Van Gogh

Auvers (Red Study), 2012
Emulsion paint on canvas
Study of the church at Auvers-sur-Oise
Series: Auvers

In the face of this unanimous swinishness, which rests
on sex on the one hand and the Mass or similar
psychic rites on the other as its basis or mainstay,
there is nothing mad about walking out at night
with twelve candles attached to one’s hat
to paint a landscape directly from the subject;

for how else could poor van Gogh have lit his surroundings?
As our friend, the actor Roger Blin,
so aptly remarked the other day.

As for the burnt hand, that is pure and simple heroism,

as for the severed ear, that is direct logic,

and I repeat:

a world that, day and night, increasingly devours
the inedible

in order to impose its malevolent will,

has, on this matter,

only to shut its trap.

The passage is from:

Antonin Artaud: Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
(Original title: Van Gogh, le suicidé de la société, 1947)

Artaud wrote this essay on the occasion of a Van Gogh exhibition in Paris. It is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most radical defences of an artist. Artaud challenges the psychiatric pathologisation of Van Gogh and reverses the perspective: it was not Van Gogh who was ill, but the society that could not bear him.