Antonin Artaud

disclosure day had that in there.

Um, I knew nothing of, of Anthony Artaud and I looked him up and it was like, this guy is fascinating.

Cause I've been recovering actor.

I don't have it done in years, but I did mostly theater and, and things like that.

So what was it during the research? You may have heard some of this.

I'm assuming everyone kind of knew that Jackie Gleason Nixon story, I think, was running around.

But how did you come across all the other stuff? Like Artaud himself, how did you come across

him? Well, a dear friend of mine who's also a writing partner, and he wrote the foreword, Mark Lehner.

Um, we did War Inc. together, and he, he, he's written on a lot of stuff.

We were really interested in Artaud as a character to make a film about, um, because he's sort of like this, this great, um, kind of wizard of failure, but who was always reaching beyond what y- it's possible to do on Earth.

You know, he wanted to make every performance like a, a magic ritual.

Like, he, he, he was the guy, uh, with all the surrealists, um, where they were like...

They venerated Artaud, and Artaud...

Andre Breton said Artaud was the only one who could step back.

You know, chief surrealist.

And so those were catty cats in, in Europe at the time.

So my question is about how does the body impact the mind? And I wanted to try and place emphasis on that because I feel there's a lack of emphasis on that in psychoanalysis.

So I fundamentally explore this question of the body through the work of Samuel Beckett and Antonin Artaud.

whose work has, for both authors, the body features very particularly, they have a very particular preoccupation with the body in their work.

And I think that through exploring the body in their work, we can learn about mind-body narratives and examine and critique them from the perspective of the anomalous body.

There's two exhibitions connected with a project called...

Artaud, A-R-T-A-U-D, in Ireland, focusing on the extraordinary visit to Ireland in 1937 by the French writer, poet and theatre maker Antonin Artaud.

Have you ever heard of him? No.

So anyway, it's a really interesting, kind of quirky story.

I tell them.

You don't know Theater of the Absurd, Artaud? You need to go study that.

You need to go do something.

Bring me a paragraph on that.

It's my turn to sound pretentious.

Antonin Artaud and, you know, the Theatre of Cruelty, Peter Brooks, you know, The Empty Space.

In that, it was...

it was cabaret but there was everything in there.

And I look at, like, a lot of my work, which was...

I was a student of Kubrick and Polanski and Ken Russell and guys like that, and, you know, when the Cinematheque did a retrospective on my work, it was called The Cinema of Cruelty, after Antonin Artaud, whose Theatre of Cruelty was all about waking up the audience through shock and things like that.

And I used to kind of believe in that.

Okay, so I started thinking, "Okay, something is really wrong with media and with television," and this was percolating, especially during COVID.

But what you're hearing right now, it's an excerpt of the really lengthy piece.

It's called Scored After Antonin Artaud.

For this, I

was pleased to see this new cassette out on Paisley Shirt Records by Hospital, who are the trio of Mike Ramos, who plays in Tony J and Flower Town, Karina Gill, also in Flower Town and probably better known for her work on Cindy, and Kevin Lin, who records as Sad Eye Beatniks and runs the Paisley Shirt label.