Ros Murray - Artaud on Paper

A/V#18.02 2014 Spring
www.actualvirtu...
In Le Pèse-nerfs, Artaud declares: ‘dear friends: what you mistook for my works were merely the waste products of myself, those scrapings of the soul that the normal man does not welcome’. Taking this statement as its starting point, this paper explores the relationship between body and text in Artaud’s work, addressing how this plays out in a material sense.
On the one hand Artaud seems to desire a direct, unmediated form of corporeal expression, yet on the other he continually draws attention to the body’s mediation, as if what he calls his ‘véritable corps’ only comes into being though the material object. Artaud’s self-generating ‘véritable corps’ is a mediated one, but one which expresses continual processes of destruction and recreation, in opposition to both the living body as it is viewed from the outside, and to any representation of the body as a complete or fixed form. The unfinished nature of most of Artaud’s work, and its ambiguous status as ‘work’, bears witness to this, and indeed, the work paradoxically announces its own impossibility from the very outset. The surface or membrane is constantly emphasised throughout Artaud’s texts and drawings both in metaphorical terms, for example through skin imagery, but also literally, through drawing attention to the surface of the page. What emerges from this is an emphatically material ‘body’ that questions the boundaries of the medium through which it comes into being, as well as the reader or audience’s perception of their own embodied experience in relation to this medium, be it a text, a film, a sound-recording, an art object, or simply a scrap of paper.