Artaud: Blows and Bombs

Antonin Artaud (1896â€"1948) remains a massively inspirational figure, worldwide, in contemporary art, film, writing and digital media. In this definitive biography, author Stephen Barber tracks Artaudâ€s extraordinary and compelling life, from his volatile alliance with the Surrealist movement in the 1920s, to his legendary Theatre of Cruelty of the 1930s, to his nine-year asylum incarceration and his final period of drug-ravaged freedom in 1940s Paris. ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS provides a vivid, potent portrait of Artaudâ€s extreme and provocative life. Artaudâ€s creative influence has been seminal, from the Beat movement to Punk, from the revolutionary theatre movements of the 1960s to contemporary digital media theory. This first-ever biography locates the vital source of that influence. Artaudâ€s wild life was full of conflict, desperation and fury. Many of its crucial aspects have been totally unknown, notably Artaudâ€s apocalyptic journey to the Aran Islands in 1937, from which he returned to France in a strait-jacket, and his agonizing electroshock-treatments of the mid-1940s; ARTAUD: BLOWS AND BOMBS illuminates all of these critical moments in Artaudâ€s life for the first time. Based on fifteen years of research and on many interviews with the people closest to Artaud, this is a unique and electrifying biography that will be read for decades to come.

Dettagli