Antonin Artaud - Influence

Influence

Artaud was heavily influenced by seeing a Colonial Exposition of Balinese Theatre in Marseille. He read eclectically, inspired by authors and artists such as Seneca, Shakespeare, Poe, Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry, and André Masson.

Mötley Crüe named the Theatre of Pain album after reading his proposal for a Theatre of Cruelty, much as Christian Death had with their album Only Theatre of Pain. The band Bauhaus included a song about the playwright, called "Antonin Artaud", on their album Burning from the Inside . Charles Bukowski also claimed him as a major influence on his work. Influential Argentine hard rock band Pescado Rabioso recorded an album titled Artaud (album). Their leader Luis Alberto Spinetta wrote the lyrics partly basing them on Artaud's writings. Composer John Zorn has six records, "Astronome", "Moonchild", "Six Litanies for Heliogabalus", "The Crucible", "Ipsissimus" and "Templars: In Sacred Blood" dedicated to Artaud, and a monodrama for voice and orchestra inspired by Artaud's late drawings "La Machine de l'être".

Theatrical practitioner Peter Brook took inspiration from Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" in a series of workshops that led up to his well-known production of Marat/Sade. The Living Theatre was also heavily influenced by him, as was much English-language experimental theatre and performance art; Karen Finley, Spalding Gray, Liz LeCompte, Richard Foreman, Charles Marowitz, Sam Shepard, Joseph Chaikin, and more all named Artaud as one of their influences.

Poet Allen Ginsberg claimed his introduction to Artaud, specifically "To Have Done with the Judgement of god", by Carl Solomon had a tremendous influence on his most famous poem "Howl".

The popular mid-twentieth-century poet and lyricist Jim Morrison was directly influenced by Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. He employed a conscious, but sometimes unconscious, method of arousing the so-called "Rock Music" audience to face "reality", cathartically. He failed in this effort a majority of the time, often overestimating the potential of the audience to transcend the bounds of superficial fandom and fad-induced behavior. Morrison enrolled in and attended Jack Hirschman's famous course on Artaud at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1964, while an undergraduate student majoring in Cinematography and Theatre.

The novel Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina Braschi includes a debate between artists and poets concerning the merits of Artaud's "multiple talents" in comparison to the singular talents of other French writers.

Artaud also had a profound influence on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who borrowed Artaud's phrase "the body without organs" to describe their conception of the virtual dimension of the body and, ultimately, the basic substratum of reality.

The survival horror video game Silent Hill: Origins contains a segment in which the protagonist must solve puzzles within the "Artaud Theatre", which is in the town of Silent Hill.

Youth film company ACT 2 CAM work is inspired by the writings of Artaud. Their 2012 feature film is entitled Beggars' Teeth, after the Artaud quotation "All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of Beggars' Teeth".