In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto, this short documentary takes a deep dive into the Surrealist game “exquisite corpse,” a collaborative drawing made by multiple people, each adding a different body part while unaware of what the others drew. This video itself takes the form of an exquisite corpse, with three distinct parts, each introduced by an exquisite corpse animated by Kohana Wilson (the head), Miranda Javid (the torso), and Gina Kamentsky (the feet).
In part one, curator Samantha Friedman introduces the history of the game and looks at historical examples in MoMA’s collection made in the fraught but fertile period between the first and second World Wars in Europe. Each is evidence of a community of artists spending time together, including André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Valentine Hugo, Tristan Tzara, Victor Brauner. and Remedios Varo. Part two delves into the longest-known exquisite corpse, Ted Joans’s “Long Distance,” created over three decades by 132 contributors. Joans’s partner, artist Laura Corsiglia, and curator Lanka Tattersall explain how this project, like Joans himself, represents a second generation of Surrealism, expanding to include Beat poetry, the improvisation of jazz, and a global constellation of artists. Part three takes us to today. We visit Huma Bhabha’s studio, where she, Jason Fox, and Joe Bradley make life-size exquisite corpses and note how pervasive the game has become in our culture.
Spanning one hundred years of art history and the game’s existence, “How to See an Exquisite Corpse” explores the appeal and influence that makes this exercise both a radical strategy of creative freedom and a game that any group of friends can play. This is a celebration of “a drawing going out to play with other drawings,” as Corsiglia puts it.
00:00-1:19: Part 1: What is an Exquisite Corpse?
1:19-3:19: A record of a social history
3:19-5:16: Part 2: Ted Joans, the second generation Surrealist
5:16-7:21: Introducing “Long Distance,” the longest exquisite corpse
7:21-10:15: Contributions to “Long Distance”
10:15-11:00: Reflecting on the power of “Long Distance”
11:00-13:40: Part 3: Making a life-size exquisite corpse
13:40-14:32: The big reveal
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The comments and opinions expressed in this video are those of the speaker alone, and do not represent the views of The Museum of Modern Art, its personnel, or any artist.
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