Surrealist automatism

Surrealist automatism is a practice of making art or writing through spontaneous procedures intended to reduce conscious control and access unconscious thought.

Automatic writing: Writing produced through spontaneous association with little deliberate planning or revision. It applies automatist procedure directly to language, often without stopping to correct or organize.
Surrealism: An artistic and literary movement that sought to join dream, unconscious thought, and waking experience. Automatism became one of the movement’s signature creative methods.
Joan Miró: A Catalan painter and sculptor whose work developed an abstract, biomorphic visual language. Miró used spontaneous marks and forms as starting points for paintings.
Rationalism: The view that reason is a primary source of knowledge and a guide to justified belief. Automatism deliberately unsettles the rational control that Surrealists associated with conventional expression.
Exquisite corpse: A collaborative game in which participants add words or images without seeing the full work in progress. Its concealed contributions interrupt individual control and produce unexpected combinations.
André Breton: A French writer and poet who founded Surrealism and articulated its theories. Breton defined Surrealism through psychic automatism in his 1924 manifesto.
André Masson: A French painter associated with Surrealism, known for gestural drawing and sand paintings. His automatic drawings let lines accumulate before recognizable imagery emerged.
Academic art: Art produced within formal institutions and traditions emphasizing established techniques, subjects, and standards. Automatist practice rejected the polished conventions that academic training often reinforced.
Psychic automatism: A mode of expression intended to record thought without the guiding control of reason or aesthetic convention. André Breton used this phrase to define the underlying aim of Surrealist automatism.
The Magnetic Fields: A 1920 book by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, composed through experiments in automatic writing. This early work put automatist writing into practice and helped establish the method.

Linked from 22 pages