Arte: Morphing Figures, Mismatched and Distorted: ‘Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration’ at MoMA
By KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: March 29, 2012
In one example from the late 1920s by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise and Man Ray, a head with donkey ears descends into a snail's torso, sprouts women's legs and ends in a pair of pointed stumps that balance on snowshoes.
The sum of these parts is one of the many grotesque creatures in "Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration," at the Museum of Modern Art. This entertaining little show expands on the Surrealists' diversion, rustling up other examples of distorted or disjointed figuration from MoMA's permanent collection.
There's much here to amuse, provoke and titillate, and not all of it is drawing; see, for instance, Louise Bourgeois's dangling latex phallus titled "Little Girl" or a Hans Bellmer doll with an extra pelvis where its head should be. And the show's organizers, Samantha Friedman, a curatorial assistant, and Jodi Hauptman, the drawings curator, make some interesting modern-contemporary pairings: Miró and Jim Nutt, Hannah Höch and Nicola Tyson.
But the show overlooks one of the most contemporary aspects of exquisite corpse: its fruitful mix of collaboration and chance and independent operation. I'm thinking, by way of example, of a recent gallery performance by the four-person Austrian artist-collective Gelitin. Each group member spent a week or so making sculpture while blindfolded, assisted by a frequently changing cast of guest artists.
I don't mean to say that this particular piece should have been acknowledged. (It's not in MoMA's collection, for one thing.) But a smattering of video or performance in the same spirit would have been welcome. It seems odd that a show inspired by a group activity mostly includes works by individuals.
One noteworthy exception is a project by Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth. Titled "Portrait of the Artist by Fr. B. by D. R. by R. H.," it consists of a pair of drawings after a Francis Bacon painting, made by two artists whose approaches evidently clashed. As Roth once said, "He eats me, I eat him, and then we see what's left."
Next to this piece are etchings by the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos, who adapt the game of exquisite corpse for two players, take its name for their title and faithfully apply its rules to printmaking. (They can't fold the plates, but they cover them up.)
Otherwise the exhibition takes an oddly clinical approach to the exquisite corpse idea, putting it, so to speak, on the dissecting table. There are sections devoted to hands, feet and heads, which are sometimes conjoined, as in Paloma Varga Weisz's "Head Over Head" and Fabrizio Clerici's "Duet for Harp and Cello."
Occasionally artists are the ones wielding the scalpels. Gorky does it expertly, in a drawing based on the 19th-century French academic practice of "écorché" ("flayed"), exposing the back muscles of a seated male nude while leaving the skin on the legs intact.
And sometimes the figures tear each other limb from limb. The Surrealists were obsessed with the sexual cannibalism of the praying mantis, adopting it as a mascot. It appears here in drawings by André Masson and in the insectoid components of Giacometti's startlingly violent bronze floor piece "Woman With Her Throat Cut."
Elsewhere human bodies undergo strange metamorphoses: becoming trees, in contemporary drawings by Robert Gober and Marcel Dzama, or robots, in a collage by the Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Mythology and science fiction seem at least as pertinent here as Surrealism.
For sheer incongruity, as defined by Isidore Ducasse — "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" — few works can match the five original Surrealist exquisite corpses in MoMA's collection. In a work made with colored pencil on black paper by the all-star team of André Breton, Valentine Hugo, Tristan Tzara and Greta Knutson, gymnasts balance on a floating mustache and a genie rises from a dainty shoe.
And in a pencil drawing by Breton, Tanguy, Jacques Herold and Victor Brauner a sunbathing nude sprouts swan's necks and holds a hand mirror with long, flowing hair. This exquisite corpse is disconcerting because it flows so well; the artists seem to have intuited a motif of sinuous lines, even though they were blind to one another's inventions. (You can see the creases where the paper was folded, as it was passed from person to person.)
There's nothing wrong with using the game of exquisite corpse as a jumping-off point for hybridized, uncanny and just plain weird figure drawing. But MoMA could have done a lot more with this playful Surrealist pastime.
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