Thank you very much, Craig, for that welcome Keniger on him. I think I've turned it on.
Yes. Thank you. I'm very honoured. Failed to be invited to deliver the state that for 2010.
It wasn't the way I had intended to start my retirement,
but I thought I couldn't refuse because I was converted to art history while I was a student here at the lectures and ECOFIN.
And so I felt that there was no way I could avoid coming back.
And it's a great, great pleasure to be here. To be fair, I haven't fully retired because I am still, as Craig mentioned,
involved in a couple of research projects which tend to be more closely linked.
I expected one concerns socialism's receptions outside Paris in particular, and working on Latin America, as you will see as the lectures progressed.
The second project is as the co-director of an HRC funded investigation headed by David Lomas on surrealism and non normative sexualities.
We were quite surprised to get the funding. This has turned out to be remarkably pertinent to the reception of surrealism internationally.
A formidable array of queer artists, writers, photographers and film makers were attracted to the movement, funding its approach gender and sexuality.
Despite its founders. No antipathy to homosexuality. Unexpected routes to new and creative negotiations of the relationship between body and mediums.
And there's a very interesting aspect. This historic is speaking, I think has a bearing on symbolisms political fortunes.
Symbolism had a rough ride, politically speaking, in the post-war period, not least from a feminist perspective.
The overwhelming presence of eroticism within surrealism with the erotic body which constantly had the female up admiration and manipulation.
The first challenge in Zambia, Goatees 1971 study survivalism is sexuality.
And despite various defences, including my own,
the gender binaries apparently enforced class realism and the persistence of the female nude became harder and harder to accept.
Had this been so truth to say,
realisms core D.R and core sorry core pain for emancipate human disaster disbelief and
Forcett desire surrealism would or should have been consigned solely to the past.
The vehemence which surrealism has been denounced for sexist and misogynist attitudes has never been counted recently by a growing recognition that
its full embrace of human desire revealed a much more ambivalent representation of an understanding of gender ambiguities and sexual energies.
Writers and artists in England, United States, Mexico, Peru, Spain,
Japan and Australia who are doubly peripheral by virtue of geographical location as well as their sexuality,
kept surrealism alive and laid the groundwork for the creative negotiation, the body, gender and sexuality by more recent generations of artists.
That's a kind of introduction. I'm trying to keep each lecture as discrete from the other as I can.
But inevitably there is a kind of necessary introduction to the to the story of surrealism.
And there will be threaded through these lectures, particular references to issues of sexuality and the reception surrealism in Latin America.
So that's going to be a continuing set of ideas.
But I want to begin one minute. I would just begin with a very a very general historical introduction to surrealism.
Also introducing my own sort of methodology, which part of which is very firmly based in the idea that these surrealist reviews,
that is the magazines that were published by the surrealist group,
one after another from 1924 to basically the end of the 60s, actually contain the real the real history,
the the extremely rich ferment of ideas and the art in particularly interesting concentrated waves.
So I shall be talking about a little bit about some of these magazines as we progress.
This is the cover of the first. Of the The Great Surrealist Reviews, 1924 is films to list the serious revolution.
And you can see on the front cover is actually based on the nature of the scientific magazine.
Number two, this is one of them to be on themselves, to be seen a little bit more as scientists than as literati and intellectuals on the cover.
There are three photographs which I perceive if you can just make out the group of women
and men gathered together in a space which is actually a bureau through this research.
That was the three major events.
This is the review. The second is the establishment of the bureau of this research, which was announced on the inside cover of the magazine.
It says you can join the bureau. The Central Bureau of Thrillist Investigations 15 the good.
This was actually a shop on the street and people were invited to come in to their dreams, ask about surrealism and generally join in.
It didn't last very long because no one was prepared to manage it, but it was there for a few months.
And of course, the the third event of I'm 24 was the publication of the Times surrealist manifesto, which I shall come back to.
I'm not just that's that was the image that I had on the poster.
And the other image we had on the poster was this cover of the New York magazine View,
which is by Marcel Duchamp, shows a smoking bottle against the night sky.
I should have more to say about do show later. I just wanted to mention this particular magazine, which is a very interesting, eclectic group,
which I think can be called another gold group of artists and poets gathered Round View,
which was in opposition to the other main New York Review of the early 40s Trip V, the cover of the thirties to which you see here.
This cover is actually was by Duchamp. It's a little of a montage and it shows a rider on a horse pointing or he's the horse on
the horses galloping across the globe and within the glow of the words South America.
In 1943, when the Israelis were in exile, many often in the Americas,
both New York and further south South America seemed to be the place where surrealism was going to be reborn.
And I'll be looking at that later on. One of the places where there was surrealist activity, it was Argentina.
This is one issue as kick.
What of an extremist school magazine published in the late 20s by a very small and ephemeral group of surrealists in Buenos Aries.
This is one of the reviews published in Chile called Mandragora.
That is quite a long, distinguished surrealist affiliation from Chile.
This is a single issue of a magazine called Palabra.
The use of the word run, organised by edited by two poets,
is Mauro and Emilio Vest Fallen and says Oamaru has been the subject of a lot of my research at the Getty recently.
It is an extremely interesting. Writer and poet who lived in Mexico and organised the story.
This exhibition. And in Mexico, the magazine Dinn edited by those.
Palin was a magazine which actually said farewell to thrillers.
We'll be looking at this. It started as a surrealist magazine and it ended as an A. through this magazine.
And that is actually very fascinating. What interests me, particularly there was dins coverage of pre Columbian and Native American cultures,
and that was a very major part of citizens engagement with the Americas, particularly on the part of the poor.
Benjamin Pepé, who I think was was really more of an academic scholar in some ways.
He was extraordinarily thorough in his research into pre Columbian cultures and actually published the first translation of the Maya the book,
The True Chillum to mail in French and find a portrait of the leader the founder was.
There is only a book in the Peruvian magazine, A Matter,
which is a particularly interesting example of a political and literary review which saw its resonances in the twenties again.
So in surrealism of a very promising aspect of a potentially avant garde affiliation with their own Marxist project and also of the.
For this reason to trust Scott again, this is such a wonderful cover.
But again, Marcel Duchamp, one of his erotic objects for one of the pencil of his Wall Street magazines,
which he and I shall I shall be coming back to later on now.
And I'm just leaving this up on screen. Prints get tantalising because you probably won't be able to read it.
But it's a it's a letter from looked on on the unusual headed paper from the pistol
period 1947 called Surrealism is cause Liberti says the court is the cause for freedom.
Winsor's was trying to establish itself as the as above the heads of the avant garde and the intellectuals in Paris
and failing because really the Pasiphae taken over by soft surrealism has actually had a very bad press for decades.
And its role in post-war avant garde art, in theory, has been very largely occluded,
quite apart from the indignity of having the adjective surreal applied to anything strange or unreasonable.
He's the surrealism is vilified by soft, dismissed by Dorna,
alternately attacked and ignored by the Telic held movie Paris pilfered and then ignored by fuko.
Lafont criticised the neo colonialism the kid did many times,
says I echo in his tops on surrealism, wrote Surrealism is a corpse as a mere literary coterie.
It was like old schools, an imposter of life, a common schapper, citizens shunned by a the sexual artists,
despite the fact that what they admitted this is in the fifties and sixties.
Well, they admitted his ancestors in the historical avant garde, i.e. Dada Duchamp had passed through and been assimilated by them via surrealism.
Dunkeld champions of Bettye setting against the surrealists and suddenly his
ideas about abjection trauma and his notion of the art form with formlessness,
which I think in some ways was a philosophical aesthetic tee's have had a huge impact.
However, it was Bettye who wrote in 1946 that my quote, Although some of may seem dead,
in spite of the confectionery and poverty of the work in which it has ended in terms of mams interrogation of himself,
there is surrealism and nothing. The writer, J.G. Ballard was frank about his admiration for surrealism for similar reasons.
And I quote from his recent memoirs, Miracles of Life. I felt strongly and still do.
The second analysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality and also a key to myself.
I'm feeling that faith from hope will make up for itself in its ambivalence about art and the chains that have been made for it as an art form.
This is a page from a public, another publication by The Situation as the Situations International from Copenhagen in Copenhagen 1959.
And you can see it's a it's a it's it's a kind of an accumulation collage of fragments of text and splashes of paint,
bits of typography and imagery flung together.
So I'm just using that as theme for a moment, because I want to say a little bit about the problem of surrealism and the avant garde,
which is did touch with these that these lectures. I'm not going to try to give an answer.
I'm just going to raise a particular set of issues that are very pertinent to surrealism as poor reception in the 60s.
And really since that since then, to quote, Peter Berg is controversial but persuasive study theory at the avant garde.
The avant garde intends the abolition of autonomous art, by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life.
This has not occurred and presumably cannot occur in both our society unless it be as a force oblation, autonomous art.
I think by that he means for sebaceous advertising and commodity aesthetics.
There's a very, very revealing insights into the condition of surrealism as No.
One God in the background of this live reputation it had in Rome.
Items heavily a history of. Symbolism. I don't think it's very often I'm reading this, but it's very well worth reading.
It was written in 1970 and eventually published under a pseudonym.
In 1977. It was a book. He said he didn't like the date is very significant.
This is the year 1970 that I can resign to Situations International after the events in 1968 have revealed
the hollowness of revolutionary slogans and clearly expose the lack of common purpose between intellectuals,
students and workers. Surrealism in the Cabinet history is criticised the unforgiving viewpoints of the situation International,
which claimed, as he put it, a unified vision of art and politics that this had changed in the early sixties.
From an art object based movement to a theory based movement and art as a separate
autonomous activity was shunned because of its vulnerability to cooption,
commodification and commercialisation. In his book,
The Revolution of Everyday Life and I Can Trace the Dust and the European and
Russian Evan Glass 1910 to 1920 for their heroic attempts to merge art and life.
Nothing he thought would come close to their achievements with the exception of surrealism until the S.R., I quote,
The work of Art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life in the company, a history of surrealism.
There's a poignant version of surrealism will to live theoretically emerging from a furious denunciation of its famous, honourable but failures.
Nonetheless, I quote, Surrealism is the last movement of health, of genuine belief in the purity of art.
Even with this belief ended in capitulation to commerce, sir, it is a brief affiliation with the French Communist Party.
It was nineteen twenty six to thirty five, as well as its collaboration with Trotsky.
Both denounced, but it was precisely because so many of the situations, ideas and practises were founded in surrealism chants.
The death deadly evil. Drifting psychogeography is little more than satirical collages.
What was seen as realisms collapse, its turn to metaphysics during the war,
its failure to separate itself from the art market, its retreat from street was so traumatic.
Surrealism must be held to account by history and quite again for its reactionary attempt to restore art,
a life that it no longer had, a life whose very meaning was already lost.
It was some. At the end of these situations, International held a different view.
But it was the art I mentioned that made assize politics the weapon it once was.
The contradictions between a negative view of art and culture and a radical
experimentation outside the giving forms of off have turned out to be arts lifelong.
I'm not going to focus on these two procedures or ideas.
Automatism chance. And look, put in context of temporary art and at automatism, chance lay at the heart of surrealism.
But the intentions behind these purposes were contradictory. They were good weapons to kill art and tools to regenerate it.
We see them walking in this contradictory way all the time. And that's why it's so interesting in relation to the question of the service in Vietnam.
God. Now, there are very interesting parallels with contemporary art where procedures based on automatism and on chance are very widespread.
Now, they do not signify any group or school. I think in this contemporary context and stuff, not post facto affiliation,
is the reason that there is suddenly a consciousness for the historical precedents.
Susan Hiller's calligraphic automatic writing. For example,
Sufi cow in her recent very successful exhibition at the White Chapel Art Gallery in London showed
her 2008 event Story Where and When book the is following the instructions of a clairvoyant.
She travels to the seaside town. Without knowing what she was looking for, it turned out not to be the town, but brothers with the same surname.
The medium got it only half right. The following orders, she writes, was a great relief.
Shouldn't have to make choices, didn't have to judge and had to make decisions.
She won't let us all go to somebody else making them. Chances very often confronted in this in this way.
Some sort of rule to to order seems to be completely, completely accidental.
The abrogation will for your control, I think is also important in the work you're looking at here,
which is Roger, is a fragment of Roger Hume's Archangel Project seizure.
A huge quantity of liquid copper sulphate solution was pumped into a small flat in a derelict 1960s housing estate.
It was then drained. I didn't hope hope was pretty, but some it was.
And crystals formed all over the surface, the surfaces of the rooms producing intoxicating saturated blue.
What was produced was a system of nature.
The artist was absent, dematerialised in the end in the world, as we'll see on the site, too, is important from the sublime story to cures.
In a way, it's a it's an overlooked corner of South London rundown and deserted,
but was healing said where lives were lived and the street has actually never been more central.
I think for artists than it is today, and it certainly was the best realists.
I've unashamedly simply scanned the page rule book on the left. Sorry about that.
And but I wanted you to just see the whole thing and another page on the right.
So the history of this so sweet, sweet intervention, you can take it back to the that a central planner.
I think it really begins with Dada's empty tourism visits in Paris 1921, which we will be looking at later next week.
And it runs through the city's pursuit of chance encounters in the city streets, an alternative space,
the chance for the purposes and unpredictable practises like those of Richard Wentworth and Falsies Ellis,
who is the office for these these two images here.
That chance is extremely important and in the chance even gives the to the medium.
If you look at the right hand set of pages, you'll see it says, look,
it's a it's a kind of small frame photograph actually, by the artist Low-down, Toledo or Francis.
That is his feet. And he's just stepped in a piece of chewing gum and the got the football for the moment, less sculpture happens.
So it's, you know, the medium, the medium can arrive and all sorts of unexpected places.
Sometimes sometimes the movement in a video performance could be classed.
Automatism, even if imperative, at least what the Israeli border dripping paint can, which was like it is imperative abstract expressionism.
But it was also at a political. I mentioned to it or there was that gunwales heart stopping 2006 video of cycling
through Manhattan on a bicycle about his hands and the camera on the bicycle,
which swings, swerves and is between buses and this terrifying video.
It really does give you a video, a kind of headache.
It's called Fossicking Goldway. And we showed it recently to the centre's exhibitions versus spaces.
OK. So the negative critique of realism as it from the avant garde type,
which I prefer alluded to before much except for the gradual penalisation visual surrealism within the history of modern art.
All too often stripped of its context and reduced to formless appreciation.
Recent studies such as James Cliffords on graphic surrealism, Steve Harris's surrealist art and fought in the 1930s.
David Lomez is the haunted self surrealism, psychoanalysis of Activity and Savan.
Because surrealism,
history and revolution are for particular studies that have helped restore a fuller picture and to which I'm indebted throughout this lecture series.
Well, the landscape of contemporary art has altered dramatically, and there's no denying a shared terrain with surrealism.
There's been a shift in focus and a sense one of the moves at the end of art is it's
done away with the modest categories abstract configuration and open up mediums.
Unfriend Towfigh artists of beginning of the last century.
And it's not the of influence that I want to look at for the ways in which society's pursuit of automatism linked.
The chance could have helped to create this shift of focus, not practise from studio and painting to street and situation.
This shift involves often the abnegation, conscious control, openness, the accident,
the physical presence of the body, or its complete absence in the work and indeed the whole question of work of art.
Fair enough. But they're not.
Automatism is the very funding of surrealism.
It's the founding definition of surrealism, which I've slightly translated up here.
Pure psychic automatism, which is intended to express either verbally when writing or any other way.
The true functioning thought.
The dictation thought in the absence of any control exerted by reason outside any aesthetic or moral put quotation sources is
based on the belief in the superior reality of certain things of previously neglected associations and omnipotent supreme.
In this interesting play of thought, it tends to read once and for all.
All of this Liquidnet mechanisms and subsid itself then insult the very principle problems of life.
So it was quite ambitious. And it was undoubtedly Freud who was at the origin for the service for Wolfgang himself of this notion of automatism.
And I'm quoting a small section from the first manifesto, which is which is a kind of intellectual autobiography as well as a as a manifesto.
And it goes over his previous history.
What did what his experience as a poet is as a doctor, as a writer.
And there's no doubt that he acknowledges Freud as the sort of Pete from false realism.
My quote was apparently by pure chance that an important part of our mental world has been brought back to loved.
So this is thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. Imagination is perhaps the point of recent itself.
A reconvince writes,
If the depths of our mind contained within its strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface or waging a victorious battle against them.
There is every reason to seise them first season. Then, if need be, to submit to the control of our reason.
But it's worth noting that no means has been designated a priority to carrying out this undertaking
that until further notice it could be construed with the province of poets as well as scientists.
In other words, they set themselves up as rivals. The newly founded French Subtleness Society.
But that is another story. But I suggested that you might start.
Automatic writing by sitting in a comfortable place, having writing tools brought to you.
He live in a different era. Put yourself in his passive set to the state of mind as you can forget your genius talents and talents, everyone else.
Remind yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
Write quickly without any preconceived subject. Fossen so that you will not remember what you writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.
The first sentence will come spontaneously.
So compelling is the truth that with every passing second, there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard.
And that's the key idea that if there's something there, if you can reach it, general,
vague is the this idea of unconscious might be they had a very strong belief that there was something that was hidden from somebody make three
points very quickly about the origins and the interpretation of automatism in what I've got on the screen at the moment is an automatic drawing.
Why don't the artists who I think was most successful in finding some sort of equivalent to automatic writing?
This is called the birth of births. And so the first thought is that although automatism was a familiar term for 19th century psychologists,
it was Freud and at least Gretel's probably misunderstood.
That's probably mistaken understanding of them that gave it relevance.
The French psychologist Peter Jenny, who published a book called Psychological Automatism in 1889,
considered the automatic ex of his patients as debased residual fat functions of
past psychic activity no more than reflex action and without fear of interest.
Freud's linkage of dreamlike to the unconscious, as well as the techniques of free association that Breteau, again partly misunderstanding them,
had had occasion to practise in patients during the war, constituted evidence of the creative paths hidden in the psyche.
Secondly, the idea of automatism as the dictation of thought was not the same.
A stream of consciousness.
In, for example, Molly Bloom's monologue in Ulysses thought is best described as Endou fuzzy edit and what the English translations.
This means that the interior language, as John Cazzo clarified the difference in his 1938 book, Surrealism is Psychology,
Endou Fasi, a of automatic Corzo who is close to the surrealists, felt the term automatic writing style had chosen.
What should be understood by was the notion notation of spontaneous verbal images rather than graphic métro automatism.
All the best modern writing has, I said, appealed to so-called latent active heightism to break the break with literary habits.
This is a Proost Joyce and the surrealists all tried it.
Jose says tried but didn't get that. I think the different.
History may well be that his version actually worked best. There we are.
The difference is significant. The aim feels like automatism was not to run across the conscious surface.
Support for this external parts and deviations that defy the means of accessing cazzo calls the relational unconscious.
This includes dreams, delirium, automatic procedures that have real relation support but are outside conscious knowledge, interior language.
Is it a pretty conscious level of thought? The question is how to access the succession of verbal images, accompany spontaneous foe's caught casette,
believe Litefoot time that the verbal that is the word presentation of the unconscious thing was superior to the visual
and end of indefeasible and the FESSEY interior language was conceived as a dynamic succession images of flight of ideas.
Its further realisation seems superior to the visual because in visualising the image, the mind is invited to describe it.
This breaks the flow of interior thought, as we shall see.
Artists took on the problem with Gustad Planes writing a couture and the visual image and often challenging.
I think the attitude consecrated by Freud put on a letter because that language always has precedents.
Third, and finally, the question of the influence of the mediums, the skirt spiritualists.
The first Freud is about experiments in automatic writing was succeeded after the collapse of that on 1922.
Last season, sales as described by Blackstone in entry of the medium's Maximus Petare a revolution by night.
This wonderful painting here in 1923 is a memory of these sentences, and I'm going to come back to this painting next week.
This senses is actually stopped him. Very dangerous. The.
Those who were able to enter into a hypnotic trance were able to speak. Right.
And draw well, apparently totally unconscious. The difference from the actual medium's practises,
the anticlerical and mystical surrealists hastened to explain was that they never claimed any contact with the beyond.
OK, to help Xterra arise, he thought, for the artists Max Mollie's in.
The first is two of the hosts of surveillance. First text to discuss the problem of finding a visual equivalent to automatic writing.
This was called Enchanted Eyes Lizzio Shanté and he wrote the succession of images.
The flight of ideas are probably the fundamental condition of any surrealist manifestation.
The predictive thought cannot be considered from a static position.
It is in time that one understands the written text, whereas a painting or sculpture is perceived only in space.
A painter has not yet managed to show a suite of images.
Cinema might offer a solution to this problem. He dismisses so-called dream painting.
He dismisses matte sounds. Petare reversion balloted.
It is Mrs. De Kiriko because the problem is that there is this asset is secondary intervention of memory.
And he also says this was stop and think what it see. And then and then, as it were, the actual connexion with his flow of thought is broken.
That's his view. The image of this real is their expression is not my use.
That contrasts the visual unfavoured to the verbal. This suggests the fugitive visions of madmen and mediums could be admired.
Collage is possible like those of Max asked, but their apparently fortuitous juxtapositions and the photographs and rare grams of man ran again.
This is something I've returned to. This isn't. This is one of my res camera list photographs.
Rare grounds which are in which he placed objects on photosensitive paper exposed to light and then developed that negative,
which just therefore there was no camera shutter. Nothing like that was simply the first Instapaper and these mysterious objects.
So it is a kind of optical unconscious because nobody knows chorded, but is text is illustrated of an automatic point band that's on this one.
I hope you can see it more or less. It's interesting, though, because the first three issues of this magazine had almost no paintings.
It had only photographs, film stills fragments.
They were very empty painting. Okay, so Maslen is the only artist who's really accepted.
This is unusual in that it has a pictorial frame drawn around it.
But the extreme inconsistency of the marks, the fragments of architecture,
the building mesh of geometric lines and body parts I think actually belong to this new practises.
Automatism by the office whose problem is successful at devising an early form of Thrillist visual automatism could cubism.
This is the bottom is one of medicine's own cubist paintings called the Four Elements.
This painting is bought by Buchtel.
And it's very interesting because it's a it's a kind of Phoebus thing, but it's being completely transformed into a highly symbolised image,
mysterious figure the into with two hands holding the four elements of farm water and so on.
So that's. The same period as there was Mattick drawings when Massimo own previous paintings.
There they're an easy, noisy homes. Maslon automatic drawings of particular prisons and also Paul Claeys notion.
This is Silver Moon Mould Blossom 1921 Portrayer, an artist who definitely was an enormous influence on Maslin's automatic drawings.
This is the Nishu taking a line for a walk. I think it's behind some of these automatic drawings.
More often, as in this one cool Delio vegetable vegetable delirium that the line in the drawings is like a maze,
stopping abruptly, turning in on itself, floating up, floating out.
He has described the process all in Indian inken pen characterised by unforeseen associations,
metamorphosis in a state graphic mobility of the lines in.
This metamorphosis wrong, describing forms of objects, Massell aimed at capturing the movement of hidden thought of the unconscious level.
This wasn't easy to achieve. Parts of Tavio posted it.
Mexican Vata said it reminded him of Buddhist meditation, a mass of supplies.
He lent it to a state of grace in theology. Let me describe the process.
The first condition is to free the mind from all apparent links and to a state similar to a trance abandonment in a tumult, rapidity of gesture.
Once these depositions were obtained, involuntary figures were born under my fingers,
most often disturbing, troubling, indecipherable, unquantifiable images.
Almost always Leblon, fun, present, disembowelled. What is this?
Fiscal obsession is sometimes vague by the symbolic placement of an open fruit.
It was female bodies, masculine. They were never free from wounds, mutilations.
And I think you might be able to make out in this one that there are both male and female breasts.
There's a male Tulsans centre springing from the leaves of of of a of the sort that the stem, the leaf at the base.
There's a kind of slow upwards upwards.
In this particular drawing, I want just to show you this one because of the obvious intestines that are both in both wound and fruit.
And the word in French for the fruit grenadine and a grenade bomb is actually the same.
And this is this is what this metaphore that Massell is playing on sometimes massol route go up.
Führer's stars dominate.
These wandering forms appear in a precarious situation, sometimes on the edge of the void, ready to fall or float or escape into space.
Now, it's very striking. The this reference securites stars and also the prevalence of these wounded and fragmented bodies
for rather obvious reason that Massol had been terribly wounded in the first one worldwar.
But he never spoke about the absolute complete silence about his wartime experiences during this period.
What do you think informs much later in life than before the memoir Du Monde,
he wrote of being wounded in the trenches during the Battle of the Somme,
abandoned in line a state of delirium, watching the exploding shells, fires and shooting stars as very striking these drawings.
This one is called The Stars, and you can see there's a gradual thinning.
The lines go up top. Those are stars and sort of also breasts.
I mean, it is a complete as well Masand mess, but it's it's very striking how there is such repetition.
There's insistence emote assistant in most of the same images in these drawings of extremely diverse Mock's repetitive fragments,
symbols and metaphors. And it's that traumatic return of what Larcom perceived as a fun, representable, unassimilable, real massol.
Again, speaking of the drawings, said that the movie image appeared on the.
But after they appeared, he couldn't resist a sense of shame and inexplicable malaise linked to vengeful exaltation,
as if it's some kind of victory over an unknown, oppressive PA.
And the drawings, I think, opened onto this inadmissible link between opposing violence, death and desire.
There are some Panetoz, and it'll be hard to find a more apt justification for its model of mental apparatus.
Freely, freely mobile unban energy flowing to the unconscious primary process is found so transformed into the tonic energy, the secondary process.
By the same token,
the bonding unbinding energy will define the pleasure unfettered access as well as well as the relation Eros and the destructive instinct.
Now I'm going to move on because I want to comparing Massol with a different response
to the notion of automatism about which there were furious debates in House.
So that is following Moniz's questions in enchanted eyes that I mentioned before.
Feel navvy in the thirties, you took the problem step further and deny the very existence of any visual surrealism.
There was no through this painting, no drawing that can't be called surrealist. For him, it could not be a question of expression at all.
Now the pencil marks free to the chants of gestures or the imagery trace his dream.
Nor imaginative fantasies can be qualified as serialist. There are only spectacles, cinema, the street of photography.
And I think that's interesting because in a way that's that's the side of surfaces that has that has been much, much.
Warmly accepted in recent years. The kind of expensive automatism that I'm talking about, cinema, bespeaking photography.
However, in an editorial critique, Novales text students these printed above a large reproduction of a pool clay, a painting called Decent 17 Strings.
Wonderful painting. Who's most striking feature arrows pointing out of the canvas?
Signifiers of the movement demanded automatism immediate response to Nevilles
Article Take-Over direction to start his series of articles on surrealism painting,
which disappointed his office associates by putting Picasso ahead of everybody else.
I will be talking more about this, but Breteau is analysing the situation June 25, 1927 of through this painting.
And I'm going to go a little bit faster over this.
The artist I wanted to talk to.
It's something that's contrasting, but it's making the sort of comparisons with with my son.
It's very interesting that when Miro discovered automatism, it produced an extraordinary freedom in his painting of paintings like this.
But with his colour of my dreams, this extraordinary, totally blue painting, which unfortunately is not very well scanned.
It's just saturated blue canvas with a tiny moon in the corner.
And that's the only object in it. And that's what he moved to from these much tighter as a curious tension between sort of cubism and realism.
It's wonderful. Still love with, you know, with with glass and junk and and Cockrill.
That's the movement for me, for Miro was between between this sort of ordered and controlled imagery and and the freedom of automatism,
its curious dynamism going the other way.
He experiments a little bit. Salvador Dali with automatism in the late 20s.
This is a good thing. He did give it up actually, because his left hand image is not not very good.
That is that story is tempted to automatism, which he abandoned in favour of the kind of extremely precise, tense,
almost photographic realism that we find that we're familiar with in his work and in painting like this, one of the lugubrious game.
I'm just that's just contrasting Mira with with some Donna very quickly.
And I really just we'll we'll go straight to the birth of the world, which is a painting museum or not.
It's it's it's an extraordinary image. For a long time.
People believe mirror when he said that in the two stages of his painting, the first stage was totally unconscious from the second stage,
was conscious when he added, sounds like in this case, the black triangle, the little red sort of foetus and the white blob at the bottom.
It turns out that, in fact, he had had sketchbooks at the time with with drawings for each of the so-called automatic paintings.
I don't think it changes too much, but it certainly has altered the way that Miro's automatism thing has been written about.
I just want to quote from William Rubin's entry into the world.
I think the book is a very large painting. I should say it's not easy to get dimensions here.
William Rubin wants to distinguish between exceptional automatism and I quote, This is not the same thing over unconscious.
The artist may be as he doodles, scribbles rapidly or spreads liquid paint with rats.
The impulse always comes from within the man, psychologically speaking, nothing.
The human nothing the human being does is totally unmotivated, accidental.
This is not apply. However, the patterns made by liquid pink when it spills the vertical surface,
which is to some extent functions of the properties of pigment and canvas under the laws of gravity.
Not. I think that what is happening possibly we can see happening in this painting is a shift from the idea of automatism,
which was the I do integration of the individual human psyche to some conscious towards actually the disintegration of the self.
It sounds like a complete that is very, very different.
But I think it's a I think what happens with the Sunnis as they explore automatism, something work with Mirro and in the work of others,
that the self is so unlike medicine itself in these is reduced to a kind of trace.
And there is a sense of the of a kind of splitting, if you like.
So I'm really just thinking about how important it was that the surrealists began to turn to more automatic sort of mechanical kind of automatism.
A little later on this. All right.
And I want to quote now from another important text about this comment by Britain called the automatic message 95 to three.
Now you've got this text that is trying to insist again on the primacy of the verbal over the visual.
He said the visual images had an unfortunate habit of interrupting the verbal flow
that he thought was the true to form as it became infected in the unconscious.
Two words, and I quote, I think that there is almost always complexity in imaginary sounds.
The unity and speed of the dictation remain active concerns. But it also seems certain that visual or tactile images primitive, not preceded by words,
that the representation of whiteness or elasticity without any prior intervention of words to express them or
derive from freely operate in the immeasurable region that stretches between consciousness and unconsciousness.
And this is this image, a measurable region that he says he thinks is much more aptly described.
It is. He thinks that verbal expressions infinitely richer than visual images says in poetry, verbal,
auditory automatism has always seemed to me to create the most thrilling visual images for the reader.
Further visual communisms never seemed to me to create the images that are any way comparable.
Now, I've made my point. It's up to the painters.
And he got a reaction immediately in the same issue of Minitel, which which contained this is a challenge to the artist.
Dani published a series of photographs entitled Involuntary Sculptures.
The photographer Brassai had taken on his instructions the involuntary sculptures.
So red row and bus ticket splitted two faced road paper are ephemeral fragments of automatic human gestures or photographic Close-Up.
I said, you like specimens of natural history on the glass pit of a microscope. Size photographs have been prised recently.
I think quite, quite, quite rightly. This in the context of spheres of automatism that in the context of the object with dematerialisation,
they also object to the workings of baptised notion of formlessness. But I think it's very interesting.
They came out that there was specific response to a very specific passage in the automatic message.
I'm not I've almost finished. I've just I want to show a very short fragment of a film.
The thing is, it's flickering images. I got out warn you of that in case anyone might respond badly to flickering images.
Okay. I wouldn't take too much of a despite standby package.
And it's called Moth Light and its field film, I think at its very limits without actual actors.
It's real things. It's moths, tweeks, grasses and petals that was sliced and packed into strips of film.
And there are no frames of film, in a sense becomes the thread between things.
The meeting ground for this random accumulation of things from the natural world.
And Brecht was very interested in the principles of growth shared by natural forms and the questions insects flight insight.
And I think that the instance there is a kind of mechanical mechanical issues that work there.
Now I have, I find one out of time, so I'm not going to be able to talk in any detail about the element of chance, which I announced the lecture.
I wanted to talk about chance in the original Douga context in the work of hands on,
and his geometrical collage is arranged according to the laws of chance and also of Marcel Duchamp.
And I'm just very, very briefly pulls on this one, because I think it is it is pertinent to a development within.
So automatism, I think, which moves more towards more towards chance involves chance,
more in terms of the actual that the presence, the presence or absence of the makeup.
At the top of this, you will see she has written three standard stories equals Cande Chance, 1914.
And this is a very famous exercise in chance.
Two from carried out round about the time the outbreak of the First World War.
Just before the idea was that he took three metres of string, the three pieces finger to meet long,
dropped them from a metres height and then stopped them down where they fell.
And this was, as he says, a new unit of measurement.
And he actually used the templates that were cut from these so-called new units of measurement in several contexts in the large glass.
He was interested in what he calls flowcharts.
Charles was a way of getting against logical reality.
There was a question of causality and to showcase his own principle of ironic causality,
setting up experiments with chance whose outcomes as if the readymades and the threes tend to stoppages were unpredictable.
So it was chance within particular parameters. Was like a kind of scientific experiment.
The unpredictable in this case, of course. Also he's picking a bit of fun at the French worship of the metre.
And this just another example of chance.
This is a mammaries, photographs of the dust breeding or the dust gathering on Du Seans enormous glass painting.
It is lying about temporary abandoned in his New York studio and that those it looks like a landscape.
In fact, it's it's the debris from the dust on the on glass.
And there are many other examples of that do show and are actually playing with chance to end with.
Just for the reference to an often overlooked text about says automatism by everyone, DAX called perspective automatic or poetic perspective.
In the almanac, SUHAD Eastern 1950 DAPs encourages artists to explore more mechanical procedures and automatism, she says,
present the shrewdest point of incontestable advantage of reducing to a great extent and even completely,
the conscious participation of the artist, who thus relies on a kind of chance which reveals unexpected possibilities.
So the idea what's become important is actually really trying to avoid the conscious participation of
the artist and chancers introduced in terms of mechanical or natural processes outside human control.
And this is an example of what they called the health mania.
When a sheet of paper or oil would be covered with with with with paint or liquid pigment or some sort of ink.
Another paper repressed onto it and then peeled off. And what resulted were these extraordinary kind of cavernous mineralised images which
were then sometimes interpreted or just left as they were by the by the artists.
And that compares to many of the photos forms created by the action of nature to fossils and mineralisation.
And then he used to talk about the artificial construction dendrites and the extraordinary similarities between them and vegetable forms.
Confirming the common tendency was the common way that animate in an inanimate matter.
Bro of a book on the spontaneous action in the creation of this little book called Accidental Configurations of Nature,
was the condition of convulsive beauty life. I'll come back filling in the Constance's it's in the post will see this process of formation.
Destruction seems Nevitt hoping better encompass for the human eye then between
the blue hedges of aragonite and the treasures of the Great Barrier Reef.
I admit that the slightest embarrassment. This is a photograph of crystals at the top of the article from which I'm quoting Beauty will be convulsing.
I admit that the slightest embarrassment, my profound insensibility, the format for spectacles,
works of art which do not immediately produce a physical sensation like that of a gust of wind on the face, causing a real shiver.
I have never been able to deny that. For me, there was a relation between this sensation and that robotic pleasure.
Well, I've ended with with seizure.
Come back to seizure, which was one of the examples that I started off with this copper sulphate rooming with these extraordinary crystals in it.
And it's beautiful. I don't know. But I think it's extremely interesting to think about this particular work,
whether the artist sense has disappeared halfway through its making in relation to the notions of control and dematerialisation.
In theory. But also, I think the way that it shows us something about the that the problem with human intervention in nature, the way nature grows,
the way man intervenes at a time when particularly Korrell has said and other aspects of the natural world are under such serious threat,
which I don't think it was part of Hume's idea in making this swap.
Thank you very much.