French playwright, actor & theatre director (1896-1948)
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theater and Its Double
The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
preface, The Theater and Its Double
Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
General Security: The Liquidation of Opium
All Writing Is Garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. The whole literary scene is a pigpen, especially today.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
letter to the Chancellors of European Universities, Collected Works
I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
Life consists of burning up questions.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything--gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness--rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
preface, The Theater and Its Double
These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double
I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
General Security: The Liquidation of Opium
Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
preface, The Theater and Its Double
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Collected Works
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Les Oeuvres et les Hommes
When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings