Tessel M. Bauduin
t.bauduin@let.ru.nl
2015
Abstract
In the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism surrealist leader André Breton (1896-1966) defined Surrealism
as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state,’ positioning ‘psychic automatism’ as both a concept and a
technique. This definition followed upon an intense period of experimentation with various forms of
automatism among the proto-surrealist group; predominantly automatic writing, but also induced
dream states. This article explores how surrealist ‘psychic automatism’ functioned as a mechanism
for communication, or the expression of thought as directly as possible through the unconscious, in
the first two decades of Surrealism. It touches upon automatic writing, hysteria as an automatic bodily
performance of the unconscious, dreaming and the experimentation with induced dream states, and
automatic drawing and other visual arts-techniques that could be executed more or less automatically
as well. For all that the surrealists reinvented automatism for their own poetic, artistic and
revolutionary aims, the automatic techniques were primarily drawn from contemporary Spiritualism,
psychical research and experimentation with mediums, and the article teases out the connections to
mediumistic automatism. It is demonstrated how the surrealists effectively and successfully divested
automatism of all things spiritual. It furthermore becomes clear that despite various mishaps,
automatism in many forms was a very successful creative technique within Surrealism.
Exquisite Corpses: Representations olectivf Violence in the Cole Surrealiist Unconscous
Megan C. McShane is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Emory University.
This paper will address the collective method for producing drawings and collages employed by the Surrealists, known as the cadavre exquis or exquisite corpse. In 1925 the Surrealists began playing the exquisite corpse game using words to produce fantastic sentences. The game was quickly adapted to produce strange and unexpected figural images. Playing the game entailed passing a sheet of paper among participants while folding the paper in order to conceal the previous person's response. Each person would contribute a part of the sentence or,if drawing, a partial image of a body. In the linguistic method, the players followed the approximate syntactical sequence of subject, verb, and predicate. In the visual method, the image of a body was substituted for the sentence. Andre Breton cites the elemental segments to be supplied by each person: "subject,verb, or predicate adjective—head, belly, or legs" {hkmifestos1 79). The first sentence produced provided the unusual name for the game: "The exquisite / corpse / will drink / the young / wine" [Le-cadavre-exquis-boira-le-vin-nouveau]
Megan C. McShane is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Emory University.
This paper will address the collective method for producing drawings and collages employed by the Surrealists, known as the cadavre exquis or exquisite corpse. In 1925 the Surrealists began playing the exquisite corpse game using words to produce fantastic sentences. The game was quickly adapted to produce strange and unexpected figural images. Playing the game entailed passing a sheet of paper among participants while folding the paper in order to conceal the previous person's response. Each person would contribute a part of the sentence or,if drawing, a partial image of a body. In the linguistic method, the players followed the approximate syntactical sequence of subject, verb, and predicate. In the visual method, the image of a body was substituted for the sentence. Andre Breton cites the elemental segments to be supplied by each person: "subject,verb, or predicate adjective—head, belly, or legs" {hkmifestos1 79). The first sentence produced provided the unusual name for the game: "The exquisite / corpse / will drink / the young / wine" [Le-cadavre-exquis-boira-le-vin-nouveau]
No comments:
Post a Comment