Ingrid Schaffner

Tag: Collage

  • Excerpt from “Lives Naturally in the World of Theatre + Illusion.” Karen Kilimnik. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, pp. 29-107. Excerpt pp. 29-41.

    LIVES NATURALLY IN THE WORLD OF THEATRE + ILLUSION

     

    The Antichamber

    Antechambers are small rooms that conduct to larger rooms. They compress space to raise expectations of what lies beyond. How strange then to exit the antechamber only to enter the space of yet another small room, one that leads, more strangely still, into yet another antechamber? This is the particular provocation of a work by Karen Kilimnik, who once briefly studied architecture, in the course of becoming one of today’s most irreducible artistic figures. Since the early 1990s, Kilimnik has been known for portraying the icons of art, film, and fashion in works that draw correspondences between consumer culture and romantic tradition, and which bring a haunting and contrary sense of beauty to contemporary art. Even for those who know her work, this installation stands out for being so purely architectural. Imagine three different period rooms each richly and discretely appointed in wallpaper, wooden moldings, and a mantel or mirror. Each perfectly performs the role that antechambers have played throughout time immemorial of building a sense of architectural drama. Multiplied times three, the drama is further heightened by the oddly angled shapes of these interiors. Space does not so much flow as get pitched from room to room. Within these tight quarters, states of anxiety and suspense erupt from the insistent emptiness, charm, and repetition of these vexatious antechambers. Titled the Antichamber (2004)—note the anti-spelling—this installation ushers us into the oppositional realm of Karen Kilimnik’s art.

    This truly spectacular realm is displayed in “Karen Kilimnik,” the first major survey of her work. Occupying two floors of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), the exhibition includes over one hundred objects borrowed from across America to represent more than twenty years of practice. It was selected and composed in dialog with Kilimnik, who typically approaches her exhibitions as a form of installation art. Here she specified that the first and largest gallery appear almost entirely empty. Works are actually hidden from view inside of a small, freestanding chamber, a new installation Kilimnik created especially for the exhibition titled the red room in the modern Architecture. The sheer volume of the surrounding space makes the gesture all the more defiant and confusing. (Try leading a tour into a gallery from which Karen Kilimnik’s first major museum survey seems to have vanished.) The conventions of curatorial practice have not been overruled by artistic intervention. Quite the contrary, both are rigorously implemented throughout an exhibition made up of four component installations, each with its own organizing premise.

    The gallery adjacent to the first, empty-looking one focuses on Kilimnik’s drawings and early sculptures. Long and narrow, it resembles a lost corridor of works on paper at the Louvre crossed with the hall at the end of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. On the center of the floor—as if in lieu of a bottle marked “Drink Me”—is a pile of pills, white powder, a razor, and other paraphernalia that make up the 1991 sculpture titled Drugs. On the second floor of the museum, the survey continues, or rather starts over again, with media-based works: photography, video, and printed matter. One gallery is a video lounge. Dark and glowing with the cool light of monitors, it contains some of the earliest works in the show. Hanging in a line, like the frames of a film, are eight of the “Me As” series of self-portrait photographs, in which the artist has used a heavy black marking pen to assume celebrity guises and alter her appearance. There is, for instance, Me as Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet Before Horse Race and Me with Contact Lenses (both 1988). Here is where you will also find a case of selected books and other printed matter designed by the artist, along with one of Kilimnik’s photo albums—the cheap store-bought kind that she has long been in the habit of filling with her snapshot photography.[footnote=1] The other upstairs gallery is Lincoln Center. Painted icy pale blue and trimmed in decorative moldings, it is a stage for one of the major themes in Kilimnik’s art—the imagery of the ballet—and features a video installation that takes the form of an architectural folly. This gallery alone tells the story of her art’s underlying ambition to achieve a full-scaled and theatrical form of production. Except that the ballet is just a single aspect of an oeuvre with many antechambers, any one of which can be experienced as a very large room.

    To enter the small white chamber that so aggressively occupies ICA’s first-floor gallery is to duck into a museum, albeit a miniature one, where another major survey of Karen Kilimnik’s art is taking place, in what appears to be the past tense. Red walls, hung salon style, are thick with pictures of every genre and subject: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, animals, religious and allegorical subjects, and, of course, the ballet. Most of the works are paintings, but there are drawings and photographs too. Many are ornately framed. Indeed, the whole space functions as a frame or tableau for the works on view. Decorative moldings—at chair and ceiling height—band the perimeter. Scrolling patterned wallpaper evokes a romantic era. An enormous round settee, upholstered in raspberry-colored velvet, occupies the floor.

    It is a temporary framework, like all exhibitions. When the ICA survey closes, and the works are returned to their respective public and private lenders, the red room in the modern Architecture will be dismantled, dematerialized. It was only conceived in response to the problem Kilimnik perceived in showing in a contemporary space to begin with. As she noted in our correspondence: “I got the idea because I thought it’s a pity to work so hard to change the modern building to look old and this way we can have both. You also have an approach, walking [across the empty white space] to the room. And I have always wanted to have paintings hung like you see in old paintings of salons from the eighteenth century.”[footnote=2] It’s a classic conundrum, which critic Brian O’Doherty theorized in his text Inside the White Cube. “Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of ‘period’ (late modern), there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbo-like status; one has to have died already to be there.”[footnote=3] In Kilimnik’s period room, art exists in a kind of eternity of taxidermy. The salon, O’Doherty writes, epitomizes what a gallery is: “a place with a wall, which is covered with a wall of pictures.”[footnote=4] But such a wall is “upsetting to the modern eye: masterpieces as wallpaper…the (to us) horrid concatenation of periods and styles…”[footnote=5] Even to postmodern eyes, which should presumably see its political and critical implications, Kilimnik’s red salon is curiously disturbing. It is the feminized space, the nonhierarchal display, the anxious architecture; it is the antidote, in short, to the white cube. And yet, at the same time this work absorbs, it also rebuffs such attempts at contextualization. Is it transgressive or ingenuous? This is perhaps the most radical aspect of Kilimnik’s art, its very destabilization of these terms.

    Scanning her work from the plush vantage of the settee, one is bound to experience a sense of déjà vu. Kilimnik is a copyist for whom the process of picture-making always begins with an act of quotation that turns into an act of possession. From publicity shots of Leonardo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson, and from paintings by Velázquez, Titian, and Reynolds, come some of the more famous images she has made her own. Sometimes it’s just a detail she’s after, which makes the original hard to identify. Not that Kilimnik is trying to hide anything; her art is friendlier than that. Its very style of depiction, dashing and bold, seems aimed at establishing the quickest means of identification between viewer and subject. Laying down just as many strokes as it takes to capture the essence of what she’s after, Kilimnik’s art is especially attuned to the pictorial economy and present-day popularity of Impressionism. On the wall is a copy after one of the historic movement’s American practitioners, who is also among its sweetest Stylists, street scene with Hansom Cab in the Forrest from Childe Hassam (2003). Nevertheless, there are many obscure and ephemeral points of reference, as Kilimnik is an avid consumer of media in all forms.

    She might be the quintessential postmodernist. All the signs and strategies are there: the concerted mix of culture high and low, the myriad mediums and allusive styles of depiction, the appropriation and fragmentation of images, the fugitive sense of history and identity. Kilimnik’s work displays the complete repertoire. However, to her credit, she calls these techniques into play without irony or detachment. Sidestepping all of the anticipated postmodern positions, Kilimnik’s art is disarmingly subjective—immersive, imaginative, opinionated, possessive. It simultaneously mediates and expresses those desires and emotions, which appear, like the imagery itself, to be left critically unresolved, full of mystery and aspiration.

    The red room in the modern Architecture is the Antichamber that introduced this essay. It is the period room that conducts the viewer into a quasi-historical and romantic past. And so does this exhibition—a grand statement composed of discrete compartments—seem to be made up of anterooms that do not lead to the expected larger room. This room could be postmodernism. It could be Romanticism. Both grant access to Kilimnik’s work. But her art resides significantly elsewhere. Adjacent and detached, it is its own antechamber, one that this essay proposes to inhabit by exploring the work’s themes and developments. Given the complexity and many intertwined aspects of her art, the lack of a basic narrative is a striking lacuna within what is now a very substantial exhibition and publication history. Before going into this history, however, another set of chambers beckons.

    To merely mention Edgar Allen Poe is to hear the tapping, “As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.” The narrator of “Berenice” is summoned by the sound of moaning to the antechamber outside his library where he finds “a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me Berenice—was no more.” Kilimnik has more than once referred to a penchant for Poe, whose Philadelphia home, now a museum, is like the Antichamber, composed of small rooms that lead into more small rooms—all of them empty. What better space in which to concentrate Poe’s imagination?[footnote=6] Calling his work gothic merely imparts the flavor, not the force that Baudelaire dubbed an “almost divine faculty,” for its ability to “immediately [perceive] everything: the secret and intimate connection between things, correspondences and analogies.” This is in essence the faculty of Karen Kilimnik’s art, which has also been called gothic in style. Framed by specific references across reams and streams of cultural matter, it brings us to an interior place of imaginative speculation and intense, sometimes divine, emotion—a place that is perhaps the antechamber of all art.

     

    What Do You Know About My Image Duplicator?

    An account of Karen Kilimnik’s formative years in Philadelphia reads as a tale of mystery and imagination. It begins with the question of when was she born?…

     

    The author would like to thank Geoffrey Batchen for his reading and Donna Ghelerter for her editing of this text.

  • “Found in Translation.” Jess: To and From the Printed Page. New York: Independent Curators International, 2007, pp. 15-72. Excerpt pp. 15-18. Copy

    FOUND IN TRANSLATION

    A Delightful Pamphlet

    “Got Wallace’s Art Forum (tore out everything else) and made a delightful Berman pamphlet,” reported Jess in January 1966.[footnote=1] He had just reduced that month’s Artforum magazine to a four-page booklet comprised only of the pages featuring Wallace Berman’s mystical Verifax collages. It is a small gesture, but one that speaks volumes about the San Francisco artist Jess and his work. On its face, it was a tribute to the success of a friend and fellow Californian with whose work Jess’s was identified.[footnote=2] That very month, an exhibition would open in London, where Berman and Jess, together with Bruce Conner and Lyn Foulkes, were presented as avatars of a new, American West Coast approach to collage.[footnote=3] Funky with the residue of not-so-distant pasts (the Victorian era, the Depression) and uncanny visions of the present (the psychedelic and occult), the California Assemblagists used the stuff of scrap yards and scrapbooks to make art that often looked ready to return to being found.[footnote=4] Tearing up magazines was basic practice, and collage a language in which they were all conversant. On the other hand, Jess’s gesture was also a tacit act of reproach. Not against Berman, but against the contemporary art world represented by Artforum’s other sixty-one pages of features, criticism, and advertisements that Jess had discarded. Apparently he didn’t consider the rest of the magazine worth cutting up for collage material. Even given Artforum’s West Coast origins (founded in San Francisco, it moved from Los Angeles to New York in 1967), the content simply wasn’t part of Jess’s picture.

    That said, Jess contributed significantly and imaginatively to the history of contemporary art. Born in 1923 in Long Beach, California, he turned to art and changed his name from Burgess Collins in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, using just a flick of the knife (and some glue), Jess subverted Dick Tracy comic strips into the series of Tricky Cad collages that became early icons of Pop art. During the 1960s, he transformed all manner of found black-and-white images into strangely gorgeous appropriation art in his series of paintings called Translations. Of the juxtaposition between these works’ illustrative imagery and lumpy molten surfaces, the poet John Ashbery wrote, “The neat, workmanlike transpositions ignore the anomalies of surface, as though a magic lantern slide were projected on a lunar landscape.”[footnote=5] During the 1970s, Jess achieved an ambitious new scale for collage, creating compositions—some measuring over six feet wide—that are as complex and clotted as they are whirling and baroque. Curator Michael Auping, the leading scholar on Jess’s art, sees in these grand-scale collages an “activated field of interlocked, free-associated images that vaguely resemble the painterly explosions and gestural coupling of action painting.”[footnote=6] They occupied Jess, who worked at an increasingly incremental pace, throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s.

    Jess’s art is book-ended by abstraction. As a student at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), he studied with some of California’s leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, most significantly Clyfford Still. His move from painterly abstraction to collage was preceded by the emergence of pictorial and symbolic elements in his paintings.[footnote=7] Like Joseph Cornell, Jess worked from a studio archive, which he developed over years of collecting and clipping source material and filed according to subject.[footnote=8] He spoke of pulling images from the past into the present and working through a state of flux until the “collage takes over, it becomes the maker and I become the instrument.”[footnote=9] In the process, he attached hundreds of fragments to the support with pins, then stirred the composition like magma or energy, until it was resolved and ready to glue into place. He called the results “Paste-Ups,” a term he coined to set his art apart from Dada and Surrealist collage, which he felt an admiration for, but little affinity with.[footnote=10] Likewise, he called his assemblage objects ‘Assemblies.” Or, as if to kill any possible link with precedent or the California Assemblage scene, “Necro-facts.” The latter term also implied the redemptive angle of working with found images and forgotten materials, a small power that seems to have given Jess a great sense of purpose and pleasure. For one of his later series, Salvages, Jess recycled abandoned abstract paintings (his own old canvases and those found in his habitual trawling of junk stores) by inserting pictorial passages into the existing fields of brushwork. In “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me”: Salvages II, 1963-1972, isolated figures dot an abstracted landscape to create a sense of uncanny incident. While previously Jess had abandoned abstract imagery for pictorial representation, the Salvages give equal footing to the non sequitur narratives of dream (or myth) that appear to be taking shape and to the hazy matrixes that envelop them. Not only had his art come full circle; Jess had, in a way that seems truly American in its resourcefulness, invented an ingenious means of recuperating for a postmodern age the glorious pasts of both abstraction and easel painting, using this clever gizmo called collage.

    Despite these achievements, Jess’s reputation remains marginal. When he died in January 2004 at the age of eighty, his New York Times obituary called him “an artist whose idiosyncratic paintings and collages made him a cult figure in American art.”[footnote=11] Indeed, Jess’s following was limited, if devoted. So the question is: How might we access his work—which is so openly inviting—more fully? Consider once more Jess’s extractive gesture, this time not as a tribute to Berman but (to borrow Jess’s terminology) as an act of translation. Jess turned an art text into a literary one—for what is a pamphlet but a little book? Pay attention to the object at hand. A slim thing, it resembles a chapbook, the kind of volume once hawked by chapmen that contained such miscellany as a romance, a ballad, or the life story of a notorious criminal, an artist of the underground. It is by way of this rendition of Jess’s act that the “delightful Berman pamphlet” guides us in how Jess’s work might be most delightfully read: by focusing on its bookish aspects.

    This interpretive framework bumps directly into a certain modernist art-historical prejudice against the literary to find meaning in the marginal. It is an illuminative one for considering the paste-ups that Jess created specifically for publication or reproduction, which are central to this survey. Turning printed matter into material to be printed, Jess made many of his works in collaboration with poets, most significantly his partner, Robert Duncan, recipient of the tell-tale January 1966 letter. He also made extraordinary collage announcements and brochures for his own exhibitions, suggesting that he valued the chance to increase his art’s “readership” by disseminating his work in print. But it is not only the literary work that this bookish framework illuminates, it is Jess’s work overall. When art as idiosyncratic as Jess’s is looked at with an eye for books and poetry, words and literature, stories and translations, it comes into plain view.…

     

    The author would like to thank Chris Taylor for his accompaniment on so many of the journeys this Jess essay represents, and for his insights along the way.

  • “Apres Exquis” The Return of the Cadavre Exquis, ed. Jane Philbrick. New York: The Drawing Center, 1993, pp. 43-71.

    Apres Exquis

    Walter Benjamin, a connoisseur of radical montage, wrote, “The father of surrealism was dada; its mother was an arcade.”[footnote=1] Seen in this light the cadavre exquis, surrealism’s abject offspring is a visual department store disgorged of its goods, an assembly line of absurd–at times, sublime–expressions. So how, one may well ask, do we read it?

    One heeds in the interpretation of original cadavre exquis drawings a caution against too singular a reading, a caution which the works themselves support. With only a few important exceptions, historic cadavre exquis have been exhibited as secondary works, treated within the larger context of surrealist games and automatism.[footnote=2] Much has been written on technique. Famous sessions have been documented, but there is very little in print about individual cadavres. [footnote=3] For the most part, these works exist as uninterpreted records, novel apparitions of point sublime, that spot on the distant horizon where everything–rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, abstract and concrete–converge.

    One of the first guides to this surrealist arcadia was Julien Levy’s book Surrealism, published in 1936 by the legendary Black Sun Press. Bound with jacket covers by Joseph Cornell, and printed on a rainbow of colored paper, this book sings like a synthetic scrapbook of surrealist precepts and personages. It contains, under headings such as CINEMA, FETICHISM, and BEHAVIOR, everything from the screenplay for the Luis Buñuel/Salvador Dalí film, Un Chien Andalou, to a passage from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, from pictures of work by Max Ernst to poems by Paul Eluard. For surveying the aftermath of “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis,” Levy’s approach seems a ready model. Allow the fragments to take issue, to form, and fall as they will, although today these fragments do not coalesce at point sublime.

     

    Surrealism

    In 1916 Guillaume Apollinaire named a poetic spirit adrift throughout the ages “surrealism.”[footnote=4] By its first historical account, recorded in Levy’s books, surrealism claimed amongst its forebears the Marquis de Sade ”in sadism,” Edgar Allen Poe “in adventure,” Rimbaud “in life and elsewhere.”[footnote=5] Others include the satiric illustrator de Granville, the symbolist writer Isidore Ducasse (a.k.a., compte de Lautréamont), the photographer of Paris Atget. Those ordained: the Marx Brothers, and Frida Kahlo, who coyly commented upon her own induction, “I never knew I was a surrealist till André “ Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.”[footnote=6] Working outside Breton’s jurisprudence, David Lynch’s ant’s-eye-view, Angela Carter’s violet pornography, Bob Dylan’s tombstone blues, and virtual reality could also be called surrealist.

    As called forth by “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis,” surrealism’s essence, a montage of irresolute fragments, appears impossible to contain. Teased by Linda Herritt, surrealism’s coif, stiff as shellacked drapery, tumbles down in the luxuriant fall of Millie Wilson’s hairpiece. Its head is buried alive by Jim Shaw under a mound of delicately rendered octopi. (The image of an octopus recurs as legs in a photogram by Kunie Sugiura.) Drawn by Lawrence Gipe  (p.42), the face of a freight train comes to light, only to be extinguished by Lawrence Weiner, who attributes to surrealism no feature at all. Sporting a dirty velvet cumberbund, courtesy Maurizio Pellegrin, with Kavin Buck’s body of text, surrealism’s sex in indeterminate, but–as Don Ed Hardy would have it–voracious, or, even–according to John Wesley (p. 49)–orgiastic. Standing back for the panoramic view, surrealism’s style is both elegantly calligraphic and compulsively blunt. Language colloquial. Surrealism is humorous, certainly sports a tattoo, may have served time in prison, frequently stalks on animal legs.

     

    Surrealisms

    Author of the movement’s polemics, André Breton was surrealism’s inspired leader and tyrannical prince. It’s ironic and indicative of surrealist spirit that Breton, who attempted to encode it, define it, even determine its politics, was ultimately eluded by it Enervated by Salvador Dali’s remarkable imagery and exasperated by his behavior, Breton dispelled Dali from the ranks of the surrealists in 1934. And yet in the popular mind it’s Dali who is most closely linked with historic surrealism. In retrospect and of late, Georges Bataille, now seen as surrealism’s critical author, has similarly displaced Breton.[footnote=7]

    Whereas Breton’s surrealism distills itself into objects–a bowler hat, a biscuit, a woman’s glove–Bataille envisions it as an image of diffusion, an excess of energy that obscures containment. He called this the “informe,” and ascribed it with the “job” of rendering the formed object, idea, emotion or sign into a state of formlessness.

    Formless is thus not merely an adjective with such and such a meaning but a term for lowering status with its implied requirements that everything have form. Whatever it (formless) designates lacks entitlement in every sense and is crushed on the spot, like a spider or an earthworm.[footnote=8]

    The surrealist movement governed by Breton tends to reside resonantly in particulars–clocks, dolls, and found objects–which are themselves dated in appearance. However, as conjured by Bataille, surrealism is transgressive. It exceeds the parameters of time, the strictures of space, and is thereby elusive.

    Both surrealisms have come into play during the course of this game. Sometimes as direct bodily evocations. After Man Ray’s famous photographic portrait comes a drawing Breton’s by Steve Wolfe of André Breton’s head. Cindy Bernard uses the text of Bataille’s “Big Toe,” which declares this appendage to be the most human part of the body.

    Other times, these two surrealists appear as oblique points of reference: Bretonian collage, displacement, found objects are drawn together with Bataille’s tattoos, scars, animism, diaspora, and pictures of spiritual ecstasy. The former is captured in a drawing, rich with nostalgia, by starts with a poem and ends with collage on little cat feet. Elements of the latter surrealism are lodged in the hectic, scribbled drawing which hovers over an image of mannequin legs akimbo in the cadavre by Alan Turner, Carroll Dunham, and Laurie Simmons.

    At its most poetic, this game remains as Breton intended it–and Bataille may have played it–with critical spirits expelled on holiday, an informal evocation of surreal transforms Bretons game of cadavre exquis into a post-modern possibility.

     

    Games

    Play might be considered the discipline of this century. Voicing every thought that came to mind, Sigmund Freud played by the rules of free-association to enter into the realm of his own unconscious and thereby formulate a modern picture of the mind. Likening their exhilarating progress to mountain picture of the mind. Likening their exhilarating progress to mountain climbing and aviation, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso worked closely and competitively to invent Cubism, opening pictorial space up to radical speculation and abstraction. Albert Einstein called it relativity. Accomplishing a similar feat in the field of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure–himself an avid anagram player–re-envisioned the structure of language after the game of chess by equating words with game pieces, each dependent on the play of context for meanings mutable and strategic. For Foucault, this notion of language as an object of knowledge open to historical change and arbitrary deformation marks the inception of the modern era.

    Consider the knight in chess. Is the piece by itself an element of the game? Certainly not. For as a material object separated from its square on the board and the other conditions of play, it is of no significance for the player. It becomes a real, concrete element only when it takes on or becomes identified with its value in the game.

    -Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1906-11)

    Play is the essence of abstract thinking and creative invention, a form of behavior with no anticipated goals or results other than pleasure itself. In the wild, young animals frisk about as a way of learning how to behave. For almost the exact opposite reason, we humans continue to romp as adults in order to refresh our minds and bodies from the restrictions of routine approaches and activities. As an alternative to the conduct that led a world to war, dada gambled on misbehavior in order to transgress all etiquette and establish a new cultural (dis)order.

    With the [surrealist] movement firmly entrenched, we met nearly every day at each other’s homes or in cafés chosen in the least artistic or bohemian quarters of Paris, to discuss future activities and publications…There were questionnaires on various subjects: sex, love, what was the most fateful encounter in one’s life, etc. Sometimes a poet would go into a trance and write automatically, producing astonishing phrases full of anagrams and puns. Or we would simply play games, everyone participating. – Man Ray, Self Portrait, 1963

    Applying themselves more systematically to this project, the surrealists adopted games as a form of experimentation. They played hard at scores of word and picture games in order to escape what they knew and discover what could be imagined.[footnote=9] Making art in this vein, Alberto Giacometti constructed his series of sculptural game boards in the thirties. Max Ernst’s late sculptures are iconic chessboard figures. Disciples of the European avant-garde, the American abstract expressionists also dutifully played surrealist games.

    Not exactly a team player, Marcel Duchamp allegedly abandoned art–with all its knowable forms–for chess. It is interesting to note that in formulating a theory of games, the mathematician John Neumann discounted chess. As it relies on tactics that are short term “if” actions, with calculable results, it doesn’t resemble those real games we constantly play in life, which are based on strategies or more open-ended “what-if” abstractions.[footnote=10] Though very few people play chess these days, such enigmatic strategies have endured. Aleatoric, what-if abstractions structured art of the sixties and seventies, making it spontaneous and lifelike. Daring silence, John Cage invited chance to play in the midst of his piano performances. Jean Tingley’s self destructive sculptures played themselves to death. Games such as these moved art into real time and space.  

    [During the Twenties] There was a great vogue for games of all sorts…crossword puzzles, mahjongg, and innumerable card games. There was also a vogue for “tests.” One of the most popular of these consisted of turning up a woman’s handbag and describing her personality from the heterogeneous contents. -Armand Lanoux, Paris in the Twenties, 1960

    As so evidently portrayed here, the artworld’s facture has grown increasingly dispersed, its community decentralized and insular. As we so well discovered during the process of this project, ferreting artists out of their studios all over the world, there are no cafe-headquarters. In turn, the nature of play has changed. Presaged by such (surrealist) examples as Claude Cahun’s gender-bending photographs and Leonor Fini’s performance-art approach to life, these games seem based more on role-playing and autobiography than on movements and conquest The big games are now, in fact, small ones, inspired by those private (often childish) forms of amusement one tends to pursue alone, like dress-up, dolls, and make-believe. Forfeiting the utopian, or merely grouped-minded, aspects of earlier pursuits, players today scrimmage, not by prescribed rules, but according to personal whim and individual preference.

    L’huitre du sénégal mangera le pain tricolore. The Senegalese oyster will eat the tricolor bread. –cadavre exquis

    So why, less than ten years short of the new millennium, do we reenact this early twentieth-century game? In retrospect of “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis,” experimental intentions come forward, but initially we played in pious keeping with orthodox surrealism. Because it’s fun.

    If there is one activity in Surrealism which has most invited the derision of imbeciles, it is our playing of games…Although as a defensive measure we sometimes described such activity as “experimental” we were looking to it primarily for entertainment, and those rewarding discoveries it yielded in relation to knowledge only came later. — André Breton, 1954[footnote=11]

     

    Collaboration

    “All our collaborators must be handsome so we can publish their portraits.” –Réné Magritte[footnote=12]

    As a joint venture, collaboration defies logic: the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. The total picture stands to topple over if the cadavre exquis is all earrings or individual organs fail to communicate. Rather, collaboration is a dialectical process. What is shared counts as much as that which has been withheld? The creative outcome of a successful collaboration is a new work, independent of any single contribution. In a collaboration by Christian Marclay, Olivier Mosset, and Alix Lambert, a pair of sutured lips, two green stripes, and a pair of legs cemented into one clay foot yields an image of thwarted expression, an evocation of censorship not one of its parts belie (p. 55).

    So good-natured by name, collaboration is not entirely generous in spirit.[footnote=13] Like Lex Luther, it calls for the death of the artist-superman. Listening for the collective voice, collaboration reproduces the interpretive and communicative aspects of art at the very level of its creation. Authenticity also takes a flying leap. Trespassing time and authorship, Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa, making Leonardo da Vinci an unwitting accomplice to this collaborative work of art. Here we find Aubrey Beardsley, Constantin Brancusi, Gustave Courbet, Ezra Pound, and unknown Rajasthani artist as well as Duchamp himself, among the many drawn into cahoots with the creators of contemporary cadavres exquis.

    Bypassing the author can create quite a snarl. The challenge in collaboration is striking that delicate balance between retaining containment and relinquishing control. Ironically, the mechanism which seems to keep collaboration healthy is competition. It is, in part self-conscious measure that accounts for the metamorphosis of the surrealist cadavres exquis from the pure noodlings that first appeared in the October 1927 issue of la Révolution surréaliste into the considerably more engaging works of art that these collaborations eventually produced.[footnote=14]

     

    Collage

    Collage was the surrealists’ umbrella aesthetic, sheltering a diversity of practices, from painting and poetry to the cadavre exquis. As a collection of things jumbled and juxtaposed, collage captured the experience of an aimless wander through crowded city streets and desolate alley ways. But collage was not about getting lost. Rather, it was a practice that required the purposeful selection, arrangement, and affixing of images. Collage-making was about looking, about locating the dream-image in the everyday.

    Although faithful in spirit to the principle of collage, the surrealists often bypassed the process of affixing images for the seamless effects achieved through photography, either in-camera or during the printing process. Compositions of trimmed snips of paper, whose cut edges openly displayed the marks of their making, were more expressive of the cacophony of dada. The surrealist, on the other hand, effectively subsumed collage within the technology of photography. As the given automatic eye, the camera offered a range of techniques through which an image could be altered, for example, by doubling, flipping, and solarizing the negative. While the dadaists were indifferent to the power of photography’s apparent objectivity, the surrealists were seduced by the uncanny “realness” generated by the manipulated photography.

    Le vapeur ailée séduit l’oiseau fermé a clé. Winged steam seduced the locked up bird. – cadavre exquis

    Relegated to the periphery, hands-on collage nonetheless remained a central and reigning principle of surrealist practice. It became integral to the popular surrealist diversion cadavre exquis. Early examples of the game, composed entirely of drawing, were superseded by more elaborate works augmented by the addition of bits of paper and ephemera clipped from magazines, catalogues, and photographs. Cadavre exquis was a curiosity to the surrealists precisely because it laid bare the workings of collage. In the preface to an exhibition catalogue of Max Ernst’s photo collages, Breton described the process of making collage as “attaining two widely separate realities without departing from the realm of our experience, of bringing them together and drawing a spark from their contact.”[footnote=15]

    Governed by chance, cadavre exquis playfully tested collage, fanning a gentle breeze to the match struck between images. Failures were as instructive and as pleasurable as successes.

    Although not a technique commonly practiced in contemporary art, with this most recent round of cadavre exquis, collage has returned with a vengeance. To appreciate this recourse to collage, it is helpful to consider cadavre exquis, collage has returned with a vengeance. To appreciate this recourse to collage, it is helpful to consider cadavre exquis’ origin as a word game. Read top to bottom, some of the drawings suggest the completion and closure of sentences. Such is the case with a drawing by Julie Ault, Cindy Sherman, and Marc Tauss, where the composed of a snapshot of a rocket, grows the body of a sinuous card-playing nude. To this body, ready to test the winds of fate, is grafted a pair of ponderous go-nowhere feet. More often, the drawings are open-ended, as in the cadavre by Curtis Anderson, Joseph Nechvatal, and Rosemarie Trockel. Unified by a common media, –nineteenth-century scientific illustrations and maps–meaning here resides in the loose, rhyming association of the combined parts.

    Interestingly, the technology of photography, the linchpin of the surrealist collage aesthetic, remains ever present in the contemporary game. Despite the advent of the computer, it is the technology of the camera that still dominates. Noted additions to the camera’s repertoire include Xeroxes, both color and black and white. In fact, photocopies have overtaken the collaged clippings of the past-pieces of yellowed newspapers and magazines have given way to the mundane shadow of the Xerox image. But like the surrealists’ embrace of photography, contemporary artists have been quick to make use of the potential of new technologies. In the drawing by the Critical Art Ensemble and Faith Wilding, a computer-generated head and torso is attached to collaged Xeroxes of repeating legs of armor. Processes common to surrealist photography, such as doubling, are now easily obtained through the use of the photocopier or the computer.

    These contemporary works, however, rarely engage the everyday urban detritus that so fascinated the surrealists. Rather, present day cadavres exquis logically quote a range of styles characteristics of contemporary art. Today artists caught playing a game which in all probability is not central to their practice, reach for a bit of he familiar. Still, others responded by suspending their usual practice. Many of the collage images they created are consciously dated, depicting outmoded machines and ghostlike grainy images from the past. Although the surrealists themselves were attracted to the forgotten and slightly out of fashion, contemporary artists have resorted to the past out of nostalgia. Whether seamless printouts or elbow-deep in clippings and glue, these images pay homage to the surrealist collage aesthetic.

    -Elizabeth Finch

    Grotesque

    This is the other art history. Accompanied by Boschian bagpipes, the Grotesque tracks a bloody footprint on the road to Calvary, farts, eats off Archimbaldo’s plate, burps, drinks from Meret Oppenheim’s tea cup, shits, dances to Goya’s capriccios, fucks and sleeps to dreams of H.C.Westermann’s death ship. Shock and schism are its means, rupture its golden rule. The cadavre exquis, playing on all of the Grotesque’s styles and strategies, is its Adonis, Venus, Marilyn, and Mickey.

    Traditionally, the Grotesque appears heaped to either side of the Renaissance, in its overwrought aspirant–the Gothic–and aftermath–the Baroque. In style and content, both canons are highly visible here. With a medievalist’s eye for the minute, Meg Belichick lifts images of potato eye and astral bodies for a torso made using found printer’s plates (p.38). Her partner, Joanne Brockley, depicts the sacred “temple of the mind” as a ruin of industrial architecture. A horny male dog’s haunches, drawn by Peter Cain, completes this Boschian hybrid on a low, animalistic note. Conflating human attributes and natural imagery is a device of the gothic grotesque brought up to date by Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Claire Pentecost, and Eve Andree Laramee. The tension between the head’s explosive burst of color and the body’s shackled cornstalk is poised–like Baba Yaga’s house–on a giant pair of chicken legs, collaged from road maps. This image suggests that, at its best, nature’s meeting with culture is an ambivalent one.

    On the march with Brockley’s automaton, a proliferation of cadavres exquis have been scrapped together by idolatrous engineers, who gleefully tinker with the machine of human anatomy. A drawing (p. 17) by Tony Oursler, James Casebere–both corroborating with mechanical modes of reproduction–and Charles Golden, recasts the model of classical perfection into a dehumanized pile a junk. Oursler’s photograph of a television antenna mounted atop Casebere’s image of a prison-cell toilet, set on Golden’s biomorph of fabric flocking, portrays the body as a dubious technological wonder.

    Matching the standards of postmodern culture, manufacture has taken on grotesque possibilities. Today, we all stand ready to be made into Exquisite Corpses. Pump it up. Suck it off. Tear it out. Reconstruct. Be all you can be, with the help of plastics, polymers, personal training, and, of course, the knife. Because the body is yours for the making. Constructing its destiny cell by cell, the Exquisite Corpse realizes the ultimate, post-human fantasy of the flesh.

    By giving way to grotesque displays of feeling, the corpse often upsets the equilibrium of emotions held in check by intellectual control. An agitated cadavre headed by Dottie Attie shouts and twists itself into a dramatic contrapposto, rendered by Mark Tansey, so that legs, by Steve Mendelson, seem to buckle under the impact. Conflating spiritual to be the ephemeral contents of a mind swirl above collage contributions by James Elaine and Peter Gilmore of a martyred Saint Sebastian set above a miasma of organic matter. Emotionally acute, humanly critical, heaven-kissing and ground-hugging, the cadavre exquis cultivates its energy and imagery from outside the classic mainstream of art history to encompass the often otherwise inexplicable excesses and margins of existence.

    Indeed, the grotesque corpse seems patterned in direct opposition to what Alberti, “the very founder of the theory of art, called convenienza or conformita.” As Erwin Panofsky elaborated, “It would be absurd if Milo the athlete were to be represented with frail hips of Ganymede with limbs of a porter, and ‘if the hands of Helen of Iphigenia were aged and knotty.’”[footnote=16]  This kind of physical comedy is the very meat of the cadavre exquis, just as mockery and satire present grotesque standards upon which the cadavre visibly thrives.

    A traditional underpinning of painting, the cartoon has long since slid out on its own subversive mission. This might be simply comic–like the (tee-hee) he-man by underground comic artists, Mark Beyer and Charles Burns, with artist Peter Saul (p. 63). Or given more pointed caricature, a lampoon attack. In a cadavre (p. 62) concocted during the 1992 election campaign, Robin Tewes turns the Republican ticket (Misters Bush and Quayle) into a two-headed hydra, which Megan Williams endows with a whirling dervish of breasts. Gary Panter adds a fecund female body, which Elliott Green finally carries away on a pair of fishy wet feet. Laughing itself to hysterical tears, a cadavre exquis by Jim Shaw, Sue Williams, and Nicole Eisenmann (p. 61) amplifies satire to a level of such ridiculous absurdity it verges on tragedy. Shaw’s caricature of one of the kings of comedy, Jerry Lewis, emits a gaseous cloud drawn by Williams, which erupts over a field of destruction, landscaped by Eisenman.

    Aching with the absurd, the Grotesque rips a hole in the sides of both conventional and conventional response, through which the Exquisite Corpse easily passes. The corpse emerges on the other side as a transcendent being, whose body performs the rituals of life–including death–with vigorous regularity.

     

    Sex

    Biomorphic, polymorphic, hermaphroditic, transsexual, homosexual, heterosexual–the cadavre is well-sexed. Perhaps it was simply the circumstances–a group creative effort–which started these juices flowing. Or else it was the perspective of surrealism–whose environs are the uninhibited unconscious mind–which elicited such licentious responses. Erotic energy courses through the collaboration of Bay Area artists, Brett Reichman, Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton and Peter Mitchell-Dayton (p. 67). A writhing bulb of gothic ornament, dripping with the oily patina of temps perdu, precipitates over the ample, bending, body of a late Marilyn, who, in white bikini, hands on hips, steps out of a bed shared with Betty at an orgy with other Archy comics, and even with just regular folks. Jughead’s crown is on the bedpost.

     

    The Corpse

    Leveling humanity to its organic essentials, flesh, excrement, and organs prove all equal in the eyes of the coroner. A veritable morgue, “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis” details an autopsy of spilt blood and gore. In a cadavre by Chicago based artists Story Mann, Mary Lou Zelazny and Roderigo Avila, a portrait image of Abraham Lincoln is abolished to a slurry of guts and animal matter. In adjacent operating room, Annette Lemieux performs an ink transfer upon an anatomical study of a head. This is joined to a photo-based image, by Doug and Mike Starn, of the body of Christ (certainly the most famous cadavre exquis), and blasphemously polished off by Timothy Greenfield-Sander’s photographic fashion-plate.

    I opened my bedroom closet. A half-dressed feminine corpse sagged into my arms..It’s a damned screwy feeling to reach for pajamas and find a cadaver instead. – Spicy Detective, July 1937

    There are also plenty of skeletons filling the ranks of the cadavre exquis and even a couple of x-rays. With death so near at hand, in both the name of the game and the images the game evoked, it is interesting to note that these spectators are patently metaphoric. The plagues inflicted by the AIDS virus and breast cancer, which constitute such an urgent component of today’s cultural politics are–almost without exception–not named here. Such omission sheds light on the true nature of the cadavre exquis as a cathartic being, whose imagery and activity envelopes the particular into a raucous, transcendental body.

     

    Time and the Body

    In the two years that have elapsed during the course of this game, the Exquisite Corpse marked time. Imagery based on the 1992 presidential election has already been mentioned in regards to the Grotesque. As if in response to the campaign button which read, “Elect Hillary’s Husband,” Bill Clinton does not appear here, though his wife, in a collage contribution from Laura Fields. The national hoopla celebrating Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America some five hundred years ago is quietly noted in the margins of a drawing by Moyo Coyatzin. (Marching backwards in history, this cadavre’s torso by Douglas McClellan is a collage homage to Chairman Mao’s colon.) “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis” also straddles the American Year of the woman. Coincidentally her body is here–with and without precedent–one of surrealism’s most graphic physical sites.

    Piquant femme-enfant, man-eating sphinx–surrealism appears obsessed with fantastic images of women. Equating sexual and creative freedom, the surrealists subscribed wholeheartedly to the psychoanalytic concepts of eros and the libido as liberating life-forces. Arousing muses of (heterosexual) love, women stood as communicating vessels between men and the marvelous. Yet there was very little place accorded her in the movement’s everyday membership, despite the participation of girlfriends and wives in cadavre exquis. [footnote=17]

    This unique woman, at once carnal and artificial, natural and human, casts the same spell as the equivocal objects dear to Surrealists: she is the spoon-shoe, the table-wolf, the marble-sugar that the poet finds at the flea market or invents in dream…

    -Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, 1949

    Here, with the cadavre’s return, women artists play in near equal numbers to men. Her body moves outside the bounds of a privileged male gaze, into the realm of a desiring or defiant female subject. Pantyhose legs contributed by Maureen Connor run to exhaustion and snarl with rebellious savagery. A simple slit cut through a torso-section by Siobhan Liddell turns up the acme fetish of castrating female. And there are abundant snippets from stories of “O,” among them David Humphrey’s girlish inquiry (p.42). On the other hand, many depictions comply with a traditional feminine cast. Within the framework of cadavre exquis,  these old parts were often handled to critical or comic effect. In a drawing by artists Bradley Rubenstein, Andrea Champlin, and Daniel Wasserman, a sinuously turning odalisque spins to a halt between her blandly bisexual head and jerry-rigged spring base.

    Sex, difference, death, beauty, birth, and ugliness, are embodied by this grotesquely gorgeous being whose vertiginous flip-flops between male and female, animal and object, culture and nature, sensual and cerebral, confound readings based on reason. Leading well beyond the point sublime, or bypassing it entirely, there is no svelte zeitgeist lurking within “The Return of the Cadavre Exquis,” though there are plenty of demons. Preying on the bugbears of an exclusive and synthetic approach to art, this inclusive body of work culminates in the antithesis of modernist principles. Collective and complicated, as opposed to singular and reductive, the cadavre exquis transgresses against the traditionally masculine construct of modernism and listens for a postmodern feminine ideal.