Friday, January 20, 2012

Exquisite Corpse/Cadaver

What comes to mind when you hear "Exquisite Corpse or Cadaver?"  Could it refer to a King, a Pope, a horse?  None of the above.  Rather it started as a parlor game.  It was amped up by the French Surrealists in the 1920's.  They called it cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).  This phrase came from a sentence created in the initial playing of the game:  "Le cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin / nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine.).  Surrealists believed in the mystique of accident in the creative process.  So Exquisite Corpse was a collective collage of words, or images (for images a section of a body was assigned to each player).  Based on the 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 the the next player for his contribution.  A collection of phrases/images is called The Morgue.   Ernst felt the results of the game came from "mental contagion" in/from a group of people.

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