76

Photography and surrealism

77

The automatic image

whose works are also published throughout the different issues of La Révolution surréaliste edited by Breton.

Is it surprising that Breton includes photographs, collages and bas relief in essays about ‘Surrealism and Painting’? This shows that ‘painting’ was a general term to describe various processes of rendering surrealism visually across different forms (plastic arts, objects, wood, casting, painting, drawings and photographic), rather than as any specic set of techniques involving pigments. Breton develops an expansive view of paint-ing across these artists and their works in the same way that automatic writing served as the name for multiple modes and forms of achieving ‘psychical automatism’. Breton makes it clear in his comments on Man Ray that to divide works up between ‘abstract’ and ‘pictorial’ cat-egories is ‘inappropriate’. For Breton, so-called abstract and pictorial works are simply different means to achieve the same ends of psychic automatism.

As Max Ernst said, ‘frottage was merely a technical means of augmenting the hallucinatory capacity of the mind’.74 What Ernst meant was that a technique which had an automated process could allow a state of distraction to emerge. Through such automations, the mind could be allowed to drift and aid the ‘hallucination’ of images without conscious interference. In frottage the ‘arbitrary’ tracing of worn oorboards could evoke other scenes, a wild forest, not hitherto seen. With collages, the distracted state could lead to chance juxtapositions which might rarely occur while in a fully conscious state. Similarly, André Masson’s automatic drawings were made as his hand ‘doodled’ automatically, while his mind (exhausted from lack of sleep, drugs or other means of narcosis) was in a state of distraction, ‘elsewhere’ as in daydreaming or as Janet’s partial automatism.

Thus, automatic writing itself did not mean ‘un-mediated’ thought. It should not be forgotten, for example, that in automatic writing (or drawing) a pencil is already a form of technology, just as the formation of acoustic sounds in the throat into auditive signiers, ‘speech’, is already a symbolic grasp of the body as a technology for signication. Hence ‘hysteria’ could be regarded as a form of ‘motor-automatism’, of writing with the body, just as automatic techniques like ‘frottage’

Max Ernst, in Werner Spies (ed.), Max Ernst (London: Tate Gallery, ), p. quoted from ‘Biographische Notizen (Wahr-heitgewebe und Lügengewebe)’, in Werner Spies (ed.), Max Ernst, Retrospektive (Munich: Haus der Kunst, ), p. .