Lot and His Daughters, Lucas van Leyden
According to Antonin Artaud, what is accomplished in this painting is what theater should be. It
has nothing to do with the literary aspect of the tale, Artaud is not
interested in literature or dialogue or plot as we would know it when it
comes to the theater. He does admit that Lot is pictured here as almost
living off his daughters as a kind
of pimp, which he seems to delight in for its profound sexuality and
for its position as almost the only social element in the entire
painting. All of the other elements are metaphysical, he describes them
as a kind of visual poetic language whose function is the manifestation
of certain inner states such as becoming and fatality, chaos,
equilibrium and the miraculous, "impotences of speech", etc. (See the chapter "Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène" in "The Theater and its Double" by Antonin Artaud.)
It is less
about attempting a complete understanding, because complete known
understandings are dead frozen subject matter for the theater and for
poetry and art, we need something more volatile. But that is not to say
excluding completeness that is the result of a sign or sound that
encompasses a universe, such as a man’s voice with a burning quality
that produces tears or shivers or the experience of the sun just before
dusk clawed by streaks of clouds.
