Automatism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Donkin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Artists ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Automatic Writing ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Poetic Imagery ◽  
Psychic Automatism ◽  
Francis Picabia

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.

Homage to Robert Aron, 1898—1975

1977 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-139
Author(s):  
Annabelle Henkin Melzer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Alfred Jarry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Young Wife ◽  
French Communist Party

I went to see Robert Aron in the summer of 1972. He was then seventy-four years old, a tall, striking man in an apartment of stuffed furniture overrun by books. In all my meetings that summer with former surrealists, people who had made avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1920s, there was always a sense of trembling at reaching out to touch cobwebbed memories. Forty-five years had passed since the events we talked about. Tristan Tzara, recalled by Gide as a charming man with a young wife who was ‘even more charming’, had since fought with the French Resistance during World War II and later joined the Communist Party. André Breton, when he died in 1966, was accompanied to his grave by ‘waves of young men and young girls often in couples, with arms entwined’. They had come from all over France to pay him tribute. Philippe Soupault is a respected editor, critic and radio commentator, Louis Aragon is at the forefront of the French Communist Party and dislikes talking about his days as a Surrealist, Roger Vitrac is an acknowledged and produced playwright while Artaud is a cult figure. There are moments when in looking back, the whole Dada-Surrealist performance world looks like some great Dada swindle perpetrated on the only too fallible researcher and critic. Robert Aron does nothing to dispel this feeling. The man who sent a telegram to Breton warning him that he would stop at no measures to keep the fervent Surrealist claque from disturbing the performance of Strindberg's A Dream Play at the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, was elected a member of the French Academy before his death.

Picabia, Francis (1879–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Vocabulary ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Machine Parts ◽  
Francis Picabia ◽  
Blind Faith ◽  
Armory Show

A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing to Dada in Zurich and Barcelona. Picabia was a car enthusiast who embraced modernity, viewing the machine as a form expressive of the modern spirit from which he drew a new and revolutionary artistic idiom. Picabia also drew upon the tenets of the Puteaux Group and, upon arriving in New York to exhibit at the Armory Show in 1913, was lauded as a leading Cubist. He worked for a time in Orphic Cubism, a blend of Cubist, Futurist, and Fauvist themes and techniques to which he added ‘‘abstracted’’ industrial and biomorphic forms. Although he maintained an interest in the figure, Picabia is known primarily for his early dialogue with abstraction and his development of a quasi-machine aesthetic. He looked to industrial diagrams for artistic inspiration and, upon returning to New York in 1915, during a period of involvement with photographer and modern arts patron Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery and journal, produced the famous Mechanomorph series. Depicting Stieglitz and his entourage as bizarre, seemingly dysfunctional, industrial forms, Picabia’s Mechanomorphs shaped the visual vocabulary of New York, and later Paris, Dada. Picabia’s ironic stance in relation to art and culture has prompted scholars to interpret his conflation of human and machine parts as also playful punning of morality, sexuality, and blind faith in technology.

Post-War and Post-Apollinaire

Georges Auric ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Colin Roust
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Louis Aragon ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Les Six ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One

After World War I, Auric’s many friendships placed him in a unique position in the Parisian avant-garde. On the one hand, he was alongside Louis Aragon, André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Tristan Tzara for the rise and fall of Paris dada. On the other, he was a member of Les Six, the group of composers led by Jean Cocteau who came to represent Parisian art music in the 1920s. Throughout the feuds between the dadaists and Cocteau, Auric preserved his friendships and functioned as an ambassador of sorts between rival avant-garde groups. In the meantime, his scores for Cocteau’s Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (with the rest of Les Six) and Molière’s Les fâcheux would lead to bigger and better opportunities in the mid-1920s.

scholarly journals ‘Gaijin Mangaka’: The boundary-violating impulse of Japanized “art comics”

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Ana Matilde de Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Negative Identity

This paper investigates the artistic strategies of Japanised visual artists by examining the emerging movement of manga-influenced international “art comics”—an umbrella term for avant-garde/experimental graphic narratives. As a case study, I take the special issue of the anthology š! #25 ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ (July 2016), published by Latvian comics publisher kuš! and co-edited by Berliac, an Argentinian neo-gekiga comics artist. I begin by analysing four contributions in ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ to exemplify the diversity of approaches in the book, influenced by a variety of manga genres like gekiga, shōjo, and josei manga. This analysis serves as a primer for a more general discussion regarding the Japanisation of twenty-first-century art, resulting from the coming of age of millennials who grew up consuming pop culture “made in Japan”. I address the issue of cultural appropriation regarding Japanised art, which comes up even on the margins of hegemonic culture industries, as well as Berliac’s view of ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ as a transcultural phenomenon. I also insert ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ within a broader contemporary tendency for using “mangaesque” elements in Western “high art”, starting with Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s No Ghost Just a Shell. The fact that the link to Japanese pop culture in ‘Gaijin Mangaka’ and other Japanised “art comics” is often more residual, cryptic, and less programmatic than some other cases of global manga articulates a sense of internalised foreignness, embedding their stylistic struggles in an arena of clashing definitions of “high” and “low,” “modern,” “postmodern”, and “non-modern”, subcultures and negative identity.

Pure Cinema in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-40
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Pure Form ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Experimental Cinema ◽  
Shape Pattern ◽  
Pattern Line

Pure cinema is situated in terms of a larger aesthetic narrative that involves visual artists, theorists, intellectuals, and avant-garde filmmakers such as René Clair, Germaine Dulac, and Sergei Eisenstein. Hitchcock appears in this milieu in his relation to a German experimental cinema tradition, and most obviously in his work with F. W. Murnau at UFA studios from 1924 to 1925. The chapter traces pure cinema as an evolution of a silent cinematic ethos that championed pure form: shape, pattern, line, symmetry, and the freedom of expression of movement and time within a moving image medium.

Arensberg, Walter (1878–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Archino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early American ◽  
Large Glass ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Constantin Brancusi

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.

Goleizovsky (Goleizovskii), Kas’ian Yaroslavich (1892–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicoletta Misler
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Sergei Prokofiev ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bodily Movement ◽  
Visual Rhythm ◽  
Music Lessons ◽  
Bolshoi Ballet

A Russo-Soviet choreographer, dancer, and artist, Kas’ian Goleizovsky was exposed to various art forms from early childhood: dance at the Bolshoi ballet school; fine and applied arts at Moscow’s Stroganov Institute; and music lessons with the celebrated violinist David Krein. This broad education enabled him to perceive dance in terms of line and color, to integrate costume and choreography, and to infuse visual rhythm, emotional expression, bodily movement, and musicality into his artistic explorations. His collaborations with avant-garde visual artists such as Petr Galadzhev, Anatolii Petritsky, and Boris Erdman, and with composers such as Boris Ber, Matvei Blanter, and Sergei Prokofiev were always distinguished by strong mutual understanding. A pre-postmodern choreographer, Goleizovsky moved among very different systems and types of dances, including classic, eccentric, variety, ballroom, and music hall.

Denby, Edwin (1903–1983)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Downtown Scene ◽  
James Schuyler

Edwin Denby is best remembered as one of the preeminent critics of dance modernism, yet he was also an accomplished poet and an experienced dancer, choreographer, and librettist. Both his poetic gifts and his practical experience in the theater informed his dance criticism, first collected in Looking at the Dance (1949) and amplified in Dancers, Buildingsand People in the Streets (1965). As the title of his 1965 volume suggests, Denby placed primacy on the pleasures of perception, recording what he saw rather than advocating for a distinct point of view, as did his contemporaries Lincoln Kirstein and John Martin. Denby’s sensibility was widely admired in New York’s postwar avant-garde milieus, and he became an important friend, muse, mentor, and tutelary spirit to visual artists—including Rudy Burckhardt, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Alex Katz—and to New York School poets—especially Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman. In the last several decades of his life, Denby continued to be a key figure in the downtown scene across several performance genres.

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