“Exquisite Corpse”

“Exquisite Corpse,” curated by Niklas Svennung of Galerie Chantel Crousel, is named for a game reportedly played by the Surrealists in Paris in which people contributed unassociated words and images to create collaborative poems or drawings. In a 1948 essay, “The Exquisite Corpse: Its Exaltation,” André Breton described the exercise as “an infallible means of sending the mind’s critical mechanism away on vacation and fully releasing its metaphorical potentialities.”

Results of the game are displayed on one wall, in the form of sixteen untitled drawings authored in groups by Breton, Yves Tanguy, and others, sometimes anonymously, between 1925 and 1938. The drawings, in colored pencil or charcoal on black or white paper, depict abstracted figures made up of disparate and occasionally illogical parts, evoking bizarre, dreamlike fantasies. That they were created collaboratively invites us to think of them as the product of a collective subconscious, and this aids in understanding the relationships among the thirty-eight mostly contemporary works on view. Of the newer pieces, many are fragmentary––such as Gabriel Orozco’s sculptures Head and Torso, both 2007, or a segment of Danh Vō’s sculpture series “We the People,” 2010–13––which makes it seem as if energy is bouncing from one piece to another in the absence of a whole. Others make heavy use of assemblage in materials and references, like Herm for Ariana, 2016, by Oscar Tuazon and Ariana Reines, a tall and strangely sensual modern-day totem made of scrap wood, metal, and additional materials with a poem titled “Public Space” plastered to it. Haegue Yang’s The Intermediate – Long Neck Woman, 2015, a human-shaped vase made of hay and filled with foliage, is just as corporeal as it is fantastical, expanding, and perhaps transcending, the limits of what it means to inhabit a body.