Antonin Artaud is one of the greatest examples in art of the imaginative retrieval of a life that was beyond repair.

– Clayton Eshlemen

Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period by Antonin Artaud @ Indiebound

Quotes

One of the young friends that Artaud prevailed upon to procure laudanum was the poet Jacques Prevel, who was wretchedly poor and tubercular. Prevel kept a journal of his meetings with Artaud. One day when they were together in Artaud’s new quarters in the Ivry woods, Artaud insisted that Prevel join him in screaming. Prevel apparently froze. According to his journal entry, Artaud then said:

‘You will not leave this room alive if you do not answer me.’'

And he stuck his knife straight into the table. So I started to shout with him. It relieved me, since I had been hearing him doing it for two hours and I felt the need to do it myself.

‘You have done something very remarkable,’’ he told me immediately afterwards. ‘If we had been on stage, we would have been a great success,…

Before they got away from me I had already blasted them into a state more terrifying than that god they reached only later.

There is no inside, no spirit, outside or consciousness, nothing but the body as it may be seen, a body that does not cease being, even when the eye that sees it falls. And this body is a fact. Me.

EXECRATION OF THE FATHER-MOTHER

Intelligence came after stupidity, which had always sodomized it closely, - AND THEN.

Which gives an idea of the infinite journey.

I condemn you because you know why… I condemn you,

and me, I don’t know why.

the hour draws near when the well driller who was defecated into the baptismal garbage cans of holy water basins,

will realize that he was me.

The magic of electroshock drains a death rattle, it plunges the shocked into that rattle with which we leave life.

they saw again the vast scene of pregenital pigwash where the body of man, not satisfied with having a chunk of blood sausage between

his thighs, wanted to have another one between his teeth, where the tongue could coat and lubricate the detonations of speech as well as the machine-gunning of I know not what mythic dental anger at the aggressive rush of food, said thus, amid the cave-ins of invading nourishment, under the unflagging carronades of teeth, there are mephitic trenches of gas,

appalling ravines of hollow matter, strange molecular wells, amid the rushes of food,

but the entrance of the tongue changed all that, mastication passed onto the level of the simple micturition of a stupid erotic masturbation.

Moreover I’ve definitely broken with art, style or talent in all the drawings that you will see here. I want to say that there will be hell to pay for whoever considers them works of art, works of aesthetic stimulation of reality.

Not one is properly speaking a work.

All are sketches, I mean soundings or staggering blows in all directions of chance, possibility, luck, or destiny.

I have not sought to refine my lines or my results, but to express certain kinds of patent linear truths which have as much value thanks to words, written phrases, as graphic style and the perspective of features.

It is thus that several drawings are mixtures of poems and portraits, of written interjections and plastic evocations of elements, of materials, of personages, of men or animals.

It is in that way that one must accept these drawings in the barbarism and the disorder of their graphic style ‘which is never preoccupied with art’ but with the sincerety and spontaneity of the line.

The human body has been made to eat, has been made to drink, in order to avoid making it dance.

I have been crazed and tetanized for years by the dance of an appalling world of exclusively sexualized microbes in which I recognized in the life of certain repressed spaces men, women, children of modern life.