Andre Masson: Automatic Drawing (1920s)
“she speaks to me a language so soft that at first I do not understand . . .”
(Aimé Césaire, Son of Thunder, 1948)
“I have always wondered why automatic writing has not been invoked more in the ever-multiplying number of discussions and positions taken on ‘composition vs. improvisation’.” Adam Linson, sleevenotes to integument, Lawrence Casserley/Adam Linson (psi 09.03, 2009).
“. . . the air pauses I hear the grating of poles on their axles the air drones . . .”
(Aimé Césaire, Permit, 1948)
. . . a series of magnetic fields . . . On the 23rd March 1941, Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton boarded the SS Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, a steamer sailing from Marseille to Martinique. Both of them hoped to reach New York. Lévi-Strauss, Jewish, and Breton, banned writer, Marxist and surrealist, chose exile rather than risk persecution and internment under Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy government. They met by accident, subsequently passing the time by discussing the theoretical texts both were producing during the voyage. According to biographer Patrick Wilcken, Lévi-Strauss “wrote a detailed commentary on Breton’s doctrine of spontaneous creativity, trying to resolve the contradictions between surrealist ‘automatic’ art (in which the artist simply writes, draws or paints with no pre-planned ideas, guided by chance and random events) on the one hand, and the idea of artistic technique or expertise on the other. How could artistic creativity express itself through what was merely a reflex of the subconscious? He concluded with the notion of ‘irrational awareness’ (‘prise de conscience irrationelle’) – a kind of creative inspiration that the true artist smuggles into a spontaneous work of art. In reply, Breton wrote of the ‘para-erotic’ aesthetic pleasure derived from art, which distinguished it from impulsive doodles, and concluded that Lévi-Strauss’s idea of ‘irrational awareness’ might itself be produced at a subconscious or ‘pre-conscious’ level.” (from Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, 2010)
On Martinique, Breton came across another recently arrived refugee from France, André Masson, painter-explorer of automatism, chance and altered states. A discovery of the literary journal Tropiques, found while browsing in one of Fort-de-France’s shops, led Breton to a meeting with the poet of Negritude, Aimé Césaire. Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil cou coupé), Césaire’s incandescent collection of surrealist-automatist poems published in 1948 wrenched automatism, along with the streams-of-consciousness of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner, away from their attachment to European and American psychology (Freud, Pierre Janet, William James) into the colonial realities of the tropics.
While the limits of pure automatism became quickly apparent – Césair later made politically directed revisions and cuts to Solar Throat Slashed, while Masson’s work had shifted away from automatic drawing by the late 1920s – music seemed strangely indifferent to its potentialities. Perhaps this was because of its greater emphasis on group performance (in which automatism becomes a far more complex process); perhaps because the technical demands of musical instruments discouraged abandonment (the paradox identified by Lévi-Strauss). With a few exceptions, it was not until the 1960s that music begin to coax messages from what Breton, after the aural hallucinations that preceded his automatic writing collaboration of 1920 with Philippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields) described as the mouth of shadows.
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About davidtoop
Ricocheting as a 1960s teenager between blues guitarist, art school dropout, Super 8 film loops and psychedelic light shows, David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This practice encompasses improvised music performance (using hybrid assemblages of electric guitars, aerophones, bone conduction, lo-fi archival recordings, paper, sound masking, water, autonomous and vibrant objects), writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera (Star-shaped Biscuit, performed in 2012). It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016, a Guardian music book of the year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible (2019).
Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards (his guitar can be heard sampled on “Water” by The Roots), he has released fifteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2020) on Lawrence English’s ROOM40 label. His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual - released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016) - were called by The Wire a “tsunami of weirdness” while Entities Inertias Faint Beings was described in Pitchfork as “an album about using sound to find one’s own bearings . . . again and again, understated wisps of melody, harmony, and rhythm surface briefly and disappear just as quickly, sending out ripples that supercharge every corner of this lovely, engrossing album.”
In the early 1970s he performed with sound poet Bob Cobbing, butoh dancer Mitsutaka Ishii and drummer Paul Burwell, along with key figures in improvisation, including Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Georgie Born, Hugh Davies, John Stevens, Lol Coxhill, Frank Perry and John Zorn. In recent years he has returned to collaborative performance, working with many artists and musicians including Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Max Eastley, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Thurston Moore, Jennifer Allum, Miya Masaoka, Extended Organ (with Paul McCarthy and Tom Recchion), Ryuichi Sakamoto and a revived Alterations, the iconoclastic improvising quartet with Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack and Terry Day first formed in 1977. He has also made many collaborative records, including Buried Dreams and Doll Creature with Max Eastley, Breath Taking with Akio Suzuki, Skin Tones with Ken Ikeda, Garden of Shadows and Light with Ryuichi Sakamoto and co-productions (with Steve Beresford) for Frank Chickens, the 49 Americans and Ivor Cutler.
Major sound art exhibitions he has curated include Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London (2000) and Playing John Cage at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (2005-6). In 2008, a DVD of the Belgian film – I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Portrait of David Toop Through His Records Collection – was released by Sub Rosa, and in 2017 his autobiography – Flutter Echo: Living Within Sound – was published by Du Books in Japan. His most recent records are Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs (Audika, 2017), Suttle Sculpture (Paul Burwell and David Toop live, 1977, Sub Rosa, 2018), John Cage: Electronic Music for Piano with Tania Chen, Thurston Moore and Jon Leidecker (Omnivore, 2018), Apparition Paintings (ROOM40, 2020), Field Recordings and Fox Spirits (ROOM40, 2020), Until the Night Melts Away (with Sharon Gal and John Butcher, Shrike, 2021) and Garden of Shadows and Light (with Ryuichi Sakamoto, 33-33, 2021).
He is Professor Emeritus at London College of Communication.
davidtoop 
This is shaping up to be a great book
Thanks Michael, encouragement duly noted and absorbed.