Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
Felix Wankel father of the rotary engine
remember The Alamo
Moshe Safdie and associates
In Every Dream Home a Heartache
Exquisite Corpse
"Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage
of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it
was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the
paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.
The technique got its name from results obtained in initial playing, "Le cadavre exquis boira le
vin nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). Other examples are: "The
dormitory of friable little girls puts the odious box right" and "The Senegal oyster will eat the
tricolor bread." These poetic fragments were felt to reveal what Nicolas Calas characterized as
the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group" resulting from a process of what Ernst
called "mental contagion."
At the same time, they represented the transposition of Lautréamont's classic verbal collage to a
collective level, in effect fulfilling his injunction-- frequently cited in Surrealist texts--that "poetry
must be made by all and not by one." It was natural that such oracular truths should be similarly
sought through images, and the game was immediately adapted to drawing, producing a series of
hybrids the first reproductions of which are to be found in No. 9-10 of La Révolution surrealiste
(October, 1927) without identification of their creators. The game was adapted to the
possibilities of drawing, and even collage, by assigning a section of a body to each player, though
the Surrealist principle of metaphoric displacement led to images that only vaguely resembled
the human form. One, by three hands, begins with a spider, which gives way to a man's torso
the feet of which are formed by two jugs. Other, more interesting cadavres exquis were
reproduced in a special issue of Variétés titled "Le Suréalisme en 1929" (fig. 288). One of these
begins with a woman's head by Tanguy, which dissolves in to a jungle scene by Max Morise,
returning to a female anatomy schematically indicated by Miró, and terminating in "legs" in the
form of a fishtail and an engineer's triangle by Man Ray."
Outhouse
Koolhaas