Elements of Transmission

 

In automatic drawing graphical lines represent transient trace elements of transmission along neural pathways.

In his text The Automatic Message (1933), Andre Breton explained Surrealism's role in the 'determinaton of the precise constitution of the subliminal' but he also acknowledged that the conditions which validate an 'automatic' text or drawing are insufficiently known. Previously (1916) Austin Spare had defined automatism as an 'organic impulse' produced when the mind is in a 'state of oblivion'. By this means, he said, 'senasation may be visualised'. Just as Surrealists argue that Freudian theory helps to disentangle automatism 'from the sphere of spiritualist mystification' (Rosemont) it may be possible, as an extension of this approach, to suggest that automatist spontaneity is a manifestation of a little-recognized principle of self-activation, or self-determination, that is an essential property of reality.

Illustration: Lucifer Rising, 2006

Medium Of Doubt

 

Collage, an ambiguous, complex medium of doubt, to quote Werner Spies, is an aesthetic of radical juxtaposition. In his personal treatise Beyond Painting (1947), Max Ernst, with reference to both Rimbaud, and the famous 'chance encounter' from Book 6 of Les Chants de Maldoror, defined collage as an 'alchemy of the image...' . However,the photomontage style of collage finds its origins in the work of the Berlin Dada Movement who in turn were inspired by the inadvertent imagery generated by early cinema special effects and the composite images of 'trick photography'. The term photomontage was invented by the Berlin 'monteurs', Raoul Hasmann and Hanna Hoch.

From the Freudian perspective it may be that collage exemplifies one of the two 'laws' governing the behaviour of unconscious processes or phenomena (such as dreams): the law of Condensation, or Compression, as it is also called. (The second 'law' is the law of Displacement.) Freud explained Condensation as the 'inclination to create new unities out of elements that we would certainly have kept separate in waking thought...' In 'The Enormous Face' section of his novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), J G Ballard refers to the 'planes of intersection' operative on 'a third level, the inner world of the psyche' where, as on other levels, such 'planes' interlock at oblique angles and where one finds 'fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies...'

Elsewhere is the same book Ballard asserts that images are born at the intersection of such planes, when 'some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.'

Illustration: Psychic Citadel, 2002