Are you familiar with the surrealist’s favorite parlor game, Exquisite Corpse? Artists having been playing it for almost a century. You just need a pencil and paper…
According to Artsy,
Exquisite Corpse was created in 1925 by Surrealists André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, and Marcel Duchamp in Paris. Breton had effectively founded the movement a year prior, formalizing it with his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. That text called for art that engaged the unconscious by using dreams and automatic drawings as creative fodder.
One way of unlocking psychic space, according to Breton, was through games—and he and his cohort were constantly inventing them. One of their favorites was the old parlor game called Consequences, in which players took turns writing phrases that eventually formed an absurd story.
Before long, Breton and his compatriots swapped words for drawings, dubbing the new game Exquisite Corpse, after a sentence that emerged during a round of Consequences:
“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”
Surrealist poet Simone Kahn, remembered it in a 1975 essay,
“We were at once recipients of and contributors to the joy of witnessing the sudden appearance of creatures none of us had foreseen, but which we ourselves had nonetheless created.”
“The suggestive power of those arbitrary meetings…was so astounding, so dazzling, and verified surrealism’s theses and outlook so strikingly, that the game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation as well as stimulation, and even, perhaps, a kind of drug. From then on, it was delirium. All night long we put on a fantastic drama for ourselves.”
Man Ray, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise, Exquisite Corpse, 1928
TO PLAY
Fold a sheet of heavy paper into thirds or quarters, folding it inside itself.
Participants take turns drawing (or collaging) sections starting with the top (head) then extending two (or more) lines onto the next section for the next artist to connect to, fold it so the next person can’t see your drawing.
The next artist adds section 2, then 3 & 4 until it is completed. You can make 3 or 4 sections, depending on the number of players.
André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jannette Tanguy & Jaqueline Lamba, 1938
George Hugnet, Yves Tanguy, Germaine Hugnet, Jannette Tanguy, Exquisite Corpse, n.d.
Players don’t have to stick to traditional representations of a body, landscape, objects, architecture, nearly anything you can conjure can be incorporated.
The Surrealist group disbanded in the 30s, but Exquisite Corpse stuck. Artists have continued to play the game ever since.
Brothers and art partners Jake and Dinos Chapman have used it to create a series of drawings that emphasize their creative partnership, and question the idea of artistic authorship.
Jake and Dinos Chapman, Exquisite Corpse (Rotring Club) V, 2000.
This last summer, painter Gina Beavers played many rounds of the game with fellow artists Peter Schuyff, Austin Lee, and Canyon Castator. Beavers said,
“Some of us had just met, so it really functioned as a way to break the ice.
It’s a really non-precious, non-competitive way to work, because no one person can claim authorship of the drawing, and the sum of the different styles is often great and can lead to many laughs and bonding.
You are reacting to the energy of the other people working near you and trying to be as free as possible with it. You allow yourself to break from whatever your style might be in order to be as inventive as possible.”
I’ve played this many times, once memorably in the summer of ’94 with comedy writer Michael O’Donoghue (who created SNL), his wife, Cheryl Hardwick former SNL music director, artist David McDermott (half of the duo McDermott & McGough) at O’Donoghue’s Irish Georgian manse, Garranbaun House.
We took turns alternating, so 3- 4 participants is an ideal number. We also added the Consequenses game idea by cutting out words from magazines and adding one word each to form a ransom note style surrealist title of each work. (Sadly, O’Donoghue was himself an exquisite corpse 4 months later. He died suddenly of an aortic aneurism in November of ’94.)
The game of course isn’t only for artists. As Kahn said in ’75, it can open the mind and inspire creativity in anyone.
“Real discovery was reserved for those who had no talent. For it offered them the possibility of creation and thereby opened, permanently, a door on the unknown.”
Michael O’Donoghue, Cheryl Hardwick, David McDermott, Trey Speegle, 1994
(via Artsy)