10/16/10

Social Art - Exquisite Corpse

"Exquisite corpse (also known as exquisite cadaver or rotating corpse) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

The technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918.[1][2]

In a variant now known as picture consequences, instead of sentences, portions of a person were drawn.[3]

Later the game was adapted to drawing and collage, producing a result similar to children's books in which the pages were cut into thirds, the top third pages showing the head of a person or animal, the middle third the torso, and the bottom third the legs, with children having the ability to "mix and match" by turning pages. (However, the game has been played with the usual orientation of foldings and four or more people, and there have been examples with the game played with only two people and the paper being folded lengthwise and widthwise, resulting in quarters.)[4] It has also been played by mailing a drawing or collage — in progressive stages of completion — to the players, and this variation is known as "exquisite corpse by airmail", apparently regardless of whether the game travels by airmail or not.

The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." ("The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.")[5][6]..."  - Wikipedia

Link Full Text, Wikipedia

10/10/10

Kirk Varnedoe and Charlie Rose, 2002




John Kirk Train Varnedoe (Jan. 18, 1946 – Aug. 15, 2003) was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He studied at St. Andrew's School and Williams College, where he was a member of The Kappa Alpha Society.
After his years at Williams, he went to Paris, where he became expert on Auguste Rodin's drawings, and fell in love with French culture and civilization. He returned to America and particularly to New York, where he married the artist Elyn Zimmerman and taught art history, first at Columbia University, and then at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.
He co-curated, with William Rubin, the exhibition "Primitivism: Affinity Between The Tribal and The Modern" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, the same year that he won a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1988, he became the Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, where his exhibitions included "High And Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" (co-directed with the writerAdam Gopnik) as well as retrospectives of the work of Cy TwomblyJasper Johns and Jackson Pollock.
He was famous as one of the most eloquent public speakers of his time, and he gave many lectures and lecture series, including the Slade Lectures at Oxford and the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. These last, his final lecture series, were published in 2006 by Princeton University Press under the title of Pictures of Nothing.
Varnedoe died of cancer in 2003. Adam Gopnik, one of his graduate school proteges in the mid-1980's, wrote a tribute in the New Yorker in 2004. - Wikipedia