Antonin Artaud: Noah's ark outside time

Antonin Artaud - painter, poet, cineast, and philosopher - was one of the greatest innovators of all time. However, he was also badly mishandled by the psychiatric establishment. Looking like a young god, he was institutionalized in 1937 and abused by electric shocks. By 1947, he looked like an old man - toothless, shriveled, dilapidated, and demented. He committed suicide like his idol van Gogh, who had undergone a similar ordeal. In considering the case of Artaud, this article claims that deviance mates with genius but that too much deviance or too much genius is likely to encounter the savage stigma of society.