Artaud-Mania: the Diary of a Fan (1997) is a zine made by Johanna Fateman during her final year as an undergraduate at the School of Visual Art in New York City. Using a conceptual-confessional form and a punk, cut-and-paste appropriationist style, she examines the cultural positions of the fan, the student, the critic, and the artist—particularly, the French artist and dramaturgist Antonin Artaud (1896 - 1948). Fateman records her impressions of the 1996-97 MoMA exhibition Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper and reports on a series of related events at the Drawing Center, which featured an astonishing group of speakers and panelists (Richard Hell, Jacques Derrida, Sylvère Lotinger, Susan Sontag, Nancy Spero, and Gayatri Spivak among them). A conflict with a professor of Fateman’s, the critic Donald Kuspit, becomes central to the story.

Completed and produced initially at a Lower East Side Kinko’s, the zine circulated informally among Fateman’s fellow students and via underground feminist-punk networks. Its inclusion in the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library & Special Collections at NYU in 2010 drew attention to the long out-of-print zine, which has been excerpted, exhibited, and written about in various contexts in the intervening years. The twenty-sixth-anniversary edition of Artaud-Mania: the Diary of a Fan is an authorized reproduction of the original version. Fateman’s new forward, Notes on Artaud-Mania, is presented as a separate, companion booklet. Each set is signed and numbered.

Johanna Fateman is a writer and critic in New York City. She reviews art regularly for 4Columns, and wrote for the “Goings on about Town” art section of The New Yorker from 2016 to 2023. She is a former contributing editor for Artforum. Her band Le Tigre, active 1998-2005, reunited to tour in 2023.