Automatism in Surrealist Art

Well, Surrealsim stemmed off of the non-sense that was the Dada Movement. It bagan in the 1920's, started out in Paris and spread all over. Some belived it to be a revoltionary movement with it's peivces being more of artifacts than just art. They also did a lot of writng, which is what I want to focus on in this post as well as Automatism. Automatism is one of the main reasons why I chose to focus on surrealism for my project. 

Defined by dictionary, this is what automatism is. I wanna bring emphasis to the moving/functioning without conscious control. Also an artist named Andre Breton defined surrealism as "Pure psychic automatism", while this definition has been expanded, automatism is of great importance to the movement.


The first practices of automatism was automatic writing. The first surrealism magazines published were full of it. Automatic writing is also known as psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconsciousness, or external or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the context or meaning.


With that being said, what ever the writer does write or create doesn't have to really be understood, sort of like a psycho-babble sort of thing. It really in a sense doesn't have to be in the English langauge or any language at that. It can go as far as alien letters or hieroglyph looking symbols.

Here is a piece of automatic writing produced by Helene Smith, interesting this is that she doesn't even take full credit for the piece considering she was simply a medium. Also the caption reads something about begin the first martian text written by Mlle. Smith according to a visual hallucination.

























Sample of "Martian" automatic writing by medium Hélène Smith, as found in Théodore Flouroy's From India to the Planet Mars. Cropped from fig. 21 of digital version at sacred-texts.com. Its caption reads:

"Fig. 21. Text No. 16 ; Seance of August 22, 1897. — First Martian text written by Mlle. Smith (according to a visual hallucination). Natural size. [Collection of M. Lemaître] — Herewith its French notation.

astane
esenale
pouze
mene simand
ini.
mira."