ArtaudMania
ArtaudMania is a zine by Johanna Fateman.
Released in 1996, Artaudmania centers itself around the life and work of writer, artist, poet, theatre director and actor Antonin Artaud. Fateman employs the use of the diary format to examine his legacy and the response to that legacy during a number of Artaud related events in New York. She records her impressions of speakers at a conference on Artaud such as Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Vincent Kaufman and Nancy Spiro; of an article in the Village Voice on Artaud; and an exhibition of his drawings which she attends with her grandparents; all the while interweaving aspects of popular culture, such as Dan Savage, Madonna, and the film The Craft, into her narrative.
One of the highlights of the zine is the recounting of a tense, explosive exchange with her art teacher Donald Kuspit. His review of Artaud's exhibition, which appeared in Art Forum magazine, concludes the story.
The zine includes a number of Fateman's drawings, and is both handwritten and typed, including mistakes and revisions, so that the zine itself functions as a work of art.
Fateman writes in the introduction to ArtaudMania, " It's a formal experiment: the application of a fanzine aesthetic to a subject outside the usual jurisdiction of my genre".