‘Exquisite Corpses’ Come Alive in Wake of Open Call to Artists

The “Exquisite Corpse” game is alive and well and living in New York.

Critics are calling it “the new charades” and, perhaps more pointedly, “the sort of no-brainer that’s the stroke of genius.”

Said poet Andre Breton of the game, a favorite among Parisian surrealists Miro, Dali and Tanguy in the 1920s: “It’s about sending the critical spirit on holiday.”

‘Tis the season, then, for a revival of the game, which calls for three or four players, one after another, to sketch first the head, then the torso, then legs and feet of an imaginary, abstracted corpse on a piece of paper.

The paper is folded after each addition, so no artist can see what the previous contribution was. The result is guaranteed to be surreal.

Responding to an open call from the Drawing Center in Soho, 600 corpses were created by 1,800 artists. Only 100 collaborations were chosen for a traveling exhibition currently being shown with great fanfare (that is, framed, labeled and well-lit) at the Drawing Center.

In the spirit of the season, the 500 corpses rejected from the traveling exhibition constitute a kind of Island of the Lost Toys, shown with much less fanfare (that is, crowded, lit harshly under unflattering fluorescents) at an outpost on West Broadway.

Artist Mary Didoardo wanders through the more viewer-friendly Wooster Street locale. For her, it’s a stroll down memory lane.

“I used to play the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ game with my friends as an art student at Pratt. This was 20 years ago,” she says. “What I’m seeing here today is basically a composite of prima donna energies.”

Starting at the top, the most exquisite of “Exquisite Corpse” heads in the traveling show include:

* A photo of a rooftop antenna by Tony Oursler.

* Eyes sewn onto the paper with needle and thread by Mary Carlson.

* An X-ray photo of a skull by Mario Rossi.

* A drawing of a speaking turnip by Jorg Immendorf.

* Ida Applebroog’s rendering of a boy getting his hair cut.

* A stamp that declares “Free All Artists” by John Baldessari.

* From Deborah Kass, a head shot of Barbra Streisand as Yentl.

Numbering among the “Exquisite Corpse” torsos are:

* Mike Kelly’s painting of clawlike limbs with fake red liquid nails.

* The words “Presumed Innocent” separated by a single dotted line, by Suzanne Treister.

* A set of rubber chicken legs tacked onto paper by Sally Webster.

“I like the sense of flow, of continuation, that I see in a lot of the entries here,” says Marie-Therese Ross, an artist. “There are some surprises from the well-known artists, but many of them, not surprisingly, seem to just leave behind a trademark offering.”

This is indeed the case among the art world cognoscenti, past and present.

In 1926, Salvador Dali drew a corpse head that resembled a maroon velvet cushion. A year later, Man Ray drew a set of racquets and Ping-Pong balls for corpse feet. In 1932, Frida Kahlo and Lucienne Bloch drew “Crazy Cat,” an “Exquisite Corpse” with a feline head, a nude woman’s body, stockinged legs and shoe-shod feet.

What could be dubbed today’s “Art Star” corpse has a painted African face by Eric Fischl, a female torso with a fish tattoo on her hip by April Gornik, and a mishmash of limblike things on black by Ross Bleckner.