Category Archives: Notes

Antonin Artaud Les malades et les médecins

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The disease is a condition.
Health is only one other, more ugly.
I mean more cowardly and petty.
No patient who has grown.
Not healthy that will ever betrayed,
not wanting to be sick,
such as doctors I suffered.
I was sick all my life and I only ask to continue.
Because the states of deprivation of life
I have always learned a lot more about
the plethora of my power as credenzas petty bourgeois:
THE HEALTHY ENOUGH.
Because my being is beautiful but awful.
And it is beautiful because it is awful.
Ugly, Affre built awful.
Cure a disease is a crime.
This is bruise the head of a kid much less stingy than life.
The ugly con-rings.
The beautiful rots.
But ill, is not doped with opium, cocaine or morphine.
And you must love the charterer fevers,
jaundice and perfidy much more than any euphoria.
Then the fever, high fever my head –
because I am in a state of high fever
for the last fifty years that I’m alive –
give me my opium –
this being –
that,
I’m hot-headed,
opium head to toe.
Because cocaine is a bone,
heroin, over-bone man,
tra la sara i ca ca ca i fena tra la fa ca sara
and opium is this cave,
this cave mummification blood,
scrapings of the sperm in the cellar of an old excrémation this kid,
this disintegration of an old hole,
this excrémentation a kid,
little kid buried anus,
whose name is: poop, pee, con-science of disease.
And opium father fi fi
So that goes from father to son –
he must return you to the powder,
when you have suffered much without bed.
So I think that this is mine eternal sick,
heal all doctors –
born doctors deficiency disease –
not doctors ignorant of my statements
awful sick to me to impose their insulin,
a world of health slumped.

Antonin Artaud




Walker Evans

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“A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement to those who don’t need anything — I mean the rich in spirit. Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and imprecations ought to be heard in a museum room. Precisely the place where these are usually suppressed. So, some of the values of pictures may be suppressed too, or plain lost, in formal exhibition.

I’d like to address the eyes of those who know how to take their values straight through and beyond the inhibitions accompanying public decorum. I suggest that true religious feeling is sometimes to be had even at church, and perhaps art can be seen and felt on a museum wall; with luck.

Those of us who are living by our eyes — painters, designers, photographers, girl watchers — are both amused and appalled by the following half-truth: “what we see, we are.” And by its corollary: our collective work is, in part, shameless, joyous, autobiography-cum-confession wrapped in the embarrassment of the unspeakable. For those who can read the language, that is. And we never know just who is in the audience. When the seeing-eye man does turn up to survey our work, and does perceive our metaphors, we are just caught in the act that’s all. Should we apologize?”

Walker Evans – Boston Sunday Globe, August, 1st, 1971, p. A-61.

Dream: Roger Blin

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As I’m thinking about the Great Recession
and it’s impact on art


the image of Roger Blin
comes to mind.

He had decided to produce
the work of Samuel Beckett.

he had to make a choice between two unpublished scripts,
Eleutheria or Waiting for Godot.

I have a sense that
if Blin had not picked Godot,
primarily because its smaller/single set
fit his limited budget,
this significant moment
in the history of the contemporary theater
would have been very different.





I admit:
the choice to do a cheaper project
is not always a pleasing aesthetic option,
but there is some significance
that if Blin had been operating in a subsidized institution,
the direction performance practices and theory have taken
might have been much more ordinary.

While it wasn’t the sole stimulus,
Beckett’s bare stages
contributed richly to the visual simplification of theater images
in the 1960s and 1970s
an aesthetic that privileged
the image of human figures in space.

Is there originality in any work of art?

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While contemporary performance may borrow
either aesthetic strategies
or apparent ideological gestures from the past,
this borrowing
makes no claims to invest the material
or the aesthetic strategy
with a historical “thought.”

The process in which a block of material
or a analogous strategy
incorporates a prior unit or technique
in a form of quotation
that makes no reference to what is prior
other than its status as
something borrowed, appropriated, taken up
in the moment of performance.

Is there originality in any work of art?

Have I thought myself
into the corner of defining art itself
as a manipulation of existing languages,
tropes, gestures
that may vary in craft
but always re-presents or reproduces
what is prior.

Productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill
are only simulations,
in no way a production of originality;
while contemporary performance
frees itself from that pretense.

Of course
this is bull shit
as that freedom from pretense
is itself a claim for authenticity.