LAUSR

In many art classrooms across the United States, at some point in the year the art teacher will guide her students in a drawing exercise known as an exquisite corpse. Surrealist artists used the exquisite corpse in the early twentieth century to engage a collective of artists in collaborative practice whereby each contributes parts to a drawing that builds into an emergent whole. For example, in drawing an exquisite corpse, a paper is folded as many times as there are group members and each member draws on their section making sure that the drawing picks up marks on the edge of the drawing above and leaves marks that invade the next section so that the next group member knows where to connect their new addition to the emerging form. Emergence, in this case, is the resulting form established from the separate parts from each contributor that is revealed in the unfolding of the paper as something new: a form that cannot be reduced to its individual parts. Significant to the exquisite corpse is a wholeness that emerges from parts articulated through a structure, in the case of drawing the folded page, and transformed through an unfolding via connection.