Associative, Automatic and Chance Processes

I was excited by this post which details Aleatoric methods of creating compositions. This word was new to me although I have been aware of the idea for sometime and use chance processes as a starting point for teaching more and more. I have found that "free" investigations into sculptural and paint media, combined with strategies of seeing in (see below as well) makes a great starting point for student work.

Max Ernst's use of Decalcomania has worked well as a source for landscapes particularly with year 9 pupils. Although I personally prefer his frottage and grottage work, which has in the outcomes a harder and less sickly feel.

This book, Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School edited by Nicholas Addison and Leslie Burgess (Routledge Falmer 2000) gave me confirmation and suggested new ways of working in my own use of this method. Here is the relevent section:

An immediate and accessible way to motivate pupils, particularly those who feel insecure in their technical abilities, is to introduce automatic and semi automatic techniques as a starting point. We do not propose this strategy to subvert analytical procedures and aesthetic practice in a nihilistic way like some of the Dada artists but more in the manner of the Surrealists for whom chance processes a method for freeing up the imagination and loosening the hold of codes and conventions and and conventions As early as the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci in his Treatise on Painting suggested that artists look at chance configurations on stained walls to conjure images. Even as controlled an artist as Degas is said to have been frightened by fresh sheets of paper and he would stain them with coffee grounds before beginning a drawing.
Ernst often used rubbings, the process of 'frottage' (and 'grattage'), to form chance or arbitrary configurations into which he would see or project images: his Histoire Naturelle (1925-26) is entirely dependent on this process. Wolheim (1987) discusses the concept of `seeing in' theorising its central place in human perception:
Seeing-in as I have described it, precedes representation: it is prior to it, logically and historically. Seeing in is prior to representation logically in that I can see something in surfaces that neither are nor are believed by me to be representations? I can, for instance, see headless torsos in clouds ranged against the vault of the sky. And seeing-in is prior to representation historically in that surely our remotest ancestors engaged in these exercises long before they thought to decorate their caves with images of the animals they hunted.
Whether seeing-in precedes representation or is a type of transformative mental activity that is itself a form of representation, is open to debate. What is significant is that seeing-in appears to be an innate faculty and is therefore an accessible method for all to use. Inviting pupils to apply this faculty to their immediate surroundings can convince them that even the most prosaic and banal of environments may hold the potential for imaginative transformation. The school environment can be used as a resource to stimulate imaginative responses beginning with the rubbing of surfaces such as wood-grain, stone and brick. The process of seeing-in can be applied to any circumstance. Ithell Colquhoun's view of herself lying in a bath (Chadwick 1991: 104), transformed from a nude into a rocky but nonetheless gendered seascape, is an amusing and troubling work, the process of which many pupils will both readily understand and be able to apply to their own work.
Another favoured method practised by Dominguez, Ernst, Leonor Fini and Ithell Colquhoun was decalcomania (Chadwick 1991). You can follow this process by spreading paint or other pigments over a non-porous surface such as glass or perspex. You then press either paper, card, canvas, etc. against this surface, pulling it off to reveal a tracery of interconnecting lines. The resulting forms are not unlike the veins on a leaf or certain fan corals. These forms can be used either as stimulus for `seeing in', as with Ernst's Europe after the Rim (1940-42), or as discrete elements for use in a collage or decorative schemes. A more fully automatic process is the common practice of doodling; the type of drawing you produce when your conscious mind is engaged in another activity such as phoning a friend. Masson, Dali, Fini, Matta, Bacon, are particularly noted for using this process, although, once again they use it as a stimulus for seeing-in. The Abstract Expressionists developed a doodling-like process as a means of bringing to the surface and realising sub- and unconscious forms and images, although, at its limits, this strategy was used by artists like Pollock to subvert the figural potential of painting, to bypass representation (Clark 1999: 299-369). In schools the wholesale imitation of the `look' of such work, without the contexts and motivations of its making, is an absurd spectacle. Such strategies may however provide pupils with ways of working that they can use to make their own metaphors.
An engaging Surrealist practice, the `exquisite corpse' is more familiarly known in the UK as the party game `consequences'. Recall this game and relate it to the Surrealist activity. The sort of chance encounters that are the result of this process can be similarly activated by choosing images at random and juxtaposing them to form unlikely, amusing, contradictory or troubling combinations. This can be developed as a more conscious activity and used to construct meanings which require the viewer to make or seek connections which may not, at first sight, appear logical or coherent. Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim produced notable objects which subvert the utility of domestic objects, respectively Object to be Destroyed (1923) and the Fur-lined Object (1936). Ernst conjured unexpected, dreamlike images using photomontage. Hannah Hoch brutally satirised bourgeois conventions using popular sources to subvert its proprietous tastes. Heartfield juxtaposed contrasting and opposing images to undermine the credibility of Nazi ideology (Ades 1976). More recently artists have taken up the decentring and dislocation of Dada photomontage and the Surrealist object to construct phobic and abject instillations and objects, e.g Louise Bourgeois (Bernadec 1999), Robert Gober (Nesbitt 1993), Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas (Rosenthal 1997).