PRECIS - I have discovered that if you substitute the word "landscape" for "theater" in Antonin Artaud's famous manifesto The Theater and Its Double (1938) there emerges a strange, salient critique of the condition of landscape in these post-cultural times (George Steiner's caustic term for the present era)."Ideas don't come without limbs, and so these are no longer ideas but limbs, limbs fighting among themselves. / The mental world was never anything but that which remains from a hellish trampling of organs while the man who had them is no more." --Antonin Artaud, Suppôts et Suppliciations
"[A]nd as I was swirled along I heard a voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is broken into numberless pieces.'" --William Butler Yeats, "Rosa Alchemica" (1897)
AR-TAU - The rage felt by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) toward the formal games of theater in the 1930s -- and in effect since Shakespeare -- might substitute for our general malaise regarding the state of affairs with public landscape (public parks and gardens, certainly, but also the street, the plaza, the train station, the highway, and etcetera). This rage is all the more significant for its proposed antidote -- the Theater of Cruelty -- in Artaud's writings. In our own situation, a landscape of cruelty is out of the question (though not a virtual landscape of cruelty, or a rhetoric of landscape). That said, is not modern landscape always-already a landscape of cruelty, albeit without the therapeutic embrace of the vital resources Artaud cites in Théâtre et son double (The Theater and Its Double)?Take, for example, the remarks: "The theater still remains the most active and efficient site of passage for those immense analogical disturbances in which ideas are arrested in flight at some point in their transmutation into the abstract." Could not the same be said for landscape, which is always on the edge of immense disturbance anyway and profoundly tied up with our whole apparatus of perception and concept building? The ravages of the contemporary built environment (that "unhandsome term"), a de facto theater of cruelty, are deployed to make of life a prison-house. The point of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty is to de-stabilize and prevent the formation of built ideology. The world as prison-house is also a battlefield -- the place where ideas wage war with "limbs" (metonym for the human condition). Landscape architecture - as the meeting-place of architecture, landscape, and ideology -- is the foremost place to mount the necessary counter-insurgency.
I invite you to read this book in this light. It was published in translation by Grove Press, in 1958, and remains in print to this day.
Gavin Keeney
PS - And, circling round, perhaps it is useful to quote Heidegger on Hölderlin -- or Heidegger "answering" Hölderlin's question "Is there a measure on earth?":
"If we merely attempt, on our own authority, to set or seize upon measure, then it becomes measureless and disintegrates into nothingness. If we merely remain thoughtless and without the alertness of an intimate scrutinizing, then we will again find no measure. Yet if we are strong enough to think, then it may be sufficient for us to ponder merely from afar, that is, scarcely, the truth of this poetry and what it poetizes, so that we may suddenly be struck by it." --Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" (Bloomington/Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 167
"A dream it becomes for him who would
Approach it by stealth, and punishes him
Who would equal it with force.
Often it surprises one
Who indeed has scarcely thought it."
--Hölderlin, "The Journey"
PLEASE NOTE: Miraculously (perhaps), and regarding all of the above (and more), a documentary film appeared in 2004 tracing the philosophical/geo-terrestrial path of "The Ister" (the Danube), from the Black Forest to the Black Sea (with excurses, along the way, into the discursive territories of Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian 'readings' of this topological terrain vague ne plus ultra ...) ... / For details of this documentary film, cliquez ici ... / Regarding a possible-impossible return to philosophical aesthetics, see Infinity Doubled: Double-Black Cat ...
PROVISIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHYAntonin Artaud, Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, with Bernard Bador (Boston: Exact Change, 1995)
*Jacques Derrida & Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998)
Jacques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty & the Closure of Representation", Writing & Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 232-250
Julia Kristeva, "From One Identity to an Other", Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature & Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 124-147
"Three Essays on Antonin Artaud", October 64 (Spring 1993), pp. 57-105
Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows & Bombs (London: Faber & Faber, 1993)
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
Jane Goodall, Artaud & the Gnostic Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Margit Rowell (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper (New York: MoMA/Abrams, 1996?)
OUTTAKES
Artaud and Mise-en-Scène (Semantikon / PDF)
Antonin Artaud (Art Minimal & Conceptual Only)
Artaud Archive (Levity)
More Artaud (Hydra)
Suppots et Suppliciations (Web del Sol)
