No More Masterpieces: On Antonin Artaud’s Texts. Notes From A Lecture by Illia Razumeiko

The lecture took place on November 9, 2023 within the educational program for people who applied for the Artaud Fellowship, Opera aperta artists, and proto produkciia teams.

No More Masterpieces is the title of one of the chapters of the book Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud. We talked about the direct and indirect influence of Antonin Artaud’s texts on art after World War II. Is there a “school” or an Artaud “method”? How did Artaud’s thoughts anticipate and inspire figures in the theater and “non-theater” and expand the boundaries of various arts over the past 80 years. We share notes from the lecture.

Illia Razumeiko is a composer, co-founder of the contemporary opera laboratory Opera aperta in Ukraine, and a doctoral student in the Artistic Research Centre at the Vienna University for Music and Performing Arts.

The figure of Antonin Artaud is controversial and, in many ways, mystified: for some, he is a text; for others, a countercultural figure; and for others – a patient. His story is indeed a difficult one: Artaud was severely ill and spent many years undergoing treatment. In part, this also helped cultivate a certain mystical image of him, and caused complications in the United States. There was a scandal after World War II when an anthology titled Antonin Artaud: Mad Writings was proposed for publication. There’s also a “sadistic” way of interpreting Artaud: supposedly, once he entered the classical theatrical environment, he became a sort of “school” in himself, and to this day, theatre professionals will often say: “we’re doing it Artaud-style” (as in “Brecht-style” or “Stanislavsky-style”). But in truth, there is no such thing as an Artaud school, so what is there?

What remains of Artaud is his texts. His essays are the most well-known. The most famous of these, written after his death, is about Van Gogh: Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société (Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society). It’s this essay that cemented a certain imprint on Artaud, he was often equated with Van Gogh, in other words, with the archetype of the “mad” artist.

So what we’re left with are Artaud’s texts, his manifestos, which vary in clarity; his time in the “asylum” also gave rise to a huge number of works. During his forced treatment, Artaud wrote more than 400 notebooks. They’ve all been deciphered and published in full in French. The complete collected works span 26 volumes.

Artaud’s most well-known text is Le Théâtre et son double (The Theatre and Its Double), through which he is most directly associated with theatre. It is generally believed that Artaud’s work revolved around theatre: he wrote plays, wrote about theatre, and critiqued it. But if we’re talking about “theatre” in Artaud’s terms, we must understand that this can mean very different things, beyond the narrow institutionalized definition that often gets in the way. For example, Artaud has a text called Staging and metaphysics, which refers to an anonymous work titled Lot and His Daughters (1509), attributed to Lucas van Leyden, a painter Artaud wrote about at length.

Artaud himself, in truth, didn’t know what theatre was. That’s why he wrote these texts. He disliked psychological and dialogue-heavy theatre – the kind associated with Molière and Racine – that dominated at the time. In many ways, his writings were an attempt to reinvent “theatre” altogether.

Artaud had a direct and tangible influence on a wide range of artistic fields: not only theatre, but music, performance art, and visual arts, both in Europe and in America. Yet he did so using certain theatrical methods, if we understand theatricality as a broad and complex category.

In The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud most often speaks about “language.” This ties him to disciplines far removed from traditional theatre: linguistics, semiotics, later anthropology, and more. He writes about language on multiple levels: verbal language, the literary text as written or spoken, the staging of plays, the language of music, of painting, the language of sets and costumes. These may seem like small, instrumentalized “languages,” but Artaud’s true goal was to search for the language of theatre, the language of art, or even more broadly, the essence of language itself and how we communicate at all.

“The choice of language reveals a tendency toward ease in using it,” Artaud wrote. This raises an important question: if we imagine Artaud’s theatre and note how he constantly criticized literary language and the idea that theatre is merely a copy of literature, can we then say that a theatre without words – a physical or dance-based theatre – is truly Artaud’s theatre? Probably not. Today, a wordless physical or dance performance can be just as impoverished in its means and representation as a staged play. And conversely, a theatre that makes use of spoken text can still be radically experimental, deeply searching, and fully infused with the spirit of Artaud.

So for Artaud, the search for language was not about a definitive rejection of verbal language, nor was it about an exclusive turn toward purely physical expression. Rather, it was about placing a question mark, an ongoing movement, a restless search.

He was undoubtedly preoccupied with language as it existed in Western theatre. He criticized the specific literary language that simply served to present a written text, language used to create representative theatre, where a person is assigned a role and then performs it. In time, he sought answers, a kind of “salvation,” in Balinese theatre, and travelled to Mexico to study ritual practices there. In other words, he wanted to move beyond the bounds of Western culture, not only conceptually, but geographically. He longed to break away from what French bourgeois art had become. And psychological theatre, which was the very epitome of that art, remained a fundamentally dialogue-driven, psychologically centred form.

Artaud’s writings truly came to life only after his death. The art inspired by his ideas emerged in the context of the Cold War, an invisible force running through the postwar European and American avant-garde.

Specific cases

Artaud influenced a wide range of movements. Think of Grotowski, Peter Brook, or Richard Schechner: these were people who worked within “classical” theatre in various forms, or who created contemporary theatre by moving into the realm of performance, while still working with actors. They were each inspired by Artaud in their own way, though at times they also critiqued him.

Another important aspect is Artaud’s impact on multidisciplinary avant-garde movements that emerged after World War II. In America, Artaud quite literally became a cult figure and, for some years, had a greater influence there than he did on European art.

One striking example is Artaud’s connection to the composer and philosopher John Cage. A year after Artaud’s death, Cage received a grant and travelled to Paris, where the composer Pierre Boulez told him about Artaud’s works, none of which had yet been translated into any language. People in Cage’s circle (including pianist David Tudor) began translating fragments of Artaud’s writings themselves, long before any official translations were available. They were deeply inspired by him. In fact, it was under the influence of specific ideas and texts by Artaud that Cage underwent a kind of “theatrical transformation.” Up to that point, he had been avant-garde, but this moment marked a turning point, after which he was also seen as an “academic” composer.

Under the influence of Artaud’s writings, John Cage and his colleagues began to do what would soon become known as performance, happening, and other small theatrical forms that would go on to transform the artistic landscape. After Cage had already established an entire school – one that, to some extent, was also grounded in Artaud’s ideas – a school of theatricalization and performatization of both music and visual art, the first anthology of Artaud’s work was finally published, making his writings accessible to a wider public. Artaud became a cult figure across many different artistic movements.

Another major shift that took place after Artaud’s death – though he had foreseen it many times – was the transformation of scenography and theatrical space. It was only posthumously that concepts such as the Black Box and the White Cube emerged and gained traction as both physical and conceptual frameworks.

Artaud had a direct influence on American avant-garde theatre, including experimental dance theatre and political theatre, both of which were flourishing in the U.S. at the time. The American dancer Yvonne Rainer explicitly referenced Artaud in her No Manifesto – a manifesto that in many ways echoes the ideas of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.

What’s particularly interesting is that Artaud both directly influenced certain developments and, at the same time, resonated deeply with the spirit of the era. On one hand, you had Cage, who cited Artaud and drew direct inspiration from him. On the other hand, there were the Viennese Actionists, who were creating parallel work. At that time, Artaud’s writings hadn’t yet been translated into German, but the Viennese Actionism that emerged in the 1960s was highly “Artaudian” in spirit, closely aligned with the American avant-garde through its use of the body, its politicization of the body, and its engagement with performance and public space.

The prelude to Viennese Actionism was, in many ways, literary. In postwar Vienna, a wave of avant-garde poets emerged who also began to experiment with performance, happenings, and the deconstruction of language. Between 1958 and 1960, the Viennese Actionist group was formed. It consisted of several key figures: Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. All of them were visual artists who came from classical art academies. Gradually, they began to seek out new media, ones that were highly corporeal and stood in stark contrast to the cultural norms of postwar Vienna.

The culmination of Viennese Actionism was the 1968 event Art and Revolution (Kunst und Revolution), which led to prison sentences or criminal charges for nearly all involved. The title itself – Kunst und Revolution – was something of a parody of the classical tradition and of Wagner, who by then had become synonymous with bourgeois German-speaking society. The performance took the form of a lecture at a university, delivered in a highly polyphonic manner. All four of the Actionists were present: one gave a lecture on communism, others performed explicit physical actions, while Hermann Nitsch sang the Austrian national anthem. The performance was deeply scandalous, combining raw physicality with political provocation. In spirit, it was closely aligned with both Artaud’s ideas and many of the developments in American performance art at the time.

Zholdak’s work could be described as super-Artaudian. His theatre is highly musical, performative, and surrealist. In fact, in the prologue to Electra by Sophocles, staged in Macedonia, Zholdak directly enacts Artaud’s idea of “killing the author.”

Artaud’s writings also had a clear influence on cinema. In his manifesto, when discussing what should be staged in the theatre, he emphasized the works of the Marquis de Sade, at a time when presenting such material on stage was virtually unthinkable. Here, one immediately recalls Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film 120 Days of Sodom, released in 1976, which became a cult classic in cinematic history. The film itself is highly theatrical.

But when it comes to someone working “literally in the style of Artaud,” it doesn’t quite work that way. His ideas are always embodied differently. They manifest, for instance, in Zholdak’s work (both in his texts, where he directly references “Artaud, Van Gogh, and Beethoven,” and in many of his productions), or they appear in progressive physical and dance theatre, in choreography that seeks to rethink the nature of the human being and the essence of theatre itself.

Today, the Theatre of Cruelty as such doesn’t truly exist. Some practices come close to its ideas, for example, the ritual performances of Hermann Nitsch, which have themselves now become museum pieces, part of artistic history. In his performances, for instance, a cow would be slaughtered, with its entrails on display, animals sacrificed, wine and blood flowing. Interestingly, in YouTube recordings, the whole thing looks quite theatrical – almost artificial – not truly terrifying.

For better or worse, Artaud himself never had the physical capacity to create a theatre, to be a director or theatre-maker in the full sense. And yet, his writings reach far wider and deeper than those of, say, Grotowski or Stanislavsky, who were both focused on developing a school or methodology.

Artaud offers no school. But in a way, he destabilizes everything, asks fundamental questions, deconstructs what’s around him. Reading him today feels deeply relevant, like he’s speaking directly to the present moment.

The translation of this material was made possible through the Per Forma grant program, implemented by the Kyiv Contemporary Music Days platform with the support of the Performing Arts Fund NL and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands, aimed at developing the performing arts sector in Ukraine.

Translation by Yurii Popovych