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Surrealist automatism is a method of art-making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have great sway. This drawing technique was popularized in the early 1920s, byAndré Masson andHans Arp.
Automatism has taken on many forms: the automatic writing anddrawing initially (and still to this day) explored by the surrealists can be compared to similar or parallel phenomena, such as the non-idiomatic improvisation."Psychic automatism in its pure state" was how André Breton defined Surrealism, and while the definition has proved capable of expansion, automatism remains of prime importance in the movement.[1]
Early 20th-centuryDadaists, such asHans Arp, made some use of this method through chance operations.Surrealist artists, most notablyAndré Masson, adapted to art theautomatic writing method ofAndré Breton andPhilippe Soupault who composed with itLes Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) in 1919.[2]The Automatic Message (1933) was one of Breton's significant theoretical works about automatism. However, tradition has theIsrael Salanter, who died in 1883, practiced automatic drawing by allowing his pen to scribble while giving lectures as means for insight into his subconscious[penimiut].
Automatic drawing (distinguished fromdrawn expression of mediums) is an artistic technique developed bysurrealists in which the hand is allowed to move randomly across the paper. In applyingchance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed ofrational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of thepsyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts. It was thought by someSpiritualists to be a spirit control that was producing the drawing while physically taking control of the medium's body.
Automatic drawing was first written about by the English artistAustin Osman Spare who wrote a chapter, Automatic Drawing as a Means to Art, in his book,The Book of Pleasure (1913). Other artists who also practised automatic drawing wereHilma af Klint,André Masson,Joan Miró,Salvador Dalí,Jean Arp,André Breton andFreddy Flores Knistoff.[citation needed]
The technique of automatic drawing was transferred topainting (as seen in Miró's paintings which often started out as automatic drawings), and has been adapted to other media; there have even been automatic "drawings" in computer graphics.Pablo Picasso was also thought to have expressed a type of automatic drawing in his later work, and particularly in his etchings and lithographic suites of the 1960s.
Most of the surrealists' automatic drawings wereillusionistic, or more precisely, they developed into such drawings when representational forms seemed to suggest themselves. In the 1940s and 1950s theFrench Canadian group calledLes Automatistes pursued creative work (chieflypainting) based on surrealist principles. They abandoned any trace ofrepresentation in their use of automatic drawing. This is perhaps a more pure form of automatic drawing since it can be almost entirely involuntary – to develop a representational form requires theconscious mind to take over the process of drawing, unless it is entirelyaccidental and thus incidental. These artists, led byPaul-Émile Borduas, sought to proclaim an entity ofuniversal values and ethics proclaimed in their manifestoRefus Global.
As alluded to above, surrealist artists often found that their use of "automatic drawing" was not entirely automatic; rather, it involved some form of conscious intervention to make the image or painting visually acceptable or comprehensible, "...Masson admitted that his 'automatic' imagery involved a two-fold process of unconscious and conscious activity...."[3]
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Some Romanian surrealists invented a number ofsurrealist techniques (such ascubomania,entoptic graphomania, and the movement of liquid down a vertical surface) that purported to take automatism to an absurd point, and the name given, "surautomatism", implies that the methods "go beyond" automatism, but this position is controversial.
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The notion of automatism is also rooted in the artistic movement of the same name founded by Montreal artistPaul-Émile Borduas in 1942; himself influenced by theDadaist movement as well as André Breton. He, as well as a dozen other artists from Quebec's artistic scene, very much under restrictive and authoritarian rule in that period, signed theGlobal Refusal manifesto, in which the artists called upon North American society (specifically in the culturally unique environment ofQuebec), to take notice and act upon the societal evolution projected by these new culturalparadigms opened by the Automatist movement as well as other influences in the 1940s.
Thecomputer, like thetypewriter, can be used to produceautomatic writing andautomatic poetry. The practice of automatic drawing, originally performed with pencil or pen and paper, has also been adapted tomouse andmonitor, and other automatic methods have also been either adapted from non-digital media, or invented specifically for the computer. For instance, filters have been automatically run in some bitmap editor programs such asPhotoshop andGIMP, and computer-controlled brushes have been used byRoman Verostko to simulate automatism.[4]Grandview — a software application created in 2011 for the Mac — displays one word at a time across the entire screen as a user types, facilitating automatic writing.[5]
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