Melissa Ranahan

Melissa Ranahan

Project 1 – Surrealism Techniques & Concepts

The surrealist movement has been a fractious one since its inception. The value and role of the various techniques described here has been one of many subjects of disagreement. Some surrealists consider automatism and surrealist games to be sources of inspiration only. Others consider them as starting points for finished works. Some consider the items created through automatism to be finished works themselves, needing no further refinement.

Surrealist automatism is to be distinguished from mediumistic automatism, by which it was inspired: ghosts, spirits or the like are not purported to be the source of its automatic messages."Pure psychic automatism" was how André Breton, surrealism's founder, defined surrealism, and while the definition has proved capable of significant expansion, automatism remains of prime importance in the movement.

In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques. "The Automatic Message" was one of Breton's most significant theoretical works about automatism. Some Romanian surrealists invented a number of surrealist techniques (such as cubomania, entopic graphomania, and the movement of liquid down a vertical surface) that purported to take automatism to an absurd point; the name "surautomatism" implies that the methods "go beyond" automatism but this position is controversial.

In the 1940s and 1950s there were a group of Canadians called Les Automatistes, who pursued creative work (chiefly painting) based on surrealist principles.