Tadeusz Kantor began his artistic path in the visual arts. Antonin Artaud began with writing. Both ended up milestone figures of the 20th-century art of theatre.
The specificity of this domain and the two artists’ paths into it allows us to trace out what was at stake for both revolutionaries.
For the description of his own engagement in the theatre, Kantor liked using terms related to painting. Being a painter was more clear to him, he said, than the newly invented profession of a director. Yet, in the theatre, the material that would constitute his 'paint’ and 'canvas’ had the actors’ human and corporeal qualities.
Although the actor and the prop were used like elements of a painting, it was not the aesthetics of performance art that captured Kantor. It is rather that experience within visual arts made Kantor especially sensitive to the paradoxes of representation. And his radical concept of the theatre, a descendant of dadaism and Artaud, never ceased to surprise and challenge the spectator.
Artaud, at times considered a forefather of performance art and a source of inspiration for Kantor, also challenged established aesthetics. Artaud’s most famous work, The Theatre and Its Double, was published in 1930. In it, Artaud opposed the vitality of the viewer's sensual experience against theatre as a contrived literary form. We thus see that the literary genre, the one with which he began, later became a point of reference that he sought to free the theatre from. Artaud juxtaposed urgency of expression against self-satisfaction on the part of the audience.
Artaud attacked what he believed was the elitism of an irrelevant, outdated literary canon of the theatre. In 1935, he inaugurated his Theatre of Cruelty with the staging of his own Les Cenci.
The Theatre of Cruelty aimed to toss the viewer into the centre of the action, forcing them to engage with the performance on an instinctive level. For Artaud, this was a cruel, yet necessary act upon the spectator, designed to shock them out of their complacency.
Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life.
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Artaud considered formal theatres with their proscenium arches and playwrights with their scripts "a hindrance to the magic of genuine ritual." While Kantor did not manifestly allude to any ritualistic or religious aspirations in his work, he was just as an overt attacker of formality within art. His solutions were at times somewhat shocking, and at other times humorous – such as when he mocked the market value of art and the position of the artist through his happening actions.
In order to read on about a particular work, in which Kantor fetishised the object-letter, click here: The Letter. Tadeusz Kantor
While the means that Artaud resorted to were probably somehow more radical than those of Kantor, there was also – more importantly – the goal that he pursued within the said cruelty. At one point, Artaud stated that by cruelty he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality.
According to the author Jamieson, Artaud's second use of the term Theatre of Cruelty, is as a form of discipline. Although Artaud wanted to "reject form and incite chaos", he also promoted strict discipline and rigor in his performance techniques. This is surely not unlike Kantor, who is known for almost obsessively detailed planning of every single element of his productions, as well as the repetitive rehearsing that would not cease until the desired effect was achieved. And, according to the author, the third use of Artaud's term was ‘cruelty as theatrical presentation’.
The unusual formula of Kantor's Theatre of Death – which was not without echoes of the Theatre of Cruelty – consisted in creating artistic illustration for mechanisms of memory. Sequences of unreal pictures, snatches of memories, obtrusively returning scenes, and absurdity. Kantor's path of research is thus not without parallels to also the third proposed definition of cruelty in Artaud.
To Artaud, the imagination was reality itself. He considered dreams, thoughts and delusions to be no less real than the outside world. Reality appeared to be a consensus – and to him, it was the same one that the audience adopts upon seeing a play.
Artaud and Kantor dealt with representation not by opposing it but by providing strategies from within to articulate the practices that alter the mode of functioning of representation. Artaud’s space of representation that no external authority or hierarchy can appropriate. He saw suffering as essential to existence, and thus rejected all utopias as inevitable dystopia. He denounced the degradation of civilization, yearned for cosmic purification, and called for an ecstatic loss of the self.
In the 1975 manifesto for the Theatre of Death, Kantor declared:
"It all began a long time ago, long before the performance in question here. In my imagination, and perhaps also within my nature, the image of the end was planted very clearly, of the end of life, of death, of the catastrophe, of the end of the world. Not without reason!”.
Kantor’s strategy of making art also problematized the postulate of reality. He continually transgressed boundaries separating illusion and reality.
The first of Kantor's happenings, the Cricotage took place in 1965. It rendered fourteen simple everyday activities – such as eating, shaving, and sitting – completely absurd, as it deprived them of their practical functions. In this work, Kantor placed the act of performing in the centre of his attention.
Cricot 2's very first première was the staging of Witkacy’s Mątwa / The Cuttlefish. In it, Kantor juxtaposed a sublime rhetoric against a host of found objects and the trivial environment of a café. This production included elements that would later become typical of his style. There were sets that suggest silent film, and actors moving like mannequins – thus making themselves into "objects”. Cricot 2's second production Cyrk / Circus used the emballage technique, also typical of Kantor's work at the time. With black bags wrapped tightly around the actors and objects, the packaging was designed to strip them of any recognisable form. They were thus turned into indistinguishable substance.
Both the examples serve to pinpoint what was Kantor’s obsession with the trivial, litter-like object, which he elevated to the dignity of art.
This is what the artist stated about chairs in his text The Chair and Its History / Krzesło i jego historia:
It is low in the hierarchy of objects. It is ill-treated. Its relationships are shamefully passed over in silence, it is a thing definitely not capable of performing a responsible function.
In 1968, Kantor created a mosaic emballage of a chair. In February 1970, he submitted his first impossible architecture design, an eight-metre-high folding chair made of concrete, to the Wrocław 70 artistic symposium. The sculpture entitled Chair was raised in Wrocław in 2011.
To find out more about Kantor, see also: