Exquisite corpse (from the original French term , literally 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.") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.
History
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.
The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game, "" ("The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.") 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.
Henry Miller often played the game to pass time in French cafés during the 1930s.
In 1932, artists Frida Kahlo and Lucienne Bloch created two near-nude exquisite corpses. One is titled "Frida" and the other "Diego" (likely meant to represent Kahlo herself and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera).
Picture consequences
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. 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. 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.
In popular culture
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. 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.
Art
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 Jake and Dinos Chapman have produced a number of exquisite corpses. Eric Croes, Cadavre exquis, Chat Santiag (2017). Croes used his exquisite corpse drawing to make this clay sculpture. 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.