Exhibition: The Exquisite Moving Corpse

The Exquisite Moving Corpse started as a conversation between Chip Lord, Jack Massing, and Sean Miller in 2020. In planning The Exquisite Moving Corpse decisions were made to trade the methodology from the original Surrealist drawing strategy with video making. Each invited artist made a one-minute video based on the last frame of the previous minute.

The three originators curated (root word cura: to care for) the moving corpse by inviting 19 other artists each. Sixty artists in sixty minutes. Some artists produced their one-minute video within hours whereas others took weeks to complete their minute. All the work, play, sharing, and caretaking resulted in The Exquisite Moving Corpse, 2022. Two years
of collective efforts produced an open-source project within an isolated yet digitally connected creative community of international artists.

The Exquisite Moving Corpse was a Surrealist strategy for collective art making, similar to the old parlor game Consequences in which players take turns writing on a piece of paper, in turn folding it to conceal what was previously written. Invented in 1925, seven years after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, the Surrealists applied The Exquisite Moving Corpse methodology to
the body with various body parts being concealed and drawn and folded over by multiple artists to produce a final chance-oriented figurative representation.

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