In celebration of the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, this short documentary takes a deep dive into the Surrealist game cadavre exquis or “exquisite corpse,” a collaborative drawing made by multiple people, with each adding a different body part while unaware of what the others drew. The video itself takes the form of an exquisite corpse, with three distinct parts, each introduced by one section from 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. Each is evidence of a community of artists spending time together. Part two delves into the longest-known exquisite corpse, Ted Joans’s Long Distance, which was 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, as we visit Huma Bhabha’s studio, where she, Jason Fox, and Joe Bradley make life-size exquisite corpses and talk about how pervasive the game has become in our culture.
Spanning 100 years of art history, 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 what Laura Corsiglia calls “a drawing going out to play with other drawings.”
We knew we wanted to link the earliest history of the exquisite corpse with artists working today. To do this we commissioned three experimental animators to play the game of the exquisite corpse, each creating a 10-second animation of the head, torso, and legs, which would serve as our chapter breaks in the video and allowing our finale of the video to be the reveal of the body they created together. This took collaboration and strategy between the animators and our Director/Producer and conceptually pushed the exquisite corpse game in a new direction we haven't seen any precedent for, with each animation taking their respective body section through a process of transformation toward its final state.
"Exquisite Corpse" is a top search term on moma.org, so we were aware of the interest from our audiences. In addition to distributing the video on our YouTube channel, this video became the centerpiece of MoMA's celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto on moma.org and added a new chapter to our rich resources on Surrealism. We also released the animation on YouTube Shorts and segments of the video on social media platforms.
On YouTube this video received 36.9K views, 230 new subscribers, and an average view duration of 3:25. Our first Instagram post, which shared Part 1 of the video about the origins of the exquisite corpse performed very well, with 277K impressions, 12.5K likes, and 80 comments. Our second Instagram post, which shared Part 2 of the video about the artist Ted Joans received 136K impressions, 2K likes, and 20 comments. The comments section had a vibrant discussion of how viewers had learned the game in childhood and memories of playing it with loved ones. Some described the surprise at learning that the game originated in Surrealism. Some selected comments include:
