2. Films
The film program was presented on Thursday evening at The Third Eye Cinema in Surrey Hills. Albie Thoms introduced his 1965 version of The Spurt of Blood, one of Artaud's more famous theatre pieces. Actors performed in masks while the soundtrack crackled the text. Thoms regaled the audience with stories of early 60s performance works when one could be banned, attract a police audience and be arrested for being naked or using the word 'shit'.

La Coquille et le Clergyman, directed by Germaine Dulac in 1928, showed the way that surrealism took up Artaud's work and subsumed it into subconscious, dream-like imagery. Artaud was expelled from the surrealist group because it aligned itself with the communist revolution and he would not. (Artaud thought that the only true revolution was one which would change inner suffering.) His work also rebelled against the idea of the subconscious. Artaud wanted to be in a state of hyperconsciousness - a state so razor sharp with the perception of the real and the action of the will that it was called the 'Theatre of Cruelty'.

Voyage To Rodez, directed by Chris Kraus in 1986, took us on a Baudrillard-type journey back to the asylum in Rodez where Artaud was incarcerated at the end of WW2 in horrific conditions.

En compagnie d'Antonin Artaud, directed by Gerard Mordillat in 1993, was a glossy B/W film that strangely followed the lesser character of Artaud's drug dealer in Paris. The work provided a sense of the bleakness which those continually observing and on the periphery of genius and madness without producing the fruits of either must feel.

3. The demigod
On Friday night the keynote address was given by Jacques Derrida via satellite from Paris. Hundreds of people came to the Clancy Auditorium at the University of NSW to hear this. Derrida appeared like a great disembodied ghost hovering in the auditorium on three separate video screens. (The double and its shadow did not, however, replace the hero.) Introduced by Alan Cholodenko, Derrida gave part of a talk that was to be presented in October at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the opening of an exhibition of Artaud's drawings.

The event was very strange. I was in Sydney watching a giant video of a man in Paris give a talk to a future audience in New York. Unfortunately, the evening was disappointing for me (and no doubt for the many who left) because the sound was very poor. I heard one in every five to seven words. The most I could glean was that Derrida questioned the nature of a museum's role in presenting the work of an artist like Artaud. Word play on M.o M. A. and Momma took place.

4. 'Music...eyelash flutter...sexuality...ruins of Picasso's paintings...a Chagall I shall always hearÿIn my drawings there is a kind of moral music...'
Prior to Derrida's appearance, Samuel Webber, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, gave a rigorous and generous keynote address titled 'Theatre of the Virtual: Gesture, Gesticulation'. The address compared the ideas of classical tragedy and drama which Aristotle proposed to the blossoming of theatrical form artists such as Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud produced. Artaud criticised a theatre where the anthropomorphism of man was at the centre of all things. The Theatre of Cruelty was connected to the inhuman and could not be measured by notions of self-consciousness, freedom and autonomy. It sought to devolve man from the centre of the universe. Artaud's theatre questioned the unity of time and space. Plot, character and ideas were marginalised to the virtual. 'The inverse moment of the actual.' One exists not on a plot line but in a problematic field of existential action.

One of the conference's highlights was Webber's elaborate description of the stages of the plague and his insight that the fourth stage of the plague, the moment when the final surviving dregs of the population come to loot the open houses of the plague victims, is when the Theatre of Cruelty takes place.

5. The conference
The conference took place over two days. It was a scholarly affair with the hard core of post-modernist Sydney and a smattering of dramatic artists in attendance. I was not assiduous in attending - the sun lured me away. The conference aimed to 'explore the remnants, resonances and traces of Artaud...' and to this end many of the speakers referred to Artaud's effect on others such as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Others took their preferred theorist and resolved some Artaudian problems through these philosophies.

For me, this conference on perhaps the most radical artist of this century provided a sense of intellectual mystery and the exquisiteness of Artaud's practice.