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Alchemigram idiosyncratic or made up art term. No google hits not related to wikipedia [1]. Maximus Rex
Delete. 0 Google hits is even worse! --Ryan 08:00, Feb 8, 2004 (UTC)
I have given this cite over and over and over again. Read the book Surrealist Experiences by Penelope Rosemont. I am getting sick of the ignoring of offline cites followed by the assertion about a lack of online references. --Daniel C. Boyer 16:17, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Keep until cite can be checked. Anthony DiPierro 16:21, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Delete. Non-important, non-famous. --Imran 01:06, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC).
The level of dishonesty and disingenuity is reaching a very high level. Clearly this is not a "fantasy"; I've given a cite for it. Through there is a lot of valuable information on the World Wide Web as searched by Google (Google doesn't index everything) if Wikipedia is going to be reduced to a regurgitation of the information indexed by Google it is going to be of very little value. I would ask again for people to look up this cite and then make a judgment. --Daniel C. Boyer 15:11, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I however have searched several dozen art journals, Lexis-Nexis and several major databases of art criticism. All of which have turned up zilch. Far too minor to count as famous or important.--Imran 16:47, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
As you are essentially saying that you will not look up the reference I've provided, I question the validity of your vote. If you are going to look up the reference I've provided and then come to this conclusion, o.k. --Daniel C. Boyer 18:21, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I don't personally doubt that this is referenced in the book you cited. However, that raises the question of whether that is enough. Should we document everything that has ever been published in a book? For art techniques, I would think having at least a passing mention in one of the art journals would be a good threshold, which this doesn't seem to have. --Delirium 06:45, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)
To describe surrealist techniques as "art techniques" and to think that they should be mentioned in art journals is to fundamentally misinterpret surrealism as an artistic movement, which it is not. Techniques of surrealist investigation, automatic techniques, are not supposed to be artistic in nature, and the bleeding edge of this are (at least some of the) "surautomatic" techniques such as cubomania and the movement of liquid down a vertical surface, which were deliberately conceived (see the article on surautomatism) as "scientific" techniques, not artistic or pictorial; i.e. they were conceived to deliberately minimise or even eliminate the role of the artist, eliminate the possible role of aesthetics, and replace it by scientifically rigorous methods of making, for lack of a better word, images. You may still find these surrealist techniques to be unimportant, but I'm saying that looking them up in an art journal is the wrong way to go. --Daniel C. Boyer 13:53, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Daniel, a question. To what end to surrealists perform these tchniques if not to create art objects that might be displayed in galleries and, if at all possible, sold?
They are not all created for this reason, far from it. I think, actually, the objects created by the surautomatic methods (this does not include the alchemigram but I'm answering your question as well as I can) are far less often created for display or sale in galleries than by any other methods. They were never conceived to be "art" -- the only reason they would be called "art" is for the lack of a better term, because they're doing something visual -- and if you read the surautomatism article with its excerpt from Luca or Trost you will hopefully get some sense of this. -Daniel C. Boyer 14:28, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Daniel. Thanks for pointing me to the quote in the Surautomatism article. I note that Luca and Trost refer to "establishing a clear distinction between images produced by artistic means and images resulting from rigorously applied scientific procedures, such as the operation of chance or of automatism". Two observations: chance and automatism are not scientific procedures and the actual production of images by the application of science would be photography and film, both of which can achieve the status of art. The cry of scientific technique was a constant with the 20th century avant garde (viz Pound on poetry, for example) and generally results from a failure to understand the scientific method. None of which affects my view that a single cite in a single book by a single artist is not enough to render something encyclopaedic. Bmills 14:52, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)
They are no more scientific that the careful mixing of oils or casting of bronze. If the intention is to make art, they are art techniques.
But with surrealist techniques in general the intention is not to make art. And the surautomatic techniques are wildly different from "careful mixing of oils"; they are letting liquid drip down a vertical surface with a minimum of control by the practitioner; they are making dots at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper and then making lines between the dots; they are cutting an image into squares and then reassembling the squares at random. Comparing these to casting bronzes is bizarre to me. --Daniel C. Boyer 14:28, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)
And I cannot see how a single cite in a single book by a single artist means that the technique is sufficiently well-known to warrant entry in an encyclopaedia. Bmills 14:19, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Well, all of your (Daniel C. Boyer's) discussion above sounded an awfully lot like what people often debate in art journals: what the extent of art is, and to what extent the artist must be involved, and so on. If this were part of the mainstream discourse, wouldn't it be represented there? Is there somewhere it's represented other than that one book? --Delirium 08:32, Feb 13, 2004 (UTC)
Delete, insufficently important. Bmills 14:19, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)
