How to See an Exquisite Corpse

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.”