Hot Times at Old Town

Appearing below are selections from the hard copy Hot Times. The objective is to highlight activities at the School and in the larger community, especially those featuring or of special interest to teachers and staff. Your suggestions are welcome. Enter a comment (under any item); it will come to me rather than automatically appearing.

The Exquisite Corpse Lives! (At least for a while)

This is about an art show that begins November 1st.

Want to impress a friend with your non-conventional taste? Or shock your Aunt Hazel, visiting from Kansas City? Visit our favorite funky café, The Heartland, in November. They’re having an exhibition by a circle of young, Chicago-based artists working with the “exquisite corpse” technique developed in Surrealist circles during the 1920s.

In one picture, a man’s ear and nose turn into the wings of a bird. In another, a jester remains stoic as her coattails turn into carnivorous swans. Nearby, a winged bird reconciles itself to being rooted to the ground like a tree. These uncanny creatures are just a few of the “exquisite corpses” that make up Constraining Play, this new exhibit of more than three dozen provocative drawings that will be on display from November 1 to November 29th.

The technique relies on accident and serendipity: Separate artists draw the top, middle, and bottom of each piece. The first artist draws the top portion and extends her drawing a centimeter below the first fold. With the top folded out of view, the second artist incorporates the fringes of the first artist’s drawing into his own composition. Then, the third artist follows suit, drawing the bottom portion based on cues provided by the second artist.

Such signs of freedom and constraint, which are interwoven in many of the figures, can prompt critical reflections on the social and psychological worlds within which we are enmeshed. Like the exquisite corpses in this show, our lives today are structured by a mixture of freedom and compulsion, pleasure and misery.

This technique regained popularity more than a decade ago through an exhibition at the Heartland Café entitled “Totems Without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse Lives!” During November, the Exquisite Corpse will live again!
The Heartland is open seven days a week; check their schedule at heartlandcafe.com.

Filed under: Interesting elsewhere by Skip | October 25, 2007 | Comments (0)


Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Share your thoughts