'automatism' is a correct and usable word in written English.
It can be used to describe the action or process of doing something automatically or mechanically, with or without conscious thought. For example: "The automatism of his office routine left him feeling uninspired."
The Surrealists demanded "pure psychic automatism"; the automatic drawings that the French artist André Masson made from 1925 onward and, on a more mechanical level, the frottage ("rubbing") devices of Ernst, which added to painting the evocative effect of fortuitously dappled textures, introduced an element that flourished even more fully 20 years later.
Later, he would reject the external world and the revolutionary politics depicted by the Mexicans in their works — in the catalog, Stephen Polcari, an art historian, calls Pollock's politics "at best of the parlor and not the activist variety" — for an inner psychic world, derived in part from the psychic automatism (or "automatic drawing") of the Surrealists.
Le Pan Pan au cul du nu nègre (1920) is a long prose poem; L'Apologie de la paresse (1921; "Apology for Laziness") is a lyrical frenzy with erotic and iconoclastic elements; his libertarian suite, Bar Nicanor (1921), includes an advanced form of automatic writing (see automatism).
I became his noble valet, reduced to even greater humiliations, and even now I am reduced to verbal automatism in thrall to his deity.
Many American artists, including Jackson Pollock, were also influenced by Hayter, particularly by his emphasis on automatism and reliance on the unconscious.
They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with a similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art.
Other sculptors such as Peter Agostini, George Spaventa, Peter Grippe, David Slivka, and Lipchitz, who were interested in bringing spontaneity, accident, and automatism into play, returned to the more labile media of wax and clay, with occasional cire-perdue casting, which permit a very direct projection of the artist's feelings.
In such poetry from the 1930s as Sent på jorden (1932; "Late on Earth"), Ekelöf was drawn to the Surrealist technique of automatism (the spontaneous release of the subconscious in the creative act), but his work also reflects an interest in musical forms and Oriental mysticism.
His poetry the primary collection of which is A invenção do dia claro (1921; "Invention of the Clear Day")—aims to recover a mythic ingenuousness, while A engomadeira (1917; "The Starcher"), a novel, is a precursor of Surrealist automatism and Nome de guerra (written 1925, published 1938; "Nom de Guerre," or "Pseudonym") is considered the first contemporary Portuguese novel.
In 1924 Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme defined Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express…the real process of thought.
His freest writing is expended on grotesque portraiture in which the human is reduced to fiercely energetic automatism.
