Antonin Artaud and Journey to Mexico

Instructor: Stuart Kendall Date & Time: September 28th, October 5th, 12th, 19th 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: On January 10, 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him not only to the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico City but to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara.

The Journey would only last ten months, culminating in some six to eight weeks spent among the Rarámuri of Tarahumara. Still, the motivations, challenges, and limits that characterized the trip have only become more relevant to our lives on this warming planet.

Artaud didn’t just leave Europe. He fled it: “I came to Mexico to escape European civilization … I hoped to find a vital form of culture.” The vitality that he sought was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in the soil of a place, and the rituals of religion reinforced a connection in human lives between the earth and the sun. However, Artaud’s quest for a vital form of culture would not be a simple one.

His appeal to indigenous culture would first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic, religious, political, and philosophical transformations. And this intellectual work would not be without a psychological cost.

Tracing the complex itineraries of Artaud’s Journey to Mexico, this Seminar will take us far to the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion. We will confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of alternatives in a search for a vital and ecologically viable forms of culture.

Session One: What Artaud Went to Mexico in Order to Do
Artaud was then and is now primarily known for his contributions to the arts – to literature, theater, and the visual arts – but the deepest strata of his life and work were characterized by a will to change the world as both a revolutionary and a mystic. The Seminar begins by considering Artaud’s will to change the world in the context of the political and social movements of the 1930s: fascism, communism, and Christianity.

Session Two: (Surrealist) Religion and Revolution
Artaud went to Mexico in order to escape European civilization. The second week of the Seminar considers Artaud’s critique of European civilization as well as his critique of European forms of art, religion, and ritual behavior.

Session Three: Mexico and Its Doubles
Artaud’s “Mexico” was at once imaginary, symbolic, and, in the end, all too real. His reading and research informed and motivated his journey but the disciplines and discourses shaping contemporary culture – art, anthropology, religion, revolution –limited it as well. This week in the Seminar considers motivations for and challenges to any attempt at decolonization.

Session Four: The Peyote Dance
Artaud’s journey to Mexico culminated in another journey, this one into the Sierra Tarahumara, where he may have participated in indigenous rituals. This was a physical journey but also a visionary one, a journey into altered states of consciousness, to the very edge of madness. Artaud continued to write about his experiences among the Tarahumara until the end of this life.

IMAGE: Gunther Gerzso, Los días de la calle de Gabino Barreda, 1944.

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