Antonin Artaud (Artist Book + CD) from Jaap Blonk / Kontrans Records

Antonin Artaud (Artist Book + CD)

from Jaap Blonk / Kontrans Records

The work of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, was a great inspiration and stimulant for me when I started out as a vocal performer. His pioneering writings on theatre gave me the freedom to venture much further into madness on stage, while still being perceived as authentic and powerful.

In Artaud’s French writings short fragments of sound poetry - meaningless words but still sounding French - are inserted in many places. Around 1990 I typed out a selection of these on three sheets of paper, and got into the habit of reciting these for myself.

I tried to voice them in new ways every time, thinking of Artaud’s words “Whatever I write, I want to burn it the next day.”

The one day in 1994 it happened that I got a nosebleed while reciting one of these pages. The sheet got covered with specks of blood. I kept this page ever since and still have it framed in my studio. After 25 years the blood spots have turned brownish purple.

Now for this book and CD I decided to base the whole work on this precious page. I scanned it and started to process (parts of) it in many ways. I also made prints in various sizes and (mis)treated them in as many manners I could think of. The result can be seen in the book as 49 images: the original followed by 48 variations.

For the CD, every track of the 49 was made after the corresponding image and inspired by it. The text present in every image can be heard in the corresponding piece on the CD. If there is no text in the image, there is no voice in the CD track.

The images as well as the CD tracks are meant to tell a story from beginning to end. However, just as you can leaf through the book in an arbitrary way, it is also recommended to listen to the CD on ‘random play’.

- Jaap Blonk

Sound samples:
soundcloud.com/jaap-blonk/aa-2
soundcloud.com/jaap-blonk/aa-48
soundcloud.com/jaap-blonk/aa-27
soundcloud.com/jaap-blonk/aa-11