21st Century Artaud: the ‘virtual’ and new media - Jay Murphy
Wednesday 19 October, 2-3pm
© Georges Pastier, 1946-48
A spate of new books and translations are creating a new evaluation of Antonin Artaud (d. 1948) as not only a seminal mid-20th century artist in his own right, but also as one with a heretofore unrealized contribution to the 21st (Barber 2019, 2020-22; Valente, 2020; Bradnock 2021; Murphy 2016, 2021) This is in league with analogous arguments for the renewed relevance of those Artaud often regarded as his peer group – Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud (Lübecker 2022), Gerard de Nerval (Valente 2022), as well as Marcel Duchamp as a prefigurative thinker of the posthuman (Rosenberg 2022). Much as Nikolaj Lübecker’s study 21st Century Symbolism maintains the notions of subjectivity that emerge from Mallarmé or Rimbaud make eminent sense in a 21st century ecology, Artaud maintains a fierce presence in his insistence on the ‘virtual’ body or “life plane” (Artaud 2004, 212), of neurology and the brain as fields of struggle and contestation. Uncannily, Artaud in 1933 predicted the development of Virtual Reality (VR) from devices that would fit in one’s pocket, yet foresaw that it could only have a “limited number of vibrations” that would be “incapable of surpassing itself” (Artaud 2004, 380). Artaud’s call for a “new body” (Artaud XIII 1974, 118), in an era of widespread body augmentation, alteration, and cyborgian mutation, appears less ‘mad’ and delusional than an essential insight. Numerous artists have created work that must indeed be navigated via a ‘virtual’ self (Varela 1999; Varela et al 2017), following perhaps Dada and early Surrealism in the proposition that full embodiment requires occasional out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences. These essential questions from Artaud, who was writing about virtuality and virtual planes as early as 1925, are these debatable roles of representation and representational processes and what can possibly constitute a subversion of them in an inexorable digital sensorium.
Jay Murphy is a writer and author of New Media and the Artaud Effect (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and Artaud’s Metamorphosis (Pavement Books, 2016). He has thrice been a finalist for Sundance Screenwriting Labs and his collaborative Internet projects have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival. He has contributed to CTheory, Art Journal, Deleuze Studies, Parallax, Culture Machine, Frieze, MAP, Afterimage, Parkett, Art in America, Metropolis, and Third Text, among other publications. In 2009, 2011, and 2014, he organised exhibitions and programs of film and moving image work from the Middle East and North Africa for venues in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow; in 2011-12 the film series "First Person" for Inverleith House/Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh; and in 2008 gallery exhibitions in New York and Edinburgh. He is also completing a creative nonfiction web project on the Middle East and other environs called Baraya/Perimeter.
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