Exquisite corpse

Surrealist automatic writing & art technique

For other uses, see Exquisite corpse (disambiguation).

Exquisite corpse drawing

Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, lit. 'exquisite cadaver') is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g., "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.")[citation needed] or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.

## History

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This technique was invented by surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least as early as 1918.[1]

The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." ("The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.")[1][2] André Breton writes that the game developed at the residence of friends at an old house in Montparnasse, 54 rue du Château (no longer existing). Besides himself he mentions Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy and Benjamin Péret as original participants.[1][3][4]

Henry Miller often played the game to pass time in French cafés during the 1930s.[5]

In 1932, artists Frida Kahlo and Lucienne Bloch created two near-nude exquisite corpses.[6] One is titled "Frida"[7] and the other "Diego"[8] (likely meant to represent Kahlo herself and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera).

## Picture consequences

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A four-person (four-sectioned) exquisite corpse drawing, 2011

Later the game was adapted to drawing and collage, in a version called picture consequences, with portions of a person replacing the written sentence fragments of the original.[9] The person is traditionally drawn in four steps: The head, the torso, the legs and the feet with the paper folded after each portion so that later participants cannot see earlier portions.[10][11] The finished product is similar to children's books in which the pages were cut into thirds, the top third pages showing the head of a person or animal, the middle third the torso, and the bottom third the legs, with children having the ability to "mix and match" by turning pages.

Another variation of the exquisite corpse also called "picture consequences" is Telephone Pictionary, a game in which players alternate writing descriptions and matching illustrations based on the previous step.[12]

## In popular culture

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* The Exquisite Corpse (1967) a novel by Alfred Chester.
* Exquisite Corpse (1996) is a Gothic horror novel by Poppy Z. Brite.
* Space and Time magazine builds a community exquisite corpse monthly on their website.[13]
* Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 erotic novel written as a literary hoax to parody American literary trends of the time. The credited author is the fictive "Penelope Ashe", though it was written by twenty-four journalists led by Mike McGrady, with each author writing a chapter without any knowledge of what the others had written.
* Exquisite Corpse is a literary magazine founded in 1983 (later in online version from 1999) published by Andrei Codrescu.
* Naked Came the Manatee (Putnam, 1996) is a mystery thriller parody novel. Each of its thirteen chapters was written, in sequence, by a different Florida writer, beginning with Dave Barry and ending with Carl Hiaasen.
* Folio of 28 Exquisite corpse drawings collected from Queensland Art Gallery's First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT1) artists' retreat, Bangalow, NSW, 20–23 September 1993. Held in the QAGOMA Research Library collection.[14]

### Art

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* The Narrative Corpse (Gates of Heck, 1995) is a comic book chain-story by 69 all-star cartoonists co-edited by Art Spiegelman and R. Sikoryak.
* The Breaking Boredom Project in graphic design, Cairo (2008).
* The Exquisite Corpse Adventure (Candlewick, 2011), commissioned by the Library of Congress, uses well-known children's authors and illustrators[15]
* Jake and Dinos Chapman have produced a number of exquisite corpses.[16]
* Eric Croes, Cadavre exquis, Chat Santiag (2017). Croes used his exquisite corpse drawing to make this clay sculpture.[17]
* A Cheese and Tomato Spider (1998) and a number of other books by author Nick Sharratt allow children to construct crazy combinations from images on half-pages.
* Exquisite Corpus (2023) by Kevin Blackistone[18] uses machine learning to create "3d chimeras of the human interior"[19] using medical imaging data.[20]

### Film and television

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* Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2000 film Mysterious Object at Noon uses this technique with a mixture of documentary and fictional film.
* The Exquisite Corpse Project is a 2012 feature-length comedy film written using the exquisite corpse technique.
* Cartoon Network and Adult Swim had created various "Exquisite Corpse" promos, with examples such as Rick and Morty 2017 trailer for season 3 titled "Exquisite Corpse" features a sequence to the song "Thursday in the Danger Room" from the album Run the Jewels 3 by Run the Jewels.
* Exquisite Corps as well as And So Say All of Us are choreographic versions by filmmaker Mitchell Rose.
* A sketch in Limmy's Show Season 3 Episode 1 involves a game of exquisite corpse being played in a bar.

### Music

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* In the 1940s, composers John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison, composed a set of pieces using this same process—writing a measure of music, with 1 or 2 additional notes (sources differ), folding it on the bar line then passing it to the next person. The pieces were later arranged by Robert Hughes and published as Party Pieces.[21]
* The band Bauhaus include the track "Exquisite Corpse" on their third studio album (The Sky's Gone Out) (1982), which appears to have been created in this collaborative surrealist style. They returned to the method for 2022's "Drink the New Wine", their first new song in 14 years.[22]
* The fifth track on the 1992 album Sacred City by the British rock band Shriekback is "Exquisite Corpse".
* The They Might Be Giants 1996 song "Exquisite Dead Guy."
* The musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998) includes the song "Exquisite Corpse".
* The band Warpaint named their debut EP Exquisite Corpse (2008) because of their collaborative songwriting style.
* George Watsky's 2016 album x Infinity features the song "Exquisite Corpse" using this technique featuring verses by several artists.
* In December 2019, French alternative-pop-rock band Therapie TAXI released the album Cadavre Exquis, relating to the artistic visuals and collaborative production of the opus.
* Swedish composer Anders Hillborg uses the technique in his 2002 orchestral work Exquisite Corpse.
* In September 2020, Polyvinyl Records released an 11-track compilation titled Exquisite Corpse, featuring over 45 of the label's artists including The Get Up Kids, Jeff Rosenstock and American Football, among others. The tracks were recorded remotely in the style of the game during the COVID-19 pandemic and a portion of the physical and digital album sales were donated to the non-profit MusiCares.[23]
* In August 2022, the free improvisation group G.at.0 (Pedro Alcalde, Núria Andorrà, Marina Hervás, Wade Matthews, Henar Rivière) presented 17 minutes of free improvisation ("Cadavre Exquis") at the IF 2022 – Improvisation Festival, organized and streamed online by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) at the University of Guelph, Canada. The piece, co-presented by 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, was an example of collective spontaneous creation, where each performer contributed unpredictably, resulting in a collaborative and experimental sonic work.[24]

### Architecture

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* In 2018, Simon Weir began producing catenary vaults where a dozen designers collaborate blindly using the exquisite corpse method.[25][26]

### Games

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* In ... and then we died, players use word-fragment tarot cards to form words to tell the story of their collective deaths.[27]

## See also

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* Photoshop tennis
* Poietic Generator
* Comic jam
* Round-robin story
* Mindmap
* Surrealist techniques
* Chinese whispers
* Mad Libs
* Reanimated collaboration

## Notes

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1. ^ a b c Breton, André (7 October 1948). "Breton Remembers". Archived from the original on 27 January 2008. Retrieved 30 September 2019. Exhibition catalogue, Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation, La Dragonne, Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris (October 7–30).
2. ^ Brotchie, Alastair; Mel Gooding (1991). Surrealist Games. London: Redstone Press. pp. 143–144\. ISBN 1-870003-21-7.
3. ^ "The Exquisite Corpse". Poetry Plus. 2009. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
4. ^ OctoberCMS. "The Exquisite Corpse". vintana.ph. Retrieved 2023-08-03.
5. ^ Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta; Schneiderman, Davis; Denlinger, Tom (2009-12-01). The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism's Parlor Game. U of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-2781-1.
6. ^ Ms Marissa Lynn (2012-02-20), Frida Kahlo & Lucienne Bloch - Exquisite Corpse, retrieved 2023-08-03
7. ^ "Frida Kahlo | Exquisite corpse (Frida)". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 2023-08-03.
8. ^ "Frida Kahlo | Exquisite corpse (Diego)". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 2023-08-03.
9. ^ Lubbock, Tom (13 April 2007). "Cozens, Alexander: A Blot: Tigers (c. 1770–80)". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2008-09-25. Retrieved 24 September 2008. "about Alexander Cozens"
10. ^ Budden, Jo. "Essential UK – Tattoos". British Council. Archived from the original on 14 January 2009. Retrieved 24 September 2008.
11. ^ "Rainy days survival guide". The Independent. 1 June 2007. Retrieved 24 September 2008.
12. ^ Newby, Peter (1995). The Giant Book of Word Games: The Bumper Book of Ingenious and Enjoyable Games for all Occasions. The Book Company. pp. 42–43\. ISBN 1-86309-172-6.
13. ^ "Exquisite Corpse". Space and Time. Retrieved December 12, 2021.
14. ^ Charlton, Cath (24 February 2022). "An 'exquisite corpse' uncovered - QAGOMA Blog". QAGOMA Blog.
15. ^ The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, Library of Congress, undated
16. ^ "'Exquisite Corpse', Jake Chapman, Dinos Chapman, 2000".
17. ^ Gotthardt, Alexxa (2018). "Explaining Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist Drawing Game That Just Won't Die". Artsy.
18. ^ "Kevin Blackistone". Retrieved 2025-06-15.
19. ^ "Remix Culture". 2022. Retrieved 2023-12-12.
20. ^ Blackistone, Kevin (2023-12-07). "Exquisite Corpus". ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Art Gallery. doi:10.1145/3610537.3632938.
21. ^ Leta Miller, ″Cage's Collaborations" in The Cambridge Companion to John Cage, 151-168. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154.
22. ^ "Bauhaus Share "Drink the New Wine," First Song in 14 Years". Pitchfork. 23 March 2022.
23. ^ "Polyvinyl Shares New Album Featuring Xiu Xiu, Jeff Rosenstock, and More". Pitchfork. 4 September 2020.
24. ^ "Cadavre Exquis, G.at.0" on YouTube
25. ^ Weir, Simon; O’Connor, Dylan Wozniak; Watt, Rodney; Reinhardt, Dagmar; Fernando, Shayani; Dibbs, Jason (2018-12-01). "Design and Fabrication of a ruled surface vault with the Exquisite Corpse". Nexus Network Journal. 20 (3): 723–740\. doi:10.1007/s00004-018-0385-9. ISSN 1522-4600. S2CID 126183070.
26. ^ "Exquisite Corpse: Catenary Vaults". sydneydesign.com.au. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
27. ^ "To Better Know that Death | Unwinnable". 3 January 2019. Retrieved 4 January 2019.

## External links

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* Media related to Cadavre exquis at Wikimedia Commons
* Exquisite Corpse (2006–2014), a collaborative digital illustration by artists James apRoberts and Brian Christopher

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*[lit.]: literal translation