In his 1947 radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God), Antonin Artaud explored different relationships between the body and language (or more broadly speaking, expression). From this point of view, the voice fills an interstitial or intermediate place, located between the physical nature of the corporeal and the immateriality of the mental, between sound and meaning, even between alive and dead.
To the extent that the voice is an emission from the body, it can also be conceived of as a form of excrement, which again leads to the boundary that separates the living from the inert. What follows is the beginning of the third section of To Have Done with the Judgement of God, a section entitled La recherche de la fécalité (The Pursuit of Fecality), performed by Roger Blin in the radio version. Excrement, which in principle can be considered a symbol of inertness, here paradoxically becomes evidence of being, although a complete being that man has renounced to, as Artaud put it, consent to “live dead”: defecation threatens the completeness of being to the extent that it represents the rejection (at least in part) of one’s own body.
“There where it smells of shit
it smells of being.
Man could just as well not have shat,
not have opened the anal pouch,
but he chose to shit
as he would have chosen to live
instead of consenting to live dead.
Because in order not to make caca,
he would have had to consent
not to be,
but he could not make up his mind to lose being,
that is, to die alive.
There is in being
something particularly tempting for man
and this something is none other than/CACA. (roaring here).”
These constant references to excrement, to the process of defecation and, ultimately, to shit, make it possible to relate Artaud’s very conception of a radio voice to the mastery of all things stercoraceous and abject. It could even be said that the voice that Artaud proposes in To Have Done with the Judgement of God is a kind of “excremental voice”, a voice that is pure discharge, an emission of simple inert material, lacking tone, empty, absent, sepulchral, inhuman. It seems to show that it is not connected to the world or to its creator; it is a heterogeneous material. Unlike a seductive or angry voice, the excremental voice tries to avoid all relationship with itself or to touch itself at any time. It is, therefore, the opposite of the seductive voice. It wants to separate itself, not only from the speaker, but also from itself. But, as we know, excrement is highly valued. It can be a sacred substance, precisely because it is profane. The same horror that pushes the excremental away from the subject creates a tie with it.
After the horrors of the Second World War, a consciousness of death became quite palpable in the work of the artists who witnessed the struggle. Artaud’s 1947 radio play captures this disturbing atmosphere, as do the other works around To Have Done with the Judgement of God in the Museum collection. Some of Artaud’s ideas about excrement are also prevalent in other post-World War II artworks, as revealed by the works in the Museo Reina Sofía collection that are based on the idea of plunder, of exclusion, and of societal rejection, but which are given new value and meaning through the aesthetic act.
Some of the works found on the Museum’s fourth floor serve as good examples, such as pieces by Jean Fautrier. This painter and sculptor was born in Paris in 1989, only two years after Artaud, and was a leading exponent of Tachisme, a movement characterised by the use of spontaneous brushstrokes, drips, blots, stains and splashes of colour directly from a tube of paint.
Artaud’s work was also deeply influential in the world of theatre, where it had a powerful impact on certain concepts in the visual arts. For example, Artaud’s efforts to cancel the illusion of staging, i.e., to favour what is experienced and real over representation, had repercussions on the aesthetic conceptions of artists as varied as Vito Acconci (in works like Three Relationship Studies from 1970), Carl André (for example, his piece Magnesium Copper Plain from 1969) and the Spaniard Javier Aguirre (in his works for video like Objetivo 40º from 1967). All of these artworks, which form part of the Museo Reina Sofía collection, reveal a commitment to create access to real, vital experience, transcending – or transgressing – the boundaries found in the domain of what is theatrical, simulated and represented.
Similarly, in Artaud’s work and in the aesthetic projects that he influenced, language was no longer used as a tool to describe the world. As we have heard, the reduction of language to its most basic sound components, also from a physiological point of view (think of the screams in To Have Done with the Judgement of God) strongly influenced movements like Lettrism, in the efforts made to create a new language, far removed from the normal guidelines of meaning. Artists including Isidore Isou, François Dufrêne and especially Maurice Lemaître (in works like Tambours du jugement premier from 1952) reveal a corporal conception of the voice similar to Artaud’s explorations, as reflected in the Museum’s exhibition Is the war over? Art in a divided world. Collection, 1945-1968.
After Artaud, the body can no longer abandon this impossible frontier between that which overflows with meaning and that which completely lacks it, between what our mind tries to control and what escapes from all possible reason – between, in the end, life and death.
