Antonin Artaud ‘Auto-Portrait’
Antonin Artaud is tweeting again. The entire Internet is up in arms, they are enraged. How could he be so stupid? How could he be so ignorant? Why does he THINK LIKE THIS?
Artaud, a literary critic and playwright, is impervious to the demands of the mob. Their outrage only seems to fortify his various stances. My god, he seems to actually ENJOY their outrage. This isn’t right. This is problematic. Artaud did a sexism! Artaud did a racism! Artaud doesn’t know how hurtful his rhetoric is. We need to do something about this Artaud, they say. Call his publisher. Call his manager, if he has one. This man keeps saying things that I disagree with! Monster. Troll. Nazbol. He’s all of that, and more.
Artaud keeps tweeting. Throughout the last year he’s commented on all manner of topics political, social and cultural.
On the pandemic’s victims: “The corpse of a plague victim shows no lesions when opened. The gallbladder, which must filter the heavy and inert wastes of the organism, is full, swollen to bursting with a black, viscous fluid so dense as to suggest a new form of matter altogether..”
Internet Responds: “This man is sick! How dare he be so cavalier about the victims, who were all honorable and purely kind and good and often were identities! Cancel Artaud! Call his Manager!”
On a recent exhibition by the artist Mathieu Malouf: “It seems as if the painter possessed certain secrets of linear harmony, certain means of making that harmony affect the brain directly, like a physical agent. In any case this impression of intelligence prevailing in external nature and in the manner of its representation is apparent in several other details of the canvas, witness for example the bridge as high as an eight-story house standing out against the sea, across which people are filing, one after another, like ideas in Plato's cave.”
Internet Responds: “Does Artaud know what he’s saying? Malouf is Nazbol who hates jews we know because moral hero and friend of Shia Labeouf Luke Turner said so arhghgghrrhhhh fuck you Artaud!! I hope Liz Warren gets your twitter cancelled!”
On cancel culture: “This reality is not human but inhuman. And man with his customs and his characters counts very little for it.”
Internet Responds: “Cancel culture isn’t real! Only rich white fucks like Artaud care about cancel culture because they won’t be held accountable for their VIOLENCE. That’s what your words are, Artaud: VI-O-LENCE! You disgusting, heinous ghoul, I wish you would leave the Internet forever. Seriously, just die.”
On mental illness: “I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.”
Internet Responds: “That’s it, it’s time to get serious. Artaud is a criminal, and his words are a danger to everyone. My mom is a therapist, and she works hard everyday to make sure that humans are well and drugged so that they can be good functional consumers who love diversity and the New York Times! Artaud has crossed the line. Sign this petition to erase Artaud.”
Artaud appears to be taking some time off from the Internet. This morning, his manager released a statement: “Antonin Artaud is taking some time from the public eye to focus on his mental health and be with his wife, Azealia Banks, and their three children, the Jonas Brothers.”
Journalists reached out to Artaud’s manager with pertinent questions.
“Is Artaud sorry about his vile statements?”
“Is Artaud affiliated with the alt-right?”
“Is Artaud on drugs.”
Artaud’s use of Ketamine is notorious by this point. He was arrested with the drug at China Chalet in New York, where he was found in the women’s bathroom attempting to learn the Electric Slide with the writer Jia Tolentino. Tolentino, a known warrior for the justice of the social, was quick to distance herself from the controversial playwright Artaud.“I don’t condone drugs or Artaud, I am going through a deeply difficult time and I’m totally, like, victimized. Otherwise I would have known better to distance myself from any and all things that are problematic.”
Seemingly accepting Tolentino’s statement as sincere, some of Twitter’s most illustrious blue checks posted statements of “solidarity.”
“Feel better, Jia, I never believed you would do Ketamine and dance with someone as heinous and despicable as that Artaud, you’re a real one. I actually have it on good authority from four bourgeois women anonymous sources who claim that Artaud at one point or another was handsy, I will write a thinly sourced article about his transgressions soon” said Tolentino’s New Yorker colleague Ronan Farrow.
“Artaud is a great dancer, and I hope he gets well soon, and morality and goodness, etc..” tweeted actor Mark Ruffalo.
“Solidarity with you Jia, us elite aspirant media figures that pretend to care about regular working people must remain firm against the fascists and the white supremacists,” wrote the academic Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor.
Artaud, comfortable but on edge in his Paris apartment, still buzzing from the DMT that he smoked the previous night with Michele Lamy, has no idea why he’s so compelled by the technological capacity to inject his thoughts and dreams directly into cyberspace. He knows, on some level, that it’s vulgar. But it’s delicious! He attempts to make his digital ghost as similar to the real thing as possible, giving his fans and haters a portal directly into his fractured and admittedly rather defective mind as it sizzles with creative energy and crackled with constructive angst. He believes his Twitter account is a gift to the world. He writes about a topic, hits send on his Iphone, and gives the sheeple something to talk about. Something to rage against. He unites them, god damn it! “They are lucky to have me,” he mumbles to himself, sipping an espresso and taking a hit off his vape pen.
He’s feeling lonely. His wife Azealia is in the United States, and truth be told they haven’t seen each other in months, and that was only when they were asked to be on a podcast to discuss the cabal of elite billionaire pedophiles. Azealia is so talented but she can’t love, Artaud thinks to himself. He wishes she would get back to making art, her gift, but like him she is equally seduced by her capacity for stirring global unrest by merely posting her thoughts on social media.
He picks his phone up, opens his Twitter account, and scrolls down. An interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda reveals that there will be a cinematic adaptation of his “hip-hop musical” Hamilton. The film will have a budget of $100 million. Artaud chuckles to himself, looks into his reflection in a mirror. He sees his weathered face, cheeks sullen and sunken in, and thinks, “Art is dead. Theater is dead. There is no cruelty in theater, just audience pandering and fake good vibes. I don’t belong here. I am from some other time.”
Artaud had been trying to wean off the opiates that he was prescribed in a mental institution when he was 19. He never understood why the doctor decided morphine would be an appropriate treatment for his madness — “though those fuckers at Purdue Pharma don’t care what their drugs are prescribed for do they?” he thought — but it sure was. He loved the stuff. He adored the way the pills dissolved on a spoon and how they got sucked back into the syringe, the ritual practice of medicinally easing psychological pain. Artaud is sure he’ll never quit using opiates, in constant admiration of the way they settled his mind into his body, the way the warmth of the chemical would cloak his physicality in peace and ease, allowing him to write and to think and to draw and, more and more lately, to tweet. “Fuck it” he mutters aloud, heading to his medicine cabinet in his bathroom and pulling out a bottle of 30 30mg Oxycodone tablets that he had been saving for emergencies. Artaud was always in a state of psychic emergency anyways, so it’s not like he’s breaking a promise to himself.
Scrolling further down his feed, Artaud notes a touching plea from none other than the subtly fascinating reality star (or so Artaud thinks) Kim Kardashian asking respect for her husband and her family while Kanye endures another manic spat of bi-polar disorder. Artaud sees a kindred in Kanye. Being a famous artist in post-digital capitalism is a tall order. “Leave Kanye alone,” types Artaud on Twitter, before deleting it, deciding that Kanye knows, wherever he is, that Artaud is rooting for him. Men like them, Artaud thinks, don’t need cyberspace to connect. They are connected in the cosmos. The beyond. They live there and here at the same time. Even though Kanye is far away from here, he is with me up there, right now.
Feeling the compulsion coming on, Artaud decides to go all in. He crushes another OxyCodone and mixes it into his espresso, sweetening the brew with a packet of Swiss Miss hot chocolate (high and low, always). He opens up his laptop, and submerges his cerebral cortex in the colors and disjointed text and matrixes of conflicting ideas and ideological oppositions, “Formally, Twitter is just so beautiful,” he thinks.Eventually, after having a laugh at the global protests that fail to achieve anything and catching a glimpse of Jair Bolsonnaro in a hospital bed looking very unwell, Artaud sees Jia Tolentino’s denial of their friendship. “What a dishonest little bitch,” he says to himself.
Though he promised his manager he’d stop speaking his mind on social media for a time, he never said anything about images. Going back into his iPhone, Artaud is elated when he finds the perfect rebuttal video in his iCloud. He saves it to the front of his picture log, re-opens twitter, and uploads the video. He sends the tweet without any text.
The Internet is ablaze the next day when the New York Post tweets an article with the headline: “Playwright and Cultural Theorist Antonin Artaud Tweets Video of Jia Tolentino Injecting Ketamine intramuscularly” with the sub-head “Tolentino says in video, “Damn Antonin you always have the best Ketamine.’”