Pages

Friday, 15 July 2016

Le cadavre exquis (the exquisite corpse)



It seems obvious to emphasize how important the visual nature of the dream is. However, this might be the reason that the major work of Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), had such a big impact on modern art, even greater than in psychiatry and psychology, at least in the early stages.

Although Surrealism emerged as a literary movement inspired by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, nineteenth-century mysticism and Symbolist art and literature, almost at the same time, the movement’s proponents realized the potential of the visual arts to express the imagery of dreams and the unconscious mind. So the practice of drawing, which offers the advantages of immediacy and spontaneity, became the most fertile medium of expression and innovation among the Surrealists.




It also seems obvious to reject the naive and clichéd affirmation that the Surrealist artists “copy” their dreams in their works. Max Ernst complained about it in his text What is Surrealism?(1934), but it is still too common even today.

For them, the dream is what might be termed life’s other fifty percent, a level of experience different from conscious life, the knowledge and liberation of which impinges in a special way on the enrichment and amplification of mental life, which constitutes the Surrealists’ main objective.

They used, in their efforts to bypass the conscious mind and access the subliminal realm, diverse drawing techniques like automatic drawing, frottage, decalcomania, collage, grattage, but some of the most striking surrealist drawings were the “exquisite corpses”.




The “exquisite corpse” is a surrealist game that involved collaboration and chance. It is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences. The technique got its name from results obtained in initially by playing: “Le cadaver/exquis/boira/le vin/nouveau” (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). Other examples are: “The dormitory of friable little girls puts the odious box right” and “The Senegal oyster will eat the tricolor bread”. These poetic fragments seemed to reveal the unconscious reality in the personality of the group, resulting from a process of what Ernst called “mental contagion”. It was natural that such oracular truths should be similarly sought through images, and the game was immediately adapted to drawing by assigning a section of the body to each player, though the Surrealist principle of metaphoric displacement led to images that only vaguely resembled the human form.




Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) described the rules of the drawing game: “Three (or more) of you sit down around a table. Each one of you, hiding from the others, draws on a sheet the upper part of a body, or the attributes able to take its place. Pass on to your neighbor on the left this sheet, folded so as to conceal the drawing, but for three or four of its lines passing beyond the fold. Meanwhile, you get from your neighbor on the right another sheet prepared in the same way (previously folded perpendicular to the axis of the body to be realized).




André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, considered that with the exquisite corpse we had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance and fully liberating the mind’s metaphorical activity. 




In my opinion, the exquisite corpse grasps the atmosphere of the dream in a amazing way, although the results can be sometimes more grotesque than real dreams. Both the spontaneity and the nonsense due to the change of one hand to another, make the magic of the “surreal” arise to its peaks. By the way, it might be an amusing game to partake in when you are out at the bar with your friends, the only thing you need is a pen, a piece of paper (a paper napkin, for example) and want to let fly  your imagination. Knowing how to draw in this particular case is not important, but rather to go into a “surreal adventure”.



Li

No comments:

Post a Comment