There’s an episode of Perry Mason from the early 1960s about automatic writing. A conman feigns falling into trance and pretends to unwittingly draft missives from beyond the grave. The messages lead to murder, and Perry is kicked into an unfamiliar orbit of spiritualists and parapsychology where he has to determine what is sincere and what’s just plain fraud. I really like this episode. It’s camper than your usual Mason fare, thunder booms and harpsichord crunches over impossibly shadowed interiors where kitschy psychics fool their dupes with carnival tricks. When the murderer’s inevitable confession arrives—it was the housemaid, who turns out to have also been the jilted lover of the conman—the whole gothic affair resolves itself as an ordinary murder carried out for ordinary reasons. Perry Mason ultimately affirms what we already knew from the start, what the silly music and lighting and costumes had been intimating the whole time: automatic writing isn’t real, belonging somewhere along the spectrum from sincere quackery to malevolent hoax.
Automatic writing—also called psychography—has been around for ages. Somewhere in the long history of the practice generally being treated as fraud, there is an exception. At least in the eyes of art history, there is a moment and a movement in which we start taking psychography awful serious. In Paris, in the interwar years, the loose gaggle of aesthetes that would come to call themselves surrealists found automatic writing to be a powerful tool. That group of almost-Marxists bumping about Montparnasse in the early 1920s were looking for ways to break free of the oppressive nature of rational reality. In psychography, they saw a way of activating the limitless potential of the unconscious mind, the untapped opposite of rational logic. Rather than communing with the dead or supernatural spirits, the surrealists jumped on some half-baked Freudian thinking to propose that various automatic techniques—writing chief among them—could be used to access normally occluded aspects of the self. Instead of dropping into a trance and letting another entity commune through you, it was more a vibe of just … letting go your rational self. Like hypnosis or the cadavre exquis, psychography was a tool for introducing aspects of illogic and unreality into the waking world. As André Breton put it in the first manifesto of surrealism, the very definition of the movement was “psychic automatism in its pure state.”[01]
Breton—self-styled leader of the surrealists—co-composed Les Champs Magnétiques (The Mag- netic Fields) alongside Philippe Soupault in 1920. It is the first and most substantive work of surrealist automatic writing, and reads like the insufferable poetic blurting of a fifteen-year-old Morrisey stan whose stepdad just doesn’t get him. Legible or not, it’s considered a seminal artefact in the development of surrealism, and it helped other automatic techniques—especially drawing—to develop. Instead of producing written text, automatic drawers like André Masson let their hand move freely and without intention across the page, bringing forth images from the well of the unconscious.
Now the rub is that surrealist psychography is no more real than any of its antecedents or offspring. There’s no measure by which we can say that Breton unveiled his unconscious through automatic writing, certainly no more so than any other practitioner. Surrealist automatic writing looks a lot like, well, writing. It looks like what a couple of kooks who drank too much from Apollinaire’s cup would inevitably write, given the circumstances. But surrealist automation is never quite tainted with the same derision that greets the more obviously magical iterations of psychography. What’s the difference? Is it the Freudian gauze that gives surrealist automation a patina of legitimacy? Or maybe it’s just that the surrealists occupy a kind of insider status that art history bestows on otherwise avant-garde figures.
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In April–May, Ruttkowski;68 showed a selection of drawings by Susan Te Kahurangi King at its Paris gallery. The works spanned a period from 1957 to the late 1970s, from the time of King’s early childhood into her mid-twenties. For those familiar with King’s practice—especially this early work—the content, and the quality, won’t surprise. The drawings are mostly full of childhood stuff: appliances and animals, domestic geography, popular logos and cartoons. Of course it’s what she does with these familiar images that makes King’s work so special. In her hand and imagination, known forms distend and engorge, shrink and vanish, pull apart and helplessly collapse into each other. In one stand-out image, Untitled (c. 1963– 65), Daffy Duck is being sucked into a nebulous mass of black and grey topped by play castles and a column made of bands of spectral colour. Another Daffy, in miniature, looks up in beak-gaped shock at his hapless doppelgänger. A third—pink, bald, clutching seaweed—leaps clear of the gruesome scene, floating above Tweety Bird, who appears to have a goitre. Further in, Donald Duck has already been claimed victim by the nebulous mass; his head sucked in- side its greying form, only his trade- mark pantless body emerges into the atmosphere.
The wonder of King’s weirdness isn’t in the activation of some serious politic. It’s in the splendour of her imaginative power and creative capability—a cold-water swim that leaves me feeling immersed in a world of odd possibility, refreshed through exposure to an expansive way of thinking, making, seeing, drawing. And with that wonderful can come the strange and grotesque, too. These works sometimes remind me of the mon- ster at the centre of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006), a rogue, cancerous dream that absorbs the dreams of others into itself, metastasising into a nightmare of pop-culture fantasy. Or, with 2023 eyes on, King’s creations look a little like the AI-image-generated denizens of the uncanny valley, almost-convincing simulations of known forms with bits melded or missing in unsettling ways.
King’s show in Paris was called Automatic Drawing, a nod to the affinities one might find between her work and the art history of automatism in that city. Just a nod, that is. The gallery makes no explicit reference to the surrealists beyond the use of their terminology, letting the title hover implied but unexplained over the exhibition. Like Breton, Masson and company, King makes art that estranges our understanding of the everyday, and points at the possibility of other ways of thinking and seeing. But beyond that, I think the comparison starts to get a little sticky. Automatic drawing, just like the automatic writing it sought to transpose, has always been about surrendering agency—to the unconscious, to aquarian spirits, to God, demons, whatever. To me, at least, King’s artworks have never really seemed to be about that. Sure, they are multitudinous and strange, but when I see King’s drawings I’m never under the illusion that I’m looking at anything other than an artist’s art, as authored by the artist.
Another discourse comes into play by placing King’s work in the same context as psychography; it very comfortably feeds into the image of the outsider artist. She gets this label a lot, for all the rea- sons relevant to its existence. King is self-taught, and works from her childhood are presented in tandem with those from all stages of her career. And whether relevant or not, the fact that she does not speak is usually included in the same sentences that describe her outsider status. No less than Jerry Saltz, New York art critic and Dunkin’ Donuts evangelist, did just that when he brought King’s artwork to international attention in 2014.
There are reasons the outsider tag exists. The label has functioned as a cultural and market fetish for decades. But it’s also proven a shield by which art schools can protect their status as sole delegator of what and (crucially) who makes an artist—if a half-read copy of A Thousand Plateaus falls in an Elam crit and no one’s there to hear it, etc. etc. I’m being a little mean, but I think this is the reason I feel pangs of discomfort at the Automatic Drawing title. A cynical part of me worries that, instead of embedding King in the rich lineage of surrealist image-making, the link to psychography is another way of outsidering her work, outsidering her. Given its history, there’s the risk—however small—that the association could be taken to imply that the art isn’t really King’s. Because it’s just an expression of her unconscious, or the messages of another being, or that she’s somehow not real. But she is real, as is her work. And it’s really very good.
Header image: Susan Te Kahurangi King, Untitled, c. 1963-1965, graphite, colored pencil and paint on paper, 20.5 × 26 cm (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68
