Industrial music’s parading of staged authority relationships is theatrical by nature, but its relationship and its debt to theater as an art runs deeper than merely acting out spectacle and the détournement of twentieth-century governments. The name most useful here is Antonin Artaud, who has already popped up a handful of times in this book. Artaud was a French actor, artist, and writer who grew frustrated with theater that “limits itself to showing us intimate scenes from the lives of a few puppets, transforming the public into Peeping Toms.”1 In his 1932 essay “The Theater and Cruelty,” he proclaims, “In the anguished, catastrophic period we live in, we feel an urgent need for a theater which events do not exceed, whose resonance is deep within us, dominating the instability of the times.”2
What Artaud offers us in “The Theater and Cruelty” is a way to bring together a variety of industrial music practices that might otherwise seem disconnected, and to see them in service of a common goal that’s consonant with the political self-proclamations of industrial musicians, fans, and critics. In this way, the focus here isn’t so much on Artaud’s influence on industrial music (though it certainly exists, as we’ll see) but more on the usefulness of his ideas in making sense of industrial performance.
A handful of industrial musicians are aware of Artaud’s ideas and acknowledge their importance: Mark Spybey of Zoviet France cites him,3 and in 1984 Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten said, “I can’t say any author has an influence, well, apart from Antonin Artaud.”4 But more often, the understanding is a superficial one, kind of like the genre’s relationship to avant-garde music; for example, Angus Farquhar of Test Dept. says, “I like the imagery with which he wrote. But we’re not intellectuals.”5 That said, Artaud’s 1932 first manifesto serves as a prescient blueprint for industrial performance, particularly in its celebration of the abject and its distaste for camp.
The first part of this book privileged Futurism and Burroughs because they both help to paint the world that industrial music sees as its inheritance; Artaud helps us to see how the genre communicates this worldview to others. Futurism avails new artistic frameworks through technology, culminating (for the genre’s purposes) with Russolo’s technophilic noise-as-music, and the techno-paranoid Burroughs provides the cut-up logic as a means to disrupt the all-surrounding, invisible control machines; for his part, Artaud empowers an aesthetic means of shock, calls on the grotesquery of the gothic, demands the bodily, and implements this all in a political framework.* For these reasons, and also because his work has remained underappreciated in previous assessments of industrial music, Artaud is worth quoting here at some length.
For art to exceed the unrest of political reality, Artaud writes, theater needs to reassert and make public “the internal world, that is, of man considered metaphysically,” in hopes of reawakening such a world within audiences.7 By focusing on what audiences keep internal but don’t recognize themselves, Artaud calls on everything a person dares not admit to thinking or secretly enjoying: “the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism.”8 Industrial music follows a near one-to-one correlation in its exorcizing these themes, from an obsession with the dreamlike (as in Mind.In.A.Box’s Dreamweb album or the music of Oneiroid Psychosis), its fascination with the celebration of serial killers (such as Whitehouse’s album Dedicated to Peter Kürten or Suicide Commando’s “Bind, Torture, Kill”), a pervasive theme of sexual fetish (nearly every song ever by Die Form), to yes, even cannibalism (think here of Ministry’s “Cannibal Song,” Wumpscut’s Cannibal Anthem album, and Nox’s “Cannibal Night”).
Simply using words to achieve this reawakening isn’t enough, because to Artaud verbal descriptions of our inner experience verge on academic psychology, lacking real punch; indeed, he advocates that performers give words “approximately the importance they have in dreams.”9 A good example of this is Z’EV’s early 1980s Uns project, which explores directionless, crazed ranting.
Rather than focus on semantic clarity, the Theater of Cruelty’s tools are instead “Cries, groans, apparitions, surprises, theatricalities of all kinds, magic beauty of costumes taken from certain ritual models; resplendent lighting … concrete appearances of new and surprising objects, masks, effigies yards high. …”10 The screams, ghostliness, and elaborate costumes and props that Artaud describes here call to mind Skinny Puppy’s live performances in which lead singer Ogre, cackling a gothic cut-up text, dons long-beaked plague masks or vivisects a distressingly realistic stuffed animal. It might just as well apply to the infamous 1981 Survival Research Laboratories/Monte Cazazza/Factrix performance Night of the Succubus, for which Mark Pauline constructed a multicarcass mechanized chimera, whose teeth Joseph Jacobs drilled out onstage, all to a flashy lightshow and a soundtrack of echo-drenched madness.
As for the nonstandard venues favored by the likes of Survival Research Laboratories, SPK, Test Dept., and Einstürzende Neubauten, Artaud’s got them covered too: “Thus, abandoning the architecture of present-day theaters, we shall take some hangar or barn, which we shall have re-constructed according to processes which have culminated in the architecture of certain churches or holy places.”11 The desire here is to erase the division of performer from audience that traditional theaters encode in their very being.
Artaud is similarly instructive with regard to sound itself, overlapping with Russolo in a desire for new sound, but expressly seeking to pain the audience:
The need to act directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through the organs invites research, from the point of view of sound, into qualities and vibrations of absolutely new sounds, qualities which present-day musical instruments do not possess and which require the revival of ancient and forgotten instruments or the invention of new ones. Research is also required, apart from music, into instruments and appliances which, based upon special combinations or new alloys of metal, can attain a new range and compass, producing sounds or noises that are unbearably piercing.12
Not only does the inventive percussion of Z’EV, Test Dept., and Einstürzende Neubauten apply here, but so too does the work of Monte Cazazza and Throbbing Gristle. Cazazza relates the story of driving away gypsies from the backyard of Genesis P-Orridge by blaring “this sound-wave generator which produced high frequency sounds almost (but not quite) above the range of human hearing … they made you really nervous.” Echoing Artaud by fifty years, he goes on, “Infrasound can be used to make people really sick … what’s needed is a thorough, scientific study.”13 Indeed, some industrial bands such as the Hafler Trio and the Anti-Group Company explicitly present their recordings as acoustic research, rather than art.
Artaud frames much of his manifesto with the desire to restore the power of theater so that it might forcibly pull viewers out of themselves by denying the decorum that differentiates private thought and behavior from public, by silencing the language that reduces inner experience to mere words, by alienating these audiences through summoning the otherworldly, and by upsetting their physical comfort with sound’s tactility. This invasiveness, despite ecstasy as a possible goal, is the cruelty in Artaud’s theater. He points out the numbness of common audiences when he writes, “Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”14
These precise strategies are also the tools of most of the early industrial music discussed so far. In seeking to shock listeners out of themselves, industrial music often attempts to expose the needless, arbitrary, and complacent trappings out of which those audiences are being shocked, treating people to a view of hegemony from the outside in. Artaud helps us to articulate the aim of so much industrial music to birth the audiences into their new selves, replete with both the freedom and the agony of maternal separation. (Its efforts to do this can be earnest or a put-on; the social and aesthetic aspects of the genre give it an overwhelming tendency to preach to the converted, as we’ll discuss later.) This notion is perhaps made most famously visible in the ultra-industrial cyberpunk blockbuster The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves’s character Neo chooses to be shocked out of his comfortable reality and reborn naked into a constant warzone against machines. Industrially enacted by acts like Wumpscut, Unit 187, Pain Teens, and Rotersand, this metaphor of rebirth was staged explicitly by Artaud—albeit with scorpions and Swiss cheese—in his 1925 Oedipal nightmare Jet of Blood.
To lovers of surrealism, to the dedicatedly paranoid, and to many self-declared freethinkers, Antonin Artaud is a symbolic figure not merely for his writing and theater but for what they perceive to be a self-sacrificing commitment to the pan-revolutionary. After a series of drug experiences, hallucinations, and run-ins with the law, Artaud was placed in an asylum. Late in his life, he received electroshock therapy, and was effectively silenced.
In the upcoming chapter about the Canadian industrial act Skinny Puppy, the legacy of Artaud looms large. Importantly, the shock, disgust, and unreason that he embraces also take on a gendered duty—hardly surprising in light of Artaud’s fascination with birth and chastity, and given the important critiques of his work by feminist thinkers Susan Sontag and Julia Kristeva. Through a peculiar logic, these aesthetics of cruelty historically served in part to unlock industrial music to wider audiences.