Exquisite Corpse: drawing as collage
collage-montage, 1912
Collage and montage in art
Let’s explore the idea of collage and montage in art, after which you’ll create a scanogram collage on a flatbed scanner. This will become a stand-alone part of the project but also will be the basis for a genuine Exquisite Corpse.
Cubists and Dadaists
We’ve bumped into collage several times in our projects and our texts, but to work on your scanogram it will be useful to know a bit more about its place in Twentieth Century art. Critics widely regard Synthetic Cubism as the first flowering of this methodology, and while Pablo Picasso gets the credit for its invention with his Still Life with Chair-caning, a particular driving force behind it was Georges Braque, who invented a kind of collage known as papier collé in 1912.
The next step was the reactionary photomontage work of Dada, with artists such as Hannah Höch and her partner Raoul Hausmann refusing to play the role of artist by playing with refuse. Read a rich and brief history of Dada photomontage at the website Cut and Paste (captured at the Wayback Machine). Read the introductory text about the 1920s and look at the four artists listed there: Hanna and Raoul, as well as John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters. Altogether, it’s a less than 10-minute read.
Surrealists: enter the Exquisite Corpse
André Breton and the Surrealists developed, or perhaps rediscovered, a kind of art parlor game, which they named Exquisite Corpse after a line of surrealist poetry. While not always strictly collage in use of media, the game infuses drawing with a collage sensibility. Read about the Exquisite Corpse at this archived site: after reading About go to Breton’s Remembrances where he talks about the origins. Again, a less than 10-minute exploration.
Digital practice
The game has taken on new life in the digital realm in many forms:
- Philadelphia’s own Burnell Yow! and two other collaborators created a digital exquisite corpse project, which is documented in Andre Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse journal (archive, in case), in this video which shows the process., and in a slideshow by Yow! himself.
- A collaboration-cum-social-networking device is found on the New Exquisite Corpse website (now old and archived at Wayback Machine).
- Cornelia Solfrank, at the Net Art Generator, has created a kind of auto-generated corpse-like collage instrument.
- APPlesauze studio authored X-Corpse, a now-defunct tablet app that has been memorialized in a Tumblr page.
- Shut Up and Draw! has been sponsoring a digital-drawing-based Exquisite Corpse game, intending to create the world’s longest drawing.
- TikTok Duets are reviving a performative version of the Exquisite Corpse. From the article:
The exquisite corpse utilized simple tools—paper and drawing utensils—but required multiple participants; as Breton later wrote, the works “bore the mark of something which could not be created by one brain alone.” They were, however, also not fully appreciated in their time. While the grotesque Surrealist illustrations now live in prized collections, as Breton remembered it, “ill-disposed” critics in the 1920s “reproached us for delighting in such childish distractions.”
A century later, TikTok is also, to some, seen as a childish distraction, or worse. But to others, it’s an incredible tool. “I think if André Breton were living today, he would turn on TikTok and be blown away with the mechanical aspect—the idea that there’s a system for generating these images so that it’s done automatically, which could have some kind of resonance with automatic writing and therefore tapping pure thought rather than preconceived conventional ideas,” says Susan Laxton, a professor of art history at UC Riverside and the author of Surrealism at Play.
Angela Watercutter at Wired.com
Round Robin
Our own version of the Exquisite Corpse game involves a round robin: a type of collaboration that occurs in a circle to conceal the order of authorship. This can lead to very interesting sequential results!