Automatism and psychopathology
For most artists automatism was a two-stage process: the production of the initial marks using some method that relied on chance, followed by their modification, interpretation and elaboration, using a more conscious and controlled technical process.
The word that best describes the second stage, the imaginative interpretation of the initial stimulus, is that it is an act of projection. Projection is a word that is frequently used in contexts such as alchemy and analytic psychology. Colquhoun was well aware of both these usages. In two articles, The Mantic Stain (1949) and Children of the Mantic Stain (1952) (1) she referred to the classic projective test of the psychoanalysts – the Rorschach ink-blot test. Presented with an ambiguous stimulus, patients project their own interpretations on the image, and, in so doing, give the therapist information about their psychopathology that cannot be articulated at a conscious level. (2)
Colquhoun understood that for an artist to use automatic processes was akin to a patient generating his or her own Rorschach cards and, by interpreting them, she (and, by implication, viewers) would gain access to the hidden contents of her unconscious. (3) This was not done with therapeutic intent, as was the case with two other members of the British surrealist group, Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff who, in the course of their extraordinary collaboration produced a large number of works laden with psychoanalytic symbols that ooze infantile sexuality and that were painted with the express purpose of being subjected to analytic scrutiny. (4)
Pailthorpe and Mednikoff were working within an established medical psychology tradition, dating back to 1889 when the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet first advocated the therapeutic use of automatism. (5) In contrast, Colquhoun’s aim was not to banish symptoms and become better adjusted. She was a trained artist with considerable technical ability who expected her works to be displayed in galleries. She expected it to be sold and to be hung on walls, not analysed and filed in a therapists’ case notes.
In the first stage of automatism, the work does not express or describe anything. It exists only in the present. Because the artist is only the medium for production, there can be no normative communication. It is not, for example, an allegorical or symbolic representation, it is the thing itself. It has no external referents. When the artist then moves to a act of projection and starts to develop the image, the work begins to acquire a history and, at the same time, becomes both more personal and more public. It stops being an intense, immediate experience that the artist is having with her materials and begins to exist in time: it has become an art object. By interpreting the image, applying aspects of herself to the image, the artist begins to develop a web of expanding relations with the work.
This web is further increased when the piece is publicly displayed and begins to gather about itself strands of meaning that originate with the viewers. Some of these will be unique and individual, but the work will also evoke collective meanings shared by many people. The greater this aggregated web of associations, the more enduring the work is likely to be. At the same time, however, the image begins to be tamed through discussion and criticism. It begins to become domesticated through being placed within an art-historical context.
Different artists choose different ways of developing the initial stimulus. Ernst, for example, characteristically built complicated but recognisable worlds where putrefaction and petrifaction blur the distinction between the organic and the mineral. These works are easily amenable to verbal description. They are narrative and engage with memory systems that utilise active recollection, verbal reflection and explicit expression. Colquhoun’s images, in contrast, require responses to the perceptual features of the image. That is, those that demand little or no conscious processing and that do not relate to a verbally accessible form of memory. Although these responses cannot be verbalised, they may well be visceral and affect-laden. Our reactions, in other words, are felt and experienced rather than analysed and interpreted: they are implicit rather than consciously processed. In terms of memory processes we might say that Colquhoun emphasises perceptual representations whilst Ernst offers semantic representations. In terms of cortical structures, we might say that whereas Ernst engages with the hippocampus, Colquhoun engages with the amygdala.
Notes
1. Colquhoun, I. The Mantic Stain. Enquiry, 2, No. 4 (October-November) 1949. pp. 15-21. and Colquhoun, I. Children of the Mantic Stain. Athene, May 1952, pp.29-34.
2. Herman Rorschach always stated that his test measured the perceptive power of the subject, and was not a projective measure of the unconscious, although this is how it has come to be used. The test has the dubious distinction of being, simultaneously, the most cherished and the most reviled of all psychometric tests. See Hunsley, J. & Bailey J.M. 1999, The Clinical Utility of the Rorschach. Psychological Assessment vol.11, pp. 266-77.
3. Colquhoun, I. Children of the Mantic Stain, op cit.
4. For details of this collaboration and for criticisms of the venture from the viewpoints of surrealism and psychoanalysis, see Walsh, N. (ed) Sluice Gates of the Mind. The Collaborative Work of Pailthorpe and Mednikoff. Leeds Museums and Art Galleries, 1998.
5. Janet was the source of Breton’s ideas about automatism. See Balakian, A. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism. Oxford University Press, New York, 1971.
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