In the early 1920s, a paradigm shift in European art took place in Paris. Dadaism, invented by Tristan Tzara, gradually gave way to a new direction, surrealism. Paris poets and artists rethought the key provisions of Dadaism, including those relating to automatism and randomness. They searched for a way to apply Sigmund Freud's theory to their work, to record dreams, to use the unconscious in their art.
. The main theorist of the new direction was Andre Breton, who published in 1924 "Manifesto of Surrealism", in which he discussed the "miraculous" and super-reality.
The cultural life of Paris of this period was unusually bright: artists and poets held general meetings, published magazines, argued about the nature of artistic action. Various publications have preserved descriptions of surrealist experiments, which we suggest you to read a little more about.
One way to grasp the "miraculous"
Surrealists considered the automatic writing method developed by Freud to diagnose patients. A word ahead of the curve is the key to super-reality, the ability to capture dreams and dreams in real life. Leaving no room for critical or analytical influence, automatic writing allowed to get the work without rational control of the author.
Ideally, the text created in this way was not corrected or rewritten (although surrealists often did so), but could become the basis for further work. The first such experience to be published is the book by André Breton and Philippe Supo, Magnetic Fields:
In the manifesto of surrealism of 1924, automatism is included in the definition of surrealism
but there's no painting in this text. Moreover, Pierre Naville
and some other early representatives of the direction categorically denied the possibility of surrealism in painting, believing that automatism is not applicable to the fine arts. Some artists, including André Masson and Joan Miró, were ready to challenge this. In their work, they attempted to affirm the visual equivalent of automatic writing.
Automatic drawing is another opportunity to express images of the unconscious, but this time graphically. The language determines the result of an automatic writing session in one way or another - you'll most likely get the text in your native language and the words you write will be familiar with you. Visual images can allow you to extract images from the unconscious - it was their surrealists who perceived them as some kind of "miraculous" manifestations.
In developing the idea of automatic writing, surrealists rediscovered and adapted the "Dadaist case". Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, and Raul Hausmann, an Austrian artist and writer, invented a method of creating "random" poems that resembled a collage. Hausman asked printers to choose printed text blocks at random and print them randomly. Tzara cut out individual text fragments from newspapers and mixed them in a hat, pulled out the scraps blindly, while making up a Dadaist poem. A similar principle underpinned the Dadaist collages of the poet and artist Hans Arp
He left the creation of which he left to fate, scattering colored scraps of paper over the base sheet of paper, and then gluing them to the places where they fell.
Among the surrealist experiments, which were based on a "miracle" of chance, was a group game called "Exquisite Corpse". In fact, it was a collage again - from the words added in turn by all the participants of the game. On a piece of paper, the participants would take turns writing down phrases or sentences, and each subsequent player should not have known what the previous one had written. The result was a collective narrative that seemed absurd at first glance. But such a game allowed you to create works regardless of the aesthetic preferences of each of the authors. The title of the game refers to one of the first results of such an experiment: "A refined corpse will drink young wine. This game was also adapted to the possibilities of drawing: each player had to capture the part of the image assigned to him. By depicting a human figure, the surrealists, with their inherent metaphorical displacement, received images that vaguely resembled a human being.