Andy Warhol and Les Automatistes

Today I went to le Musee des Beaux Arts to see the Andy Warhol exhibit. I've never really been that interested in Andy Warhol's art and this exhibit didn't really change that. Not much information was really provided about the specifics of his process in making what I assumed were stenciled prints. The most interesting things were his stylized portraits using distortions of colour. There was also evidence of a strong influence from American composer John Cage.

Warhol attended a premiere concert in New York of Erik Satie's composition Vexations which consists a short chordal passage to be repeated 840 times. The piece, played by a group of pianists including David Tudor and John Cale of Velvet Underground fame, lasted around 18 hours and surely had an impact on Warhol. I recall a quote of him saying he would sit in his infamous "Factory" and listen to various sounds including typewriters and city traffic, clearly interpreting this to be music happening around him. This, as far as I know, is one of the main innovations of John Cage. Warhol is also well known for doing artwork for many album covers of the 60s (the image above being a famous example), but I also learned that he has done a few Blue Note records, specifically Johnny Griffin's The Congregation (a favourite) and a Kenny Burrell record whose name I can't recall. And let's not forget Sticky Fingers, the first "interactive" album cover, featuring a real zipper.

(Joan Miro's The Tilled Field)

A bit disappointed by the Warhol exhibit, I headed downstairs to the contemporary collection, which I had visited quickly when I visited Montreal the summer of '07. A good portion of the collection features a group of Quebecois painters known as Les Automatistes. Led by Paul-Emile Borduas, the group was inspired by abstract expressionists like Joan Miro but with a strong seperatist agenda. Most of the artists studied in Montreal at l'Ecole des Beaux Arts, explaining their being featured in the musuem. Feeling stifled by the rigid academic constraints of the school, they looked for ways to develop a rawer, purer form of expression. Borduas found this in the french poet and theorist Andre Breton, who strove in his own work for what he called "pure psychic automatism" and wrote the "Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924. When Borduas met younger painters Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean-Paul Mousseau and Fernand Leduc, he provided them with the ideas they were searching for.

So what does a hard-edged French seperatist looking to start a new art movement do? Write their own manifesto, of course. Borduas' was Le Refus Global (Global Refusal) which he required all who wished to join Les Automatistes to sign. You can read the manifesto here (and here in French). It's fascinating to know that this type of radicalism was going on over 20 years before the October Crisis, among intelligent artists no less. The manifesto is riddled with phrases like "the limits of our dreams" and "shades of hopeless bondage". Looking at the FLQ's manifesto (here) which was demanded be broadcast by CBC on October 8th 1970 during the October Crisis, it's hard to not notice the similiarities (compounded over 20 years and with a more overt political stance).

The painter who really knocked me out, more so than Borduas, was Jean-Paul Riopelle. His painting called "The Wheel" is above. Approximately 8 by 10 feet, this painting stares you down in a way that I can only imagine a Pollock must. The painting is made up of small cubes of colour, created with a pallete knife rather than a brush. It seems to be abstract expressionism at it's finest.

Of all Les Automatistes that I saw, Fernand Leduc stood out as the odd man out. Though he signed Borduas' manifesto, he also adopted many ideas from Les Plasticiens, a countermovement happening in Quebec by the mid-50s. This is the style of the paiting above, concerned only with pure abstraction, line and colour.

The Theory of Automatism

Automatism, or automatic writing, is the ideal which all these artists (excluding Warhol) strove for. It was first used by painters Joan Miro and Salvador Dali as an attempt to get the rational mind out of the way and express the under workings of the subconscious. Improvisation seems to play a large part in this process, as the painter strives to paint from scratch each time, with no preconceived notion of the end result. Automatism avoided representation at all costs, often replacing it with illusionistic or dream-like forms instead.

I don't think it's too big of a stretch to compare this type of process to those of tenor saxophonists like Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. Critics accused Coltrane of "speaking in tongues" and albums like Meditations and Ascension show a definite attempt to get to a more abstract, irrational process of improvising where traditional melodies notes are replaced with pure sound abstractions in unknown, altissimo register of the saxophone. Coltrane was most influenced in this period by the aforementioned saxophonists, with Sanders being a regular member of his group for a time. The common element of improvising makes the comparison all the more apt, as it is often easier to get a purer, raw form of expression with just the right ammount of reckless abandon.