along with "the-ater, music-hall, opera, [and] possibly music."7 What Artaud foresaw arising from synchronized sound— "not as a development of cinema itself which has its proper laws and requirements, but as the appearance of an absolutely new formulation, a bit disquieting in its expanse and too varied to ever be compre-hended"—was nothing other than spectacle, as theo-rized by onetime Lettrist Guy Debord.8 "This new art," Artaud warned, "cannot but be totalizing, that is to say all encompassing, all absorbing, or it will not be."9

In a little-known text of 1933, Artaud predicted spectacle's culmination in the type of portable virtual reality devices only now being developed. "And after sound film and talkies," he contended, "there will be olfactory, tactile, and gustatory film; cinema outside the screen and in space; 3-D cinema in color; the characters leaving the screen, independent, free of the film and of one another, moving about the room or in the street, like actual theater actors, completely human characters.... And once the era of Pygmalion has definitively returned, any amateur, any 'tourist' of taste, sound, smell, and vision, will carry in his pocket the means to make the person of his dreams appear before him at any moment. But this person," Artaud continued, already foreseeing that this spec-tacular dreamworld would not allow for unlimited fantasies, "will always be the same, and this land-scape, or setting, or action, or drama will always,

Artaud predicted spectacle's culmination in the type of portable virtual reality devices only now being developed.

Rene Clair, Sous les Toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris), 1930, 35 mm, b l a c k - a n d - w h i t e , 96 minutes .

O p p o s i t e page: Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac, La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashel l and the C lergyman) , 1928, 35 mm, b lack -and -wh i te , s i lent , 41 minutes .

B e l o w : Shoot ing script for Antonin Ar taud and Germaine Dulac's 1928 La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman).

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unflaggingly, be the same."1 0 As vehemently as Debord, Artaud foresaw how the prevailing develop-ment of multimedia spectacle would entail ideologi-cal restrictions on the experiences to be simulated. From this perspective, Artaud's role as patron saint of modernism's implosion, an annihilator of medium distinctions and unifier of art and life, must be nuanced. For it was in "real and philosophical com-petition" with sound film's development into a mul-tisensory, multimedia spectacle that he would formulate and launch his "Theater of Cruelty."11

THE THEATER OF CRUELTY'S OPPOSITION to lan-guage is well known. Language, according to Artaud, served only to "arrest and paralyze thought," rather than "fostering its development."12 Less noted, if not entirely overlooked, is the fact that Artaud justified the elimination of language not only for its expres-sive liabilities but also—and perhaps primarily— because it belonged more properly to the literary arts. "Dialogue," writes Artaud (though his criticism was not limited to dialogue), "does not belong spe-cifically to the stage, it belongs to books, as is proved by the fact that in all handbooks of literary history a place is reserved for the theater as a subordinate branch of the history of the spoken language."13

In his attentiveness to medium-specificity (defining theater, in part, by the exclusion of literature), Artaud proves surprisingly compatible with Greenbergian modernism. As defined in Greenberg's essays from "Towards a Newer Laocoon" to "Modernist Paint-ing," each modernist art subjected itself to the self-critical determination of its "unique and proper area of competence."14 Despite Greenberg's insistence on this critique's immanence, each art's competence was defined not so much internally, by honing itself to its unique essence, but from without, by "eliminatfing] from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art."15 Modernist paint-ing thus had to rid itself of storia and imitation, because these were shared with literature, and of illusionistic relief, which it shared with sculpture.16

"The enclosing shape of the picture was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater; color was a norm and a means shared not only with the theater, but also with sculpture," so neither could be essential.17 The result of such reduc-tiveness, modern painting's well-known orientation "to flatness a s . . . to nothing else," derived, then, not from being the medium's ineluctable essence, but as the remnant left over once nearly everything any other art could accomplish had been stripped away.18

Such was also Artaud's concern. Not wanting theater to be literature's poor stepchild, a subordi-nate art better realized in books and poems, he sought

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Theater, for Artaud, has no single medium and no unique physical substrate whatsoever.

to determine the "means [by] which theater is able to differentiate itself from speech."19 If in painting what remains once all aspects possible in other arts have been purged are colors on a flat surface, in theater, according to Artaud, the remnant of such a subtrac-tion is mise-en-scene. Mise-en-scene, as Richards, who chose to keep the term in French throughout her translation of Artaud's The Theater and Its Double, noted, "implies all that we call direction, production, and staging."20 It designates, in other words, all those facets of theater that remain once script, dialogue, and everything else it owes to literature have been removed. "This idea of the supremacy of speech in the theater is so deeply rooted in us," explained Artaud, "and the theater seems to such a degree merely the material reflection of the text, that every-

thing in the theater that exceeds this text, that is not kept within its limits and strictly conditioned by it, seems to us purely a matter of mise-en-scene, and quite inferior in compar ison with the t e x t . " 2 1

Artaud's modernist theater would thus be built on mise-en-scene:

Presented with this subordination of theater to speech, one might indeed wonder whether the the-ater by any chance possesses its own language, whether it is entirely fanciful to consider it as an independent and autonomous art, of the same rank as music, painting, dance, etc. . . .

One finds in any case that this language, if it exists, is necessarily identified with the mise-en-scene considered:

1. as the visual and plastic materialization of speech, 2. as the language of everything that can be said and signified upon a stage independently of speech, everything that finds its expression in space, or that can be affected or disintegrated by it.22

If anything, Artaud's notion of modernist exclu-sion was more precise than Greenberg's. Rather than eliminating language and speech in their entirety, he sought only to preclude those aspects uniquely appli-

cable to literature, which to him (certainly unfairly) was confined to the cogently expressible, " to the domain of what daily thought can reach," even with access to the unconscious.2 3 Mise-en-scene could thereby include "spoken language," but only " to make the language express what it does not ordi-narily express . . . ; to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, against its trapped-beast origins; and finally, to con-sider language as the form of Incantation,"24

In her incisive reconsiderations of artistic medium, Krauss has argued that even Greenberg's conception of flatness must be comprehended as layered and self-differing—as opposed to a singular, unified, physical essence—and, further, that an artistic "medium" may be fabricated out of anything, from a car ride to oil stains on asphalt.25 Artaud pushes this logic to an extreme. Theater, for Artaud, has no single medium and no unique physical substrate whatsoever. "The theater," Artaud declares, "is in no thing but makes use of every thing—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness," and so on.26 The "pure theatrical language" of mise-en-scene func-tions as an assemblage of diverse artistic compo-nents: staging, direction, costumes, decor, movement, gesture, lighting, sound, vocalizations apart from

MEDIA STUDY

KEITH SONNIER

THE SCULPTURAL BASE HAD TO GO. I chose to work, and move, within a fourth dimension by placing two six-foot-square mirrors face to face (MirrorAct, 1969), creating what I refer to as an "infinity channel" to work within. First the manipulation of forms. Then color, forced to bounce back and forth within the infin-ity channel. Color as volume within architectural space. Solid color, not applied color. A spatial volume that the viewer moves through. The point is not to reflect upon the object but to make the object the situation (the title of the book for my 1971 show at Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne: Object, Situation, Object).

Then the video camera comes into the work. The first videotapes were narrative spatial studies of people and objects moving around and inside the infinity channel, recorded and projected on large flat screens. My con-cept of video changes. Computerized images taken from television are used first, then layered. Shapes are mixed from seven simultaneous visual tracks. A concept of a global communications system of broadcasting, send-ing, and receiving, visually and audibly through space.

Send/Receive Satellite Network, 1977. Collabora-tion with Liza Bear, my coconspirator in New York.

Experimental video project between artists on the East and West Coasts.The Send/Receive Satellite Network was established using a low-flying NASA satellite system. Two days of live interactive two-way video broadcast were carried out. An attempt to establish a collabora-tive state between artists communicating from one coast to the other. A big push for the concept of live video communication.

I stopped making video and broadcast-TV work after this experiment. Organization and research had made it feel like I was going to be permanently attached to a desk job and become a media mogul. Ironically, it seems that the contemporary art world is now influenced to such an extent by modern technology and by the Google/ art-fair mentality that, in the end, tout est a vendre. •

Above: Keith Sonnier (coproduced with Liza Bear), Send/Receive Satellite Network, 1977, NASA truck. Installation view, Battery Park City, New York. Photo: Gwen Thomas.

Left: Keith Sonnier, Mirror Act II, 1970, mirror, black light, f luorescent paint, Styrofoam, wood, resin, two units, each 84 x 84".

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