Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

• Surrealist artists of the 1930s invented the Exquisite Corpse game as a technique to tap into the unconscious and create an artwork that was nonsensical and based on experimentation 
• Surrealists were interested in spontaneity and chance 
• Participants take turns drawing sections of the body (head, torso, lower body) on a sheet of paper that is folded to hide the different contributions. 
• * Tip: draw lines from the section that you are working on connecting it to the second section so that the next person makes sure that the body is connected. Do the same to connect the second section to the third section.
• A bizarre and comical creature is born from the additions of all of the participants. 
• Referring to this game, Simon Kahn (Surrealist poet) said: 

We were at once recipients of and contributors to the joy of witnessing the sudden appearance of creatures none of us had foreseen, but which we ourselves had nonetheless created. The suggestive power of those arbitrary meetings…was so astounding, so dazzling, and verified surrealism’s theses and outlook so strikingly, that the game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation as well as stimulation, and even, perhaps, a kind of drug. 

See: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-explaining-exquisite-corpse-surrealist-drawing-game-die

Drawings are by Illustration students from the class “Illustration: Trends and Movements” in the Fall of 2022. 

Examples of artwork: 

1. André Masson, Max Ernst, and Max Morise, Exquisite Corpse, 1927.
2. Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise, Exquisite Corpse, 1928.