How do artists get out of their own heads and just play? The Surrealists had some fantastic answers to this question. Lovers of chance, surprise, and the bizarre, the early 20th-century group had a cache of games that they used to tap into the unconscious and foster collaborative creativity. Exquisite corpse was among the most popular of the Surrealist games and is still widely enjoyed to this day.
In exquisite corpse (or cadavre exquis), participants take turns drawing sections of a human body on a sheet of paper that is folded such that each participant is unable to see what was drawn before. Short lines extend beyond each hidden section into the next one, indicating where the following artist should pick up so that the parts ultimately connect into one whole—albeit curious—figure. The fact that these drawings were made on paper, an inexpensive and low-stakes material, encouraged wild experimentation. Through this game and others, the Surrealists attempted to access automatism and the parts of their brains not governed by logic.
Rounds of exquisite corpse resulted in strange, amusing, and impossible-looking figures. The creases, once unfolded, revealed odd transitions from the imagination of one artist to another. Surrealists were known for their love of juxtaposing two unlikely things and seeing what they could generate together—a teacup lined with fur (à la Meret Oppenheim), for example, or a photograph of an eye that Man Ray attached to a metronome—and the exquisite corpse drawings were opportunities to fuse several nonsensical things together. Artworks created through this game are now held in major art museums worldwide.
“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,” recalled Simone Kahn, a core member of the Surrealist group and the wife of Surrealist ringleader André Breton. “This ingenuous collective creation called into question, once again, the very nature of artistic endeavor, as Surrealism has done repeatedly over the years.”
The idea for the game—and its name—came from a similar writing game that preceded it. In that game, participants took turns writing sentences or phrases on a piece of paper that was folded with each new addition; ultimately a nonsensical story emerged. “We started with writing games, devised so that the normal elements of conversation were distorted and made as paradoxical as possible,” Breton later explained. “In that way, human communication, twisted from the start, led us as much as possible toward adventure.”
One of the sentences that emerged during a round of this writing game was “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” One night in 1925 when a group of Surrealists were hanging out at the (now destroyed) Parisian home of French actor and screenwriter Marcel Duhamel at 54 rue du Château, someone suggested playing the game with drawings instead of words. Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy developed the new game, and it took its name from that nonsensical phrase. In the Manifesto of Surrealism, written the year before, Breton had called for using automatic drawings as a way to engage the unconscious; this was one way to do it.
“Once the imagination of these fellows was set loose, there was no stopping it. André shouted with joy, immediately recognizing in this game one of those natural wellsprings or waterfalls of inspiration that he loved so much to discover. It was unfettering,” Kahn recollected. “Even more so than with automatic writing, we were sure of getting an astonishing amalgam. Violent surprise provoked our admiration and sparked an insatiable passion for new images: images unimaginable by one brain alone—images born of the involuntary, unconscious, and unpredictable combination of three or four heterogeneous minds.”
Apart from being imaginative and outlandish artworks, today the exquisite corpse drawings are also records of social history and reveal which artists knew and collaborated with one another. These collaborations often included female Surrealists, many of whom were later overlooked (such as Remedios Varo and Valentine Hugo).
“What excited us about these games is that no single mind could have made what they created,” Breton noted. “With the Exquisite Corpse we found a way—finally—to escape our self-criticism and fully release the mind’s metaphorical activity.”
The popularity of exquisite corpse endures as a game played by artists (and even children). In the late 1960s the Chicago-based Hairy Who artist collective frequently played it, and some of their collaborative drawings are now held in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. American artist, musician, and filmmaker Ted Joans set out to make the longest exquisite corpse drawing ever, a project he began in the 1970s with a stack of computer paper (which was conveniently folded already). Over three decades, Joans carried the drawing, aptly called Long Distance (1976–2005), worldwide to 132 contributors (including artists such as Roland Penrose, Betye Saar, Dorothea Tanning, and David Hammons).
The game has been taken up by some of today’s artists as well. In 2010, the New York–based Armitage Foundation invited more than 200 contemporary artists (including Kerry James Marshall) to create collaborative drawings based on the exquisite corpse model as a way to celebrate chance encounters. Other contemporary artists who have played the game in less structured ways include YBA artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and sculptor Eric Croes.
At this year’s Venice Biennale, titled in “In Minor Keys” and on view through November 22, artist residency Denniston Hill is presenting its version of exquisite corpse with contributions from 150 of its alumni. (The day before Biennale’s opening, Denniston Hill and nonprofit organization Performance Space New York also hosted an afternoon of exquisite corpse drawing.) At a moment when the city gathers artists from across the globe spanning different approaches and practices, the timing is ripe for a diverse pool of participants, primed to produce exquisite combinations.
