AUTOMATISM

in spiritualism, the spontaneous performance of certain physical acts without the conscious control of the agent. In automatism a message is purportedly conveyed, usually through a spiritualist medium speaking in a trance during a sance (French: sitting), through automatic writing or through a joint experiment involving several persons (e.g., using a Ouija board). Though the message may appear to come from the spirit world, spiritualists concede that automatism may be the result of subliminal thoughts or feelings that are released and given free expression in certain favourable situations. See also automatic writing; medium; Ouija board; sance. technique used by Surrealist painters and poets (see Surrealism) since 1924 to express the creative force of the unconscious in art. In the 1920s the Surrealist poets Andr Breton, Paul luard, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault tried writing in a hypnotic or trancelike state, recording their train of mental associations without censorship or attempts at formal exposition. These poets were influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory and believed that the symbols and images thus produced, though appearing strange or incongruous to the conscious mind, actually constituted a record of man's unconscious psychic forces and hence possessed an innate artistic significance. Little of lasting value remains from the Surrealists' attempts at automatic writing, however. Automatism was a far more productive vehicle for the Surrealist painters. Andr Masson, Arshile Gorky, and Max Ernst (qq.v.), in particular, experimented with fantastic or erotic images spontaneously recorded, in a kind of visual free association, without the artist's conscious censorship; the images were either left as originally conceived or consciously elaborated upon by the artist. Related to automatic drawing are the techniques devised by Ernst to involve chance in the creation of a picture. Among them were frottage, rubbing canvas or paper, placed over different materials such as wood, with graphite to make an impression of the grain; grattage, scratching the painted surface of the canvas with pointed tools to make it more tactile; and decalcomania, pressing liquid paint between two canvases and then pulling the canvases apart to produce ridges and bubbles of pigment. The chance forms created by these techniques were then allowed to stand as incomplete, suggestive images or were completed by the artist according to his instinctive response to them. Between 1946 and 1951 a group of Canadian paintersincluding Paul-mile Borduas, Albert Dumouchel, Jean Paul Mousseau, and Jean-Paul Riopellewas known as Les Automatistes and practiced automatism. From about 1950 a group of American artists called Action painters (see Action painting) adopted automatic methods, some under the direct influence of Masson, Gorky, and Ernst, all of whom had moved to the United States to escape World War II. Seeking abstract pictorial equivalents for states of mind, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, and Bradley Walker Tomlin variously experimented with chance drippings of paint on the canvas and free, spontaneous brushstrokes. This approach was seen as a means of stripping away artifice and unlocking basic creative instincts deep within the artist's personality. Automatism has since become a part of the technical repertoire of modern painting, though its prominence declined with that of Action painting itself.