Legend has it that The Exquisite Corpse was born one night in 1925 in a house in Paris. A group of writers and artists were settling in for what they thought would be a pretty dull evening. Because they were Surrealists and given to playing games of chance, one of them suggested the pastime Les Petits Papiers, or Little Papers, in which players compose poems from randomly chosen words.
The first player wrote a noun on a piece of paper and folded it so the second player couldn’t see what was written. That person wrote an adjective, folded the paper again and passed it on, and so on. When they were done with the sentence they unfolded the result, which, in English, was: “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”
Delighted with the outcome, the players spread the word about the game. Soon, larger numbers of Surrealists were concocting such other outlandishly creative sentences as “The wounded women disturb the guillotine with blond hair” and “Winged steam seduces the locked up bird.” They later substituted drawings for words, usually dividing the paper into three or four parts representing the head, chest, torso and legs of a human body. The game, which came to be known as The Exquisite Corpse and is represented in a new show at a Chicago gallery, became a staple in the Surrealists’ stash of diversions.
The Surrealists of the ’20s and ’30s — descendents of the nihilistic Dada movement but with a more positive attitude — took such games fairly seriously: They played in earnest, with exact rules. But they also conducted the games in the spirit of fun, all the better to crack the controls of rationality and intellect and free the dizzying energy of the unconscious. They relied on chance and collaboration to deliver what Surrealist leader and poet Andre Breton called “the marvelous,” which they believed was concealed by mundane existence.
The enemies: order, logic and an individualistic approach to making art. Breton encouraged artists to “speak according to the madness that has seduced you.”
When creating exquisite corpses, the artists interpreted the body parts quite subjectively. One well-known corpse done in 1927 by Breton, Yves Tanguy and five other participants depicts an umbrella balanced on a trunk that rests on two legs made of stacks of pots with handles.
The current exhibition at Printworks Gallery contains similarly intriguing contemporary examples, presenting 21 corpses of the three-part variety by 63 artists. The participants played the game mostly according to the original rules, one exception being that they didn’t find out with whom they were collaborating until the show opened. The resulting figures are alternately raucous, lyrical, grotesque, bestial, poignant and erotic.
Printworks owners Bob Hiebert and Sidney Block and artist Audrey Niffenegger worked on this exhibition for more than two years. In 1993 they had seen “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis” at the Drawing Center in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood that involved about 1,200 artists who created more than 600 drawings, as well as some historical corpses. Up until that point, exquisite corpses had been exhibited mainly as secondary works, seen within the greater context of Surrealist games.
“We decided this idea would do well in Chicago, with its strong tradition of Surrealist art,” Hiebert said. Several prominent Chicagoans were early and avid collectors of Surrealist art, and the Art Institute of Chicago holds what is considered to be one of the finest Surrealist collections in the world.
Hiebert, Block and Niffenegger invited a mix of emerging, midcareer and seasoned artists, more than half of them from Chicago, to participate. They included photographers, painters, cartoonists and sculptors, in keeping with the tradition of the Surrealists, who often crossed disciplines. The process of selecting groups was appropriately random: The organizers wrote each name on a piece of paper and put all the pieces in a hat, then picked out names one at a time. The first was designated to produce the head, the second the torso and the third the legs, a cycle they repeated 21 times. Then each artist was sent a piece of paper, which they were asked to return in a few months.
The Printworks organizers accepted and exhibited all the corpses. That inclusiveness was not always the case with the Surrealists, although they were reluctant to admit their critical control over output. As Breton’s first wife, Simone Collinet, observed: “The wastepaper basket played its part. One tends to forget that.”
Some of the visual coincidences that occurred at Printworks are uncanny, considering the large role chance played in creating these corpses. In one figure a torso by Jeanine Coupe Ryding exposes a skeleton made of industrial-age machinery, from which equally industrial legs by Phillip Chen emerge almost seamlessly. The head by Antonia Contro is also schematic, identifying parts of the face only with written words describing their function — “see,” “smell,” “hear,” “taste” — and completing a body more machine than human.
Other corpses give a jolt with their wildly disparate parts. The corpse made by Susanna Coffey, Lesley Dill and Karl Wirsum starts with a classical female head obscured by random markings and a torso sewn with ribbons that reads, “I will call you ribbon of hunger and desire.” It ends with legs done in Wirsum’s typically funky, downtown style, complete with an erect, neon appendage.
The Exquisite Corpse wasn’t the only Surrealist technique to tap into the poetry of dreams and the unconscious. Question and Answer, the Truth Game and the Game of Variants are just a few of the games that involved words. Visual games included Ghosts of My Friends, which used players’ signatures; frottage, a method of rubbing a pencil or crayon over textured surfaces; grattage, scraping wet or dry paint from a canvas with a blade; decalcomania, a transfer process; and, most important, collage, in which scraps of paper were dropped randomly onto a sheet of paper and glued.
But the kingcat daddy of all Surrealist techniques was automatism, which also formed the basis for many of the games. All it required was sitting down and putting oneself in a receptive frame of mind, then writing down or drawing whatever thoughts bubbled up. Its pra
ctitioners often claimed to fall into a trancelike state, captive to the whims of the unconscious.
These games and techniques eventually made their way to the United States, where they found new fans, especially among young Abstract Expressionist painters in the making. By the 1930s some artists were experimenting with automatism, albeit a new, Americanized version that brought the ego into the process, as well as incorporating the biomorphic forms of artists such as Tanguy and the fantastic landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico.
An exhibition of American Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s now at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art illustrates with 74 works by 54 artists how the European movement helped usher in a new era of American art. Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder and other artists discovered Surrealism through travel in Europe, art magazines and a few exhibitions, and then later experienced it firsthand from Surrealist emigres during World War II. Surrealism helped free Americans from the realism that reigned in the 1930s, clearing the way for the advent of Abstract Expressionism.
Most of the works in the exhibition, such as Leon Kelly’s painting of giant insects standing among cliffs and Kurt Seligman’s decaying, mummylike figures, stay as true as the eternal Exquisite Corpse to Breton’s mandate: “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”
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“The Exquisite Corpse” continues at Printworks Gallery, 311 W. Superior, through Feb. 12, and “Surrealism in America During the 1930s and 1940s: Selections from the Penny and Elton Yasuna Collection” at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., through March 12.
