automatism

automatism. Method of producing paintings or drawings (or writing or other work) in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the movements of the hand, allowing the unconscious mind to take over; more broadly, the term can be applied to working procedures that embrace chance, improvisation, and free association. Automatism is mainly a modern phenomenon, but it has various precedents, most notably the ‘blot drawings’ of Alexander Cozens, who stimulated his imagination by using accidental blots on the paper to suggest landscape forms. Cozens remarks that Leonardo da Vinci had proposed a similar method and quotes him as saying: ‘If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, &c. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.’ Slightly before Leonardo, Leon Battista Alberti (in his treatise De statua, c.1460) gives an imaginative account of the origins of sculpture, describing ancient peoples observing ‘in tree trunks, clumps of earth, or other objects of this sort, certain outlines which through some slight changes could be made to resemble a natural shape’. Alberti's version of events may be not far from the truth, for scholars of prehistoric art have found examples of such spontaneous discovery of representational images in chance natural formations of cave walls.

In its fully developed form, however, automatism did not appear until the 20th century. The Dadaists made some use of the idea, but they were more interested in chance effects than in automatism as such, and it was the Surrealists who first made automatism an important part of their creative outlook; whereas the Dadaists used the idea dispassionately, to the Surrealists exploration of the unconscious through such methods was deeply personal. They devised various means to facilitate automatism (see decalcomania and frottage, for example) and some of them regarded the use of dream imagery (as in the work of Dalí) as a kind of psychological—as opposed to mechanical—automatism. The Surrealist interest in automatism had a strong influence on the Abstract Expressionists, some of whom took their ideas further. With Surrealists, once an image had been formed by automatic or chance means, it was often exploited deliberately with fully conscious purpose, but with Action Painters such as Jackson Pollock, automatism in principal permeated the whole creative process.

Other types of automatism are those in which the artist works under the influence of drugs or by alleged occult means. The offbeat British painter Austin Spare (1886–1956) claimed to be able to conjure up horrific survivals of man's pre-human ancestry from deep within his mind, but more usually the artist is said to work under the inspiration of a beneficent spirit guide (a notion not necessarily to be taken lightly, as no less an artist than William Blake claimed to have direct inspiration from his dead brother). Unlike Blake, most psychic artists of this kind have no particular artistic gifts or inclinations in their ‘normal’ life.