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The Human Face
(ARTAUD MORPION / ARTAUD PARASITE)
On some of his portraits.
The human visage
is a vacant force,
a killing field.
Olive smoke twists above the rows.
There were beautiful gelatin
prints of children
carrying rifles.
The old revolutionary cry
for a form [rock on scissors] that never fits,
meant to be something besides
the body. Have you ever
lost control of your face-
the twitches and spasms exceed
what you thought you felt.
So it's absurd
to denounce as academic
a photograph's obstinate
efforts, still trying
to reproduce the features
of the human face
such as they are. For such
as they are they haven't yet
found the form they
shadow and hint at: [Hugo trying
to photograph his drowned daughter, as such
by the leg of the séance table.] the cave
and nothing but the cave [Munch
took pictures of sexy ghosts over his bed,
in one self-portrait, as Marat
he leaned from the bathtub with a turban.]
doing no more than sketch
(phenotype's footprint)
from dawn to dusk,
& in the midst of 10,000 dreams
animals lovers acquaintances
mashed as if in
the crucible of a passionate
untiring palpitation. Cells
slammed with photons/
surges/ unmerciful
heats, sperm-egg force
suns
enveloping eyes
(night's cool pollen clouds)
& rain spots the parched earth.
[Artaud in America
I was walking through an area
we used to call grass because of an area
it was the hills laid on it
and made in tiny rows
the buffalo came down to meet us
in the center where
flags fluttered
instead of leaves
we did a dance]
Which means
the human visage
hasn't found its face
--how do you explain cruelty's
commonness?
& it's up to the painter
to give it one.
Who paints a black eye, molding
another face in the dark,
a flayed head
or a face on TV,
makes it with eyes closed.
[Blind, white gloves
feel their way through
the Musée Rodin.]
But this means
that the human face
such as it is still searches
itself [mirror/devil] with two eyes one
nose one mouth
and the two, auricular
cavities answering
the orbital holes [projections]
as the four openings
of the cave
of present death.
Where earth trickles,
hears into Hades
through six holes, through
billions of pores.
The human visage
actually wears a sort of
perpetual death
and it's up to the painter
to save the face, concentrate
or lose worlds
by giving it back its
own traits. When you see light
perforate/ roughen/ shatter
it wants to punch holes.
In fact, in thousands
of years the human face has
spoken and breathed
in the brightness of Arcturus
we still feel
it hasn't even begun
to speak for itself
or shine
and I don't know a painter
in all of art history, from Holbein
to Frank who was able to
make it talk.
Portraits by Frank or Holbein
are thick walls, & don't explain
the old, mortal
architecture
buttressing the eyelids'
vaults
or embedded
in the cylindrical tunnel
of the two, mural
ear cavities.
Transparence pierce transparence
inside an ear
in the wheatfield.
Only Van Gogh
was able to get a portrait
out of a human head
like the explosive smoke
of a burst heart-
beat.
His own [burst].
Van Gogh's Head With
a Soft Hat
annuls and voids
any further attempts at
abstract painting
for longer than forever.
Inside the explosion
there is tremendous silence.
For this avid
butcher's face, projected like
a cannon blast at the furthest
edge of the canvas
& seeing itself suddenly
stopped
by an empty eye
[fluxus glass, the eye Victor Brauner
drew from inside out]
rolled back inside,
completely exhausts
all of the most specious
abstract tricks
in which non figurative art
revels-- that's why
in the portraits I've made,
I above all made sure
not to forget the nose mouth
eyes ears or
hair, but tried
to make the face speaking to me
spill the secret
of an old, human
story [a horse
scratching its back against
the tree]
one that played dead in
the heads
of Ingres or Holbein.
I felt the soul
could burn through its skin.
Sometimes a hyena
and a woman's face were
superimposed.
I have besides definitively
broken with art
style or talent in all these
drawings. I wish
unhappiness on who
ever takes them as art,
aesthetic works of
fake reality.
Take rhetoric
and wring its neck.
None of them
properly speaking
is a work.
All are sketches,
I mean probings and chisel blows
in the several directions
of chance, possibility
luck, or
destiny. Et
le / fou / fut / partout
to live inside for awhile.
It's a strange invitation:
I wasn't trying
to hone my line
or effects,
but to make manifest
the sort of
patent linear truths [tracks
over desert]
worth as much in words,
& written sentences,
as in line
and perspective.
I broke three hundred crayons.
Thus several drawings
are a mix of poem and
portrait [O SILENT TEACHER]
of written interjection
and plastic evocation
of the air
in elements materials
characters of men or animals.
And the best crept in
on all fours.
It's thus one must accept
these drawings in
the kindness of your heart
the barbarism and chaos
of their
style "never
concerned with art"
but with the sincerity
and spontaneity
of the line:
from the other side
of the surface-
which never complained.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Jonathan Skinner
[Ed. note: The Artaud text Skinner's piece works from appeared in a pamphlet put out by Galerie Pierre in July of 1947 in an edition of 265 copies.]