Artaud: Blows and Bombs

Book excerpt: Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) remains a massively inspirational figure, worldwide, in contemporary art, film, writing and digital media. In this definitive biography, author Stephen Barber tracks Artaud’s extraordinary and compelling life, from his volatile alliance with the Surrealist movement in the 1920s, to his legendary Theatre of Cruelty of the 1930s, to his nine-year asylum incarceration and his final period of drug-ravaged freedom in 1940s Paris. ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS provides a vivid, potent portrait of Artaud’s extreme and provocative life. Artaud’s creative influence has been seminal, from the Beat movement to Punk, from the revolutionary theatre movements of the 1960s to contemporary digital media theory. This first-ever biography locates the vital source of that influence. Artaud’s wild life was full of conflict, desperation and fury. Many of its crucial aspects have been totally unknown, notably Artaud’s apocalyptic journey to the Aran Islands in 1937, from which he returned to France in a strait-jacket, and his agonizing electroshock-treatments of the mid-1940s; ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS illuminates all of these critical moments in Artaud’s life for the first time. Based on fifteen years of research and on many interviews with the people closest to Artaud, this is a unique and electrifying biography that will be read for decades to come.