The Exquisite Moving Corpse

In 2020, a conversation between American artists Chip Lord, Jack Massing, and Sean Miller sparked the idea for an ambitious collaborative audio-visual project that became the Exquisite Moving Corpse (2020–2022). Lord recalls that: “we started the project almost simultaneously with the local order to stay at home during the pandemic, and somehow it fit within that larger framework, and I had been working on a project that I could do at home in the backyard. The first minute was shot in my backyard.” Unfolding against the backdrop of the early stages of a global pandemic—the coronavirus disease known as COVID-19, first identified in Wuhan, December 2019—the project involves the creative work of 60 artists from across the world, each of whom was facing the conditions of a locally enforced lockdown in which movement was restricted. Lord, Massing, and Miller invited 19 artists apiece, and contributed their own one-minute films.

The environmental parameters which sprung up due to what was then to become a global pandemic, were entirely coincidental, yet they proved to be integral, interwoven into the Surrealist weft of the final artwork. As we all learned more about the coronavirus, our daily lives became simultaneously closer and further away, as public transportation, cultural and social labour, interaction, and free movement ground to a halt, facilitated only through zoom calls, computer screens, texts, and telephone calls. The sense of impending doom, of a Surreal patina slowly détourning the ‘normal’ was not only palpable, but actual. As a scholar of Surrealism, I felt the urgency for a revolution in representation, a mode of expression and resistance to counter the official narratives that held us in their power. As Massing articulates, without deliberately using Surrealism as the guiding principle of the project, nevertheless “it became both surreal and pandemic. Because it’s those ideas that are embedded into all of our work, whether we know it or not.” The project harnesses the vectors of time and distance to create a poly-authored film which feels paradoxically intimate at a time when people were being cautioned to stay apart, and to stay within fixed spatial perimeters.

Lord, Massing, and Miller each randomly selected 19 artists who would collaborate with them long distance in a game of cadaver exquis. Originating in 1925 and adapted from a ‘parlour game’ initiated by a group of Surrealists to harness chance, unknowability, and spontaneity in their creative collaborations, cadavre exquis metamorphosed into the twenty-first century as a digital, open-source, and experimental mobius strip of endless possibility in the deliciously expansive form of The Exquisite Moving Corpse—“we were, in essence, forced into thinking differently—because the world was different” (Massing). Miller notes how the dates align with the global pandemic of 1918, and shares his surprise at the striking similarities between the Surrealists’ cadavre exquis and The Exquisite Moving Corpse one hundred years or so earlier,

Back in Paris in 1925, when Jacques Prévert, André Breton,Yves Tanguy, and Marcel Duchamel played the first game at Duchamel’s house at 54 rue du Château, the rules were simple: write a line of poetry on a piece of paper, fold the paper so as to conceal the writing, and pass on to the next person to do the same. In Breton and Paul Éluard’s 1938 edited volume Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, the now classic line which gave the game its name is revealed to have been “Le cadavre—exquis—boira—le vin—nouveau.” Their dictionary entry also catalogues how the game of words grew to become a game of drawings, paintings, and collages, and from works now collected in the world’s museums, we can see how Surrealist artists collaborated on some extraordinary examples of le cadavre exquis. Suzanne Collinet1 describes the moment of the first surrealist game in 1925 as an “unfettering”: “Even more so than with automatic writing, we were sure of getting an astonishing amalgam. Violent surprise provoked our admiration and sparked an insatiable passion for new images: images unimaginable by one brain alone—images born of the involuntary, unconscious, and unpredictable combination of three or four heterogeneous minds.”2 Such feverish and spontaneous creative activity produced collaborative works absent of hierarchical order. Breton recalls that “[w]hat excited us about these games is that no single mind could have made what they created, and that they had a great deal of the power of drift, which poetry too often lacks. With the Exquisite Corpse we found a way—finally—to escape our self-criticism and fully release the mind’s metaphorical activity.”3 And for the participant viewer, “the power of drift” is transferred through the resulting edges of the folds. As Susan Laxton argues, “While the secrecy of the successive contributions to any one exquisite corpse is essential to preserve the startling effect of the players’ differences, it is the fold that makes them pronounced—against each other and against the unified figure. The ghostly familiarity of each fragment made unrecognizable through the condensations and displacements enacted by the folds, designates the scene of unfolding as an uncanny encounter with an estranged self.”4

What frequently began to emerge from le cadavre exquis were anthropomorphised object-corpses, abstract forms and columns indexing human form. The collage ‘exhibited’ alongside Breton and Éluard’s definition in le Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme is a case in point, where an upright umbrella in frozen pirouette replaces an upper torso, connected to various cut-out objects approximating a being of some kind (comprised of a travel chest, piles of saucepans, sculptural thighs, and hooves).5 There are many such examples, their vibrant collective energy a significant part of Surrealist history and its legacies, and it is similarly uncanny to witness the number of animals, and estrangements of human corporeality in The Exquisite Moving Corpse. For Lord, these were some of the most compelling images and transitions in the piece: “we’re living in a moment where the planet itself is threatened, and there’s a lot of exploration into co-living between humans and other species. And so that’s [. . .] what those animals represented to me [. . .] in the larger work. I love the transition from the chickens in the yard and then the next cut, the next piece begins with a peacock walking across a manicured lawn in Miami Beach.” As Miller puts it: “chickens can become peacocks and all this weird stuff can happen”—the cut allows for the magic to emerge in the transition.

The emphasis on chance relationships, and the collective, unconscious networks of surprising similarity (despite conventional readings of difference) that emerge across both written and drawn examples of le cadavre exquis, find new energies and resonances in The Exquisite Moving Corpse project. This is, of course, made possible through the medium of film—audio-visual capture—as well as through the virtual possibilities enabled through the internet, including such hosting platforms as YouTube and Tik Tok. The exquisite corpse game circumnavigates the social boundary between inner and outer worlds, and as such, perhaps provides the perfect liberatory vehicle for life during the strange lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, when, spatio-temporality shifted. The rules for The Exquisite Moving Corpse as set by the artists, were as follows: to take the very last frame of a one-minute video sent to you, and then to use that final frame as the inspiration for your own minute of video, which would then be sent to the next person in the list. Chip sent his first minute to Jack, who then sent his to Sean, and the randomised list of artists.

The link to Surrealist history was a very conscious part of the project’s genesis. Massing explains how the origin for the project “begins with the 1991 exhibition of the Exquisite Corpse [‘The Return of the Cadavre Exquis’] at The Drawing Centre [New York].6 Sean and Chip and I had been talking periodically basically every week for a while during COVID [. . .] We were talking about developing a project and this book happened to be on the table that I was looking through a few days earlier, I kinda turned to it, this could be an interesting take on video—I’d never thought about that before, and since we were talking on video conferencing the idea jumped into my head.” The book to which he refers is the catalogue for the exhibition at The Drawing Center.7 He goes on to explain how in the spirit of “merry mix ups” the project encountered temporal lags—for example when an artist didn’t respond—and continued on for three years. What was adapted from an intimate “parlour game” by the Surrealists, became a gigantic game of virtual intimacy via one-minute audio-visual films. We might consider, for example, how the addition of sound, brings additional sensory connections between the ligaments of the “corpse.” Miller notes how important sound is for the audience encountering an art project such as The Exquisite Moving Corpse and describes how one group of viewers questioned him as to whether the rules could have been altered “so that the artist could sonically respond in some ways as well” by sharing the last sound of each film, rather than the ultimate image. Such responses clearly indicate the multi-sensory stimuli at play in a work of film and make us consider not only the fold in the paper, but the idea of silence versus sound in the cuts between a montage without a unifying soundtrack.

As with Surrealist works of art and literature, the participant is integral to the affect produced, and as Massing describes: “It’s not necessarily what we intend or what we actually videotape in the piece. It’s what also is not in the videotape [. . .] It’s like a drawing or a sculpture. What’s not drawn is as important as what the lines are [. . .] what’s not there has a bearing and a weight on what is.” In order for this to work, the artists, like the Surrealists, choose avidly to relinquish editorial control, with Miller describing the creation of The Exquisite Moving Corpse as a project of curation (underscoring the etymology cure—to care for). The images, sounds, silences, and juxtapositions that follow have free rein, seeming to spill out and away from any idea of constraint. Lord emphasises the accessibility of the project for everyone, including the artists, who did not have to be filmmakers: “everybody has a video camera in their pocket [. . .] I welcome the fact that it’s [the cell phone] ubiquitous as a technology. And that meant that we weren’t just inviting video artists to make works [. . .] Any artists could do it.”

Watching and listening to the entire piece reveals microcosmic worlds; the smallness and ephemeral sensations of living in the moment, living in an everydayness where perspective and action are surreally suspended against the unknown, and the unravelling chaos of a global pandemic. The artists’ routines, whether relatively close at hand in constrained rooms, backyards, or on local walks, circulate with the help of digital technologies and spontaneous flights of imagination. The completed work of 60 minutes has been described as having an “accordion style” which “(lends itself to) something that surprises everyone in the end.” The motif of the accordion, an instrument itself sometimes temperamental and spontaneous, is an organism evolved from the original accordions of paper excitedly folded by the surrealists. Massing, Miller, and Lord also find the notion of the project as an organism, rather than “a film,” to be resonant.

Lord’s is the first video segment, and features his backyard during lockdown, and “somewhat appropriately to Surrealism, Duchamp was one of the first images in the film” made from objects to hand. As Lord joyfully notes, his version is as legitimate as any of the copies of the 1913 original, and its later versions, in museum and gallery circulation. The cinematic match cut that follows in #2, is a still, yet animate, tyre, which is accompanied by birdsong and naturalistic sounds of wind and planes overhead. Following the almost comic arpeggios of the bassoon piece in #1, the birdsong seems heightened, its realism strangely piercing. The accordion then twists inversely as minute #3 begins; this time the image provides the humour, with the circular motif metamorphosing into a bowl of ordinary Cheerios against a blue sky, and the naturalistic sounds bridging #2 without dissonance. Charles Simic, in an essay for The Return of The Cadavre Exquis catalogue, reminds us that the Surrealists intuited that the creation of the world is not finished. We might consider this when viewing the fragments of a world in The Exquisite Moving Corpse:

The art object is always a collaboration of will and chance, but like your sense of humor, it eludes analysis. There has never been an adequate definition of why something is funny or why something is beautiful, and yet we often laugh and make poems and painting that reassemble reality in new and unpredictably pleasing ways. What shocks more in the end, what we see or what we hear?8

The piece continues on, some artists remain behind the camera, others are seemingly desirous of a direct address to the camera. The viewer moves inside and outside, up flights of stairs, through screens, into vast panoramas, artists’ studios, woodlands, the surface of the moon, pixels. There is no grounding principle, yet the progression from one minute to the next feels illogical, familiar, alien, and intense. Images course freely: from live action footage, to found footage, of grainy and blurred qualities, to those which are pristine and stable; from pink animated chickens to real, ominous slugs. I feel that I am learning new, but already known facts about the world and its animate and inanimate inhabitants, where walls and ideas are permeable and proliferating, and light and shadow fall from different sources. The experience is tactile and exhilarating, and against the push of existential dread perpetuated by the world’s media attempting to control an image of the pandemic, The Exquisite Moving Corpse resets the rules of the game of life. Rather than walking the streets of Paris, these collaborators, trapped within varying degrees of spatial restriction, wander the flotsam and jetsam of earth, and all, once their encounters have occurred, have reenergised the ordinary. They have demonstrated the magical and strange connective tissue that lies, often hidden, on top of reality, conjoined, waiting to be noticed.

Finally, then, I want to return to the medium of The Exquisite Moving Corpse, the audio-visual moving image. In the preface to Death 24x a Second, filmmaker and film theorist Laura Mulvey summarises the peculiar particularity of film:

The cinema combines, perhaps more perfectly than any other medium, two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate, particularly the human, figure. These porous boundaries introduce the concept of the uncanny and Freud’s debate with Jentsch about the power of the old over the new and the hold that irrational belief has over the human mind. [. . .] Necessarily embedded in passing time, these images come to be more redolent of death than of life.9

Mulvey’s thesis that cinema is a mausoleum, a trader in the already gone, is one side of the coin, with the opportunity for life to arise back out of the image in the viewing or re-exhibition process. Surrealists loved the haunting, uncanny reanimation of objects via film. When I interviewed Jack, Sean, and Chip about their project, I mentioned the work of American Surrealist artist and musician Ted Joans whose own cadavre exquis project—Long Distance (1975–2005)—was completed two years after his death. Long Distance took time as each contribution inscribed on perforated computer paper, was sent by postal mail, safely forwarded in ‘skins’ such as plastic bags and envelopes. There was much that I wanted to say with this reference, not least to consider the idea of a protracted, slow game of chance across a 30-year collaborative artwork that travelled the globe, set in motion by an artist whose death became inscribed within the artwork’s living energy. This is the other side of Mulvey’s coin, the vitality of the past (and passed) in the acutely felt present. Lord talks about the fear of death that lingered in the air as a result of pandemic discourse, and Massing gestures toward a certain section of The Exquisite Moving Corpse that summarises this tension between death and life that the project as a whole encapsulates: “there was one transition [. . .] Natalie Leduc from Canada, and she took the final frame and made a paper aeroplane out of it. And then she threw it into the fire and it burned, and then there were those slugs that came out and were going around. And for me that could have been the very last minute. It would have been a great ending to the whole project, to take the art the idea of art and burn it and let the let the slugs take over and make their work out of our work.” This reminds me of René Laloux’s Surrealist short film Les escargots (1966), a work of extreme black humour where snails begin to destroy the world. Such connections render death in life, in a similar fashion to the surrealist humour of Luis Buñuel, and thereby avoid existentialist questions of ‘why?’ through the means of play, where everything is in constant and potentially liberating flux. Jade Dellinger, director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery where The Exquisite Moving Corpse was first screened, in 2022, reflects that: “In the 1940s, John Cage with Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell made exquisite corpse pieces but did it with compositional paper and created musical scores. These rules can be applied in interdisciplinary ways that are very interesting. How the Surrealists never came upon the idea of making a film is really surprising to us. This is the first exquisite corpse game that’s a time-based piece that is all about creating a film version.”10 We might say that film is the perfect medium to represent the space/non-space, sound/non-sound and the indiscernibility between animacy and non-animacy, or life, and death. It also did not escape Lord, Massing, and Miller that their game of exquisite moving corpse corresponded to a period in history when time and attention span are dictated by online platforms, cell phones, 24-hour connectivity, and the fight for meaningful engagement is hard won. As Nancy Stetton observes: “today’s ways of seeing are not just so much dispersed and distributed as incessantly hybrid: both present and mediated, live and online, fleeting and profound, individual and collective—a condition that has only been compounded and intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.”11 Towards the end of our interview, Massing returns to the catalogue from The Drawing Center exhibition: “When I was looking through it, before we started, I wanted to touch up on a concern. Walter Benjamin, a connoisseur of radical montage, wrote that the father of Surrealism was Dada, whose mother was an arcade, and that, in and of itself is putting two ideas that don’t belong together together. And I just thought that that was so much fun because the notion of this way of working is really kind of a non-art, almost a Fluxus way of being.” This observation, incorporating antithetical, radical ways of being, and of making art, is at the heart of le cadavre exquis and whatever stands in for its beating heart. The Exquisite Moving Corpse was an experiment with nothing to lose, and everything to gain. It, like the many exquisite cadavers before it, straddles the gulf between art and non-art, and in the twenty-first century, facing accelerating horrors and fears, the ideas of its collaborative thinking reach out to the curious viewer. The distracted and disjointed power of its images and sounds form a universe that both mirrors and refracts our world:

Caring not a fig for order, for how we fit in, for what we sound like and look like, the Exquisite Corpse disorients, it devalues the singular imagination. It is antiestablishment in the crudest sense; it exults the antisentimental, the anti-individual, the antilogical. [. . .] No one single mind can grasp the relation set up, so arbitrarily, in principle, between this thing that I find and set down, and the next thing that the two of you are finding and setting down separately.12