ABSTRACT
Relying on the Whiteheadian-Motherwellian foundations established in Chapters 3 and 4 by analyzing how Whitehead’s work can be approached aesthetically and the ways Motherwell himself viewed Whitehead as useful for thinking about his art, I look at how Motherwell rethought surrealist psychic automatism, which was of great importance to him since he had become acquainted with a number of prominent expatriate surrealists in New York City in the early 1940s. Motherwell renamed psychic automatism “plastic automatism” in 1944 in order to emphasize the vital collaborative role an artist’s medium plays in the generation of a work of art, and he continued to use this term until the end of his life. In exploring Motherwell’s plastic automatism, I investigate how it is informed by Whitehead’s process philosophy.
