The Art of Avowal — Memorium Mori — It is All Coming Back to Artaud

The Art of Avowal — Memorium Mori — It is All Coming Back to Artaud

Blau asserts that in the “activity of perception”, a “moral rigor” and “self-critical severity” are necessary in times of social purblindness. This sense of purpose lies at the heart of Artaud’s proposition for a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ that is “difficult and cruel for myself first of all” (79, Artaud 1958). Circumscribing a sociological pandect, within the context of 11th September 2001, and performance apropos Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’; Le Petit Mort is a viscerous response in the ‘tradition’ of art in “times of crisis” and perceives an “acute moral and spiritual bankruptcy”. The culture of fear and trivial distractions –— artistic or otherwise — blighting the current ‘war on terror’ era is autogenous of death’s denial. Consciousness is condemned to psychoanalytical repetitions, until the taciturn subject of mortality is addressed onerously. Artistic practices are the ideal medium par excellence in providing this voice — literally in performance — and Artaud’s ‘Will ... without conflict” (51, ibid). An ontological, corporeal thought might reconcile existence with ‘memento mori’ by means of performance and having a distinct disregard for proper Latin ‘ars moriendi’ — the art of dying — becomes ‘ars vita longa’ — the art of living forever.

Like Herbert Blau and Forced Entertainment’s artistic director Tim Etchells; Helen Cixous in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing approaches a “certain truth”, however unsayable, indefined or unbearable with the inclination for avowal —the “Real need” (41-2, Cixous 1993). Unexpected perceptual insights may be garnered by the revelations of an artistic audaciousness, consisting in “saying the worst”, where it is not the religious but the human content, venturing “there where we don’t have the strength or means to venture, to the edge of our abyss: and then describe it” (41, ibid). By confessing to the presence of “crime”, and the “repulsion that is always at work within us”, a strategy “[T]hrough death, towards the recognition of love” — not unlike Artaud’s cruelty — presents for Cixous a “difficult joy”. The knowledge that “the approach to anything is done gradually and painfully — and includes as well as passing through the opposite of what is being approached” (42, ibid) evokes Lacanian theory in the ‘extimite’ of subjectivity, where in “differing it agrees with itself” — we become each ‘thing’ — I am you am I are you are I me and you and I and you and me and I and you. Le Petit Mort is a ‘dubious confession’ to crimes never committed, but somehow one assumes responsibility, guilt, shame and carries burdens of blame for acts like murder, misogyny and the ‘masculine crisis’, rape — by seduction, colonialism and Western imperialism, negating ‘God’, suiciding, vilifying minorities like the Jews in World War II, incest and paedophilia, 11th September 2001 and being a failure in love and life.

Le Petit Mort contrived to be a dramatic tragic-comedy, a romantic story of loss, grief and unrequited love. In its woeful fucking lamentations, brevity of autoeroticism; guilt and shame and guilt — one more time, for ‘good measure’ — with blame; are played out by a psychotic, schizoid and jealous ‘god’, whose painful explorations might bring ‘wisdom from suffering’. Like most ambitious, artistic endeavour, it is a pathetic gesture, incommensurate with the events and complex emotions it actually sought to represent — the ‘unrepresentable-ness’ of this, the ‘Thing’ called ‘loss’, the ‘Real’ in the death of love-life and its ‘impossibility’; whether consisting in the experience of the date 11th September 2001 or not otherwise.

The beauty of ‘successful’ artistic exploits might be determined in the ability to transcend ‘the moment’, by creating something ‘timeless’, that is, ‘out of time’. Le Petit Mort desired this by not being explicit in situating its content — by ‘giving space to time’ and the chance to ‘measure’ its quality of ‘something beyond’, ‘emptiness’, ‘fullness’, ‘nervousness’, ‘humour’, ‘absurdity’, ‘pathos’, ‘bathos’ or utter ‘incomprehensibility’ that approaches a ‘nameless-ness’. The logic of Le Petit Mort was intuitively determined by an entanglement of failure and jouissance, that ultimately serves nothing but something between what Blau describes as a “proleptic uselessness” and Peggy Phelan’s “psychic need to rehearse for loss and especially death” (3, Phelan 1993; 20, Auslander).

Elizabeth Grosz refers to the “inherent violence” of binarization demonstrated in French philosopher’s Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysical ‘logocentricism’; and it is this polarizing structure whose repetitions create the conditions for contemporary aesthetics. Lacan’s positing of a topological subjectivity — (as a mobius strip, prior to being captured in the mirror-image and its subsequent ‘mis-recognised knowledge’) — is reality apprehended par excellence, where seemingly at one point, two sides are distinguished, yet when traversed, are experienced as a singular side — the Lacanian extimite. The subject as a binary structure, is supported by the compulsive return of a repressed fantasy, as a relation, to an object of desire that ‘never was’ existing in the ‘first place’ — a mere memory; in doubt?

Aligned with such (mis?)conceptions, Antonin Artaud proposed that an idea of culture — ideally artistic — distinct from life should be abolished by theatre-as-plague — in a crisis “resolved by death or cure” — “an extreme purification”, revealing the repressed shadow, doubling reality. Artaud posits that the first true aim and purpose of artistic creation is the pedagogical instruction that all “great Myths” and “all true freedom is dark” because “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.” (79, Artaud 1958). “Infallibly” identified with this freedom, is the recounting of an “essential separation” that is not the fault of artistic creation, but “of life”, veiled by traces of psycho-analytical desire marking its disappearance — a vanishing point into void. For Artaud, the explicit, physical, materiality of the body and its acts within a performance space might be capable of attaining a pious, ritual purity — a sacred spirituality. The conception of Artaud’s theatre would produce “instantaneously” an act in order to “free us, in a Myth in which we have sacrificed our individuality, like Personages out of the Past, with power rediscovered in the Past”, where “pleasure” is found, increasing life value by “profound transformations”, derived by “the spirit” of the times and assuming “another form of civilization” (116-7, ibid).

Following what might be described as a ‘terrorist aesthetic’, Artaud acknowledges the appearance of “Good that is always upon the outer face, but the face within is evil … which will eventually be reduced, but at the supreme instant when everything that was form will be on the point of returning to chaos.” 11th September 2001 becomes the Artaudian aesthetic we deserve when compared to the anti-thesis of the original “superior” idea; — “capable of attaining awareness and a possession of certain dominant forces … notions that control all others … energies which ultimately create order and increase the value of life”. Due to the inability to “restore all the arts to a central attitude and necessity”, Artaud suggests that “we might as well abandon ourselves now, without protest, and recognize that we are no longer good for anything but disorder, famine, blood, war and epidemics”, and to cease “painting, babbling, writing or doing whatever it is we do.” (80, ibid) — And why not? For to continue would be, nay, is, sheer nihilism, when faced with the continuing prospects of nought but wealth for 20% of the worlds population; poverty, misery and exploitation for the rest of capitalism’s ‘trickle-down effect’ recipients with an ironically — (or is that moronically?) — apt global, ecological disaster for all of us!!! Unless “WE” ACT. The spectrum of being within, has Artaud considering evil as “permanent law and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other”. However, “cruelty” for Artaud must be “taken in a broad sense” that signifies ‘pure, philosophical consciousness’. It is “Everything that acts”, an “appetite for life”, a “cosmic rigor” and implacable submission to necessity, intention and decision, irreversibility, lucidity, kinds of rigid control — “in the Gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness … good is desired, it is the consequence of an act … the hidden god creates, he obeys the cruel necessity of creation which has been imposed on himself by himself, and he cannot not create, hence not admit into the centre of the self-willed whirlwind a kernel of evil ever more condensed, and ever more consumed ... the sense of continuous creation, a wholly magical action, obeys this necessity. A play in which there would not be this will, this blind appetite for life capable of overriding everything, visible in each gesture and each act and in the transcendent aspect of the story, would be a useless and unfulfilled play” (102-3, ibid). The idea of life for Artaud is an “irrational impulsion, a kind of initial perversity” and suggests Zizek and the notional Lacanian Act, as well as the Kiekergaardian ‘madness’ incorporated in a “leap of faith”. This approach toward ‘pure thought’, “beyond” Occidental realms of psychological individuality and meta-physics, evokes the Victoria University — Footscray Park’s Division of Performance’s “thinking through performance” and Blau’s final essay ‘Limits of Performance: The Insane Root’, in The Dubious Spectacle, where one is doing performance, methodologically, “in order to think” — (318, Blau 2002 - my emphasis).

Grosz cites a certain “imaginary anatomy” as an “individual and collective fantasy” of the body’s “forms” and “actions”. The “refusal” to accept loss, in what is known as the ‘phantom limb phenomenon’, asserts Lacan’s claims that this explains “peculiar, non-organic connections”; in that what is removed “continues to induce sensations” there, where it was once occupied (41, Grosz). Absence is “psychically invested” as “present”, in a libidinally invested “memorial”, or “nostalgic tribute strongly cathected” to undermine “perceptual awareness” of such loss, not unlike the Freud’s “compulsion to repeat” . Grosz then suggests that this can be a “kind of mourning for a pre-Oedipal — i.e. pre-castrated — body and a corporeal connection to the mother that women in patriarchy are required to abandon” (40, ibid). The imaginary identification with what is and is not self, is a mapping of the ego through this subject’s identification and internalization of the totalized image of the self. This “body phantom” forms the basis of an imaginary Gestalt, that derives a stability or lack from these self-representations (42, ibid). ‘We’ become identified in a relation to ‘an-Other thing’ — a parent, lover, nation or religious god. The “phantoms” of Le Petit Mort are the absences of what cannot be explicitly present — that which is ‘lost’ — such as a ‘God’, a ‘Garden of Eden’ (that might be imagined as a public bar) , serpents and other shape-shifting identities, lovers — past or otherwise, memories, projected traumatic scenes of suffering, a war, fallen bodies falling, terrorist attacks, the detonation of bombs — atomic or otherwise, concentration camp victims, terminally-ill cancer patients, crucifixions, other bodies in pain, a subjects circumcision, a feminine sexuality, a mother giving birth, an explicit sex scene, an apple, a tree, a book, a word, a world, a sky, a sun or star, a cosmological universe or a blank screen with white noise.

Like Blau’s reference to architect Damien Leibskind’s Jewish Museum and its “no exit acuity of the unnerving space” that testifies to the Muselmann of the Holocaust in World War II (16, Blau 2003); the site-specificity of the photographic studio in Le Petit Mort represented the Lacanian ‘concentrational anxiety’ that constitutes the utilitarian form of the social bond — a “freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison” (6, Lacan 1977) and conceived in psycho-analysis as the authoritative, super-ego, incorporated into the subject — subjected to allegiances such as ‘father’, ‘nationhood’ or ‘god’.

Significantly, following Artaud — “the desire characteristic of Eros … feeds upon contingencies” [such as] “death … resurrection … transfiguration”, [for] “nowhere in a circular and closed world is there room for true death, since ascension is a rending” [and] “closed space is fed with lives … tramples down the others, consuming them in a massacre” — this consciousness is rendered as giving the “exercise of every act of life its blood-red colour, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone else’s death”(103, Artaud 1958). Ultimately, Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ project and Le Petit Mort are an ‘impossible’ act of gift-giving love, whose reciprocal sacrifice between the audience-participants and live performer — what Blau refers to as the “stink of mortality”, lying at the “edge of the breath” — is experienced in the proximity of being together and makes ‘failure’ palpable (83-86, Blau 1982).

Le Petit Mort plays with these notions of ‘cruelty’ and the question and knowledge of Artaud’s “hieroglyph of the breath”, as being primary to performance, as conceived in ‘An Affective Emotional Athleticism’ and ‘Theatre of the Seraphim’. Principally these consist of innumerable combinations of the cabalistic ternaries:-

ANDROGYNOUS MALE FEMALE
BALANCED EXPANSIVE ATTRACTIVE
NEUTER POSITIVE NEGATIVE

— Here, “all life issues” and acts as the place where “magic respiration is reproduced at will” (112, Artaud 1958). For Artaud, the performer is “an athlete of the heart” whose “emotional musculature corresponds to certain physical localizations” and becomes a “Double, like the Ka of the Egyptian mummies ... a perpetual spectre” evoking Freud’s ‘uncanny’. The organic sexuality of the breath, in this spectral double, has a “long memory” of the heart that “endures”, “thinks” and “holds sway” (133-6, ibid).

It is in “the belly that silence must begin” and the breath “descends and creates its void”, extending space as per Merleau-Ponty’s spatially ‘buccal notion’ of body experience (122, Merleau-Ponty 1964). Le Petit Mort experimented in its developmental phases, by explorations of this space-void within the body, through extended voice inspired by Roy Hart-Alfred Wolsohn. From Artaud’s ‘Theatre of the Seraphim’, a scream of “anguish armed for war”, demanding justice like a “terrible subterranean cry” of the “feminine” was sought. Informing the live performance was a strategic “revolt”, like the “groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth”; [in] ‘the dream where one must fall’, [that makes the] “energetic will prevail” by a “disappearance of force” and the “SENSES WILL BELIEVE THEY ARE PRESENT”. By ‘calling forth’ a “hole of silence”; the scream cried, attempts to ‘awaken’ a “double” and “sacred”, ‘lost secret’ — “magic in living” — existence — and ‘passes’ into a “single chest” from the performing body, reforging the ‘chain of Time’ in order to be “locked away”. ‘Entranced’ upon entering the “chest of the spectator”, an ‘identification’ is then sought in the “reality” of the “spectacle” (272-5, Artaud 1976). The ‘infantilism’ of this scream, (that echoes Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s iconic 1883 painting The Scream), produces a condition beyond language, abandoning audibility, in accord with silence. As per Paul Valery in 1938, what is more an immediate duration of time collapsing, and therefore, mortal life passing and death approaching than silence? (69, Virilio 2004). In a play between its representation, layers of real time rendered fictional — a ‘historical world’s end’ — and the ‘life’ of Le Petit Mort pursues this silence by simply concluding; ‘being there’ — quotidian, with an-other-s-audience. The ultimate reality of actual matter in Le Petit Mort, seeks to possess a spirit that permeates its ‘presence’ as ‘phantom’, with a ‘feminine dynamic’ — the Artaudian ‘Great mystery’ governing life and guarding the dead from birth to burial;-— beyond the spheres relating to a metaphorical and cultural ‘God’s death’. The live performer’s desired ‘communicable purity’ of ‘presence’ is sought and to be found in the ‘risk and wreckage’ of its own ‘blank perfection’ and ‘happening’. Alienated beyond the rhetorical powers of artistic contrivances obsessed with ‘technique’, Roy Faudree from the Wooster Group’s notion of the live performer — referred to by Forced Entertainment’s artistic director, Tim Etchells — is conveyed in the “Look, I am in front of you. You can look at me from the top of my head to the tips of my feet” attitude Le Petit Mort seeks to evoke through its ‘decaying away’. Alive, together, we share the similar experience of breath, in a seemingly endlessness of eye contact and inquiry between each other (216, Etchells), hopefully, during Le Petit Mort. Here in this — a live performer’s — becoming-mythical-being; expectations, resistances and defensive limits of meaning might be discarded, perpetually now, without closure, approaching towards an intimate neutrality, beyond fatal and clichéd ‘master-slave dialectics’ that are seemingly devoid of life — in a necessary, flawed, failure and labour of love.

In respect for this silence, in the experience of breath, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Proposition #7’ from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus shall be invoked and what remains is left within Artaud itself :-

“When I live I do not feel myself live. But when I act, it is then that I feel myself exist … doing something … [T]he events of the dream, directed by my deep inner consciousness, teach[ing] me the meaning of the events of the waking state in which a naked fatality directs me … [B]ut the theatre is like one waking state in which it is I who direct the fatality ... [m]y own personal fate … an idea … sacred … ”(275-6, Artaud 1976).