Alice in Horrorland

Exquisite Corpse by Jake and Dinos Chapman 

John Tenniel (1865)

Jake and Dinos Chapman (2001)

found here

know more about the series Exquisite Corpse 

of Jake and Dinos Champman at TATE

"Jake and Dinos Chapman make iconoclastic sculpture, prints and installations that examine, with searing wit and energy, contemporary politics, religion and morality." (White Cube gallery)

Jake and Dinos Chapman

"(...)  Alice se assustou com um cadáver delicado criado sobre sua própria figura. Ela já sabia que os surrealistas costumavam recorrer a jogos coletivos a fim de captar o inconsciente e criar textos e imagens potencializados pelo fluxo criativo espontâneo e subversivo. O cadáver delicado era um jogo surrealista que podia ser realizado através de texto ou desenhos e colagens e consistia numa criação coletiva em que cada participante inseria um novo elemento numa composição em processo sem enxergar o que havia sido adicionado antes. Os artistas Jake e Dinos Chapman retomaram essa prática
para produzir essas images aqui.

Sobre uma ilustração vitoriana do corpo de Alice  em metamorfose, se desdobravam outros devires, de onde emergiu um monstro devorador com a boca entre as pernas, com uma voz cavernosa que sussurrava eat me e um pescoço fálico em crescimento. Frankenstein de impulsos de morte e desejo. Isso a fez duvidar mais ainda da própria identidade num convite para explorar novas espirais, novos modos de perceber o mundo. Alice viu no monstro que também era ela, que a subjetividade não era aquele lugar seguro e estável que a fizeram acreditar. A Alice monstro naquele momento escapou para retornar à sua habitação nas margens do mundo, nos portões da diferença, nas fronteiras do possível, no limiar do tornar-se. (...)" 
Adriana Peliano



find many surrealist Exquisite Corpses HERE

My Other Body Is a Corpse: 
The Long and Awesome Tradition of the Exquisite Corpse

found HERE

Joe Noland

"Sibling duo Jake and Dinos Chapman are a collaborative, British art twosome known for their vulgar and offensive work: Their 2008 show If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be, they defaced original watercolors by Adolph Hitler, adding colorful rainbows to the original landscape paintings. In the Fairy Tales exhibition at the Frist Center, the Chapman Brothers offer up another sick and silly look back at art history. (...)

 Corpse drawing; Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Max Morise

 There are a number of ways to create exquisite corpses using a variety of media, but the game's constants are that it's always played by more than one person and that every player's contributions must be more-or-less blind. The Surrealists loved this game because it created collaborative effort even as it denied any one artist control of the final work. In this sense, it was thought to reveal a glimpse of the consciousness of the group as a whole. 

An exquisite corpse drawing by André Breton, Man Ray, and others.

 Exquisite Corpse by Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy, In a literary version of the game, each player writes a sentence on a piece of paper and passes it on to the next collaborator. With each addition, the paper is folded in such a way that the next writer will see only the most recent contribution. The results can range from boring nonsense to mad-cap plotlines to seriously psychedelic pastiches of imagery and insight.

 

Y. Tanguy, Joan Miro, Max Morise, Man Ray, 1927

The visual art version can be accomplished by similarly drawing or painting contributions on a sheet of paper. Here, the Chapman brothers created their prints using separate plates, taking turns creating the upper, middle and lower portions of each creature. The phrase “exquisite corpse” comes from one of the Surrealist's earliest literary experiments with the game, which resulted in the line: “The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine.” 

 The exquisite corpse is dead! Long live the corpse!"

"The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality... " 
Pierre Reverdy

Breton, Tanguy, Duchamp and Morise

Follows exerpts from:

André Breton comments on the origination of the cadavre exquis.


  (...) When the conversation—on the day's events or proposals of amusing or scandalous intervention in the life of the times—began to pall, we would turn to games; written games at first, contrived so that elements of language attacked each other in the most paradoxical manner possible, and so that human communication, misled from the start, was thrown into the mood most amenable to adventure. From then on no unfavourable prejudice (in fact, quite the contrary) was shown against childhood games, for which we were rediscovering the old enthusiasm, although considerably amplified. Thus, when later we came to give an account of what had sometimes seemed upsetting to us about our encounters in this domain, we had no difficulty in agreeing that the Exquisite Corpse method did not visibly differ from that of 'consequences'. Surely nothing was easier than to transpose this method to drawing, by using the same system of folding and concealing. (...)

A. Breton, V. Hugo, N. Eluard and P. Eluard, 1929

"Disposed critics in 1925-1930 gave further example of their ignorance when they reproached us for delighting in such childish distractions, and at the same time suspected us of having produced such monsters in broad daylight, individually, and more or less laboriously. In fact, what excited us about these productions was the assurance that, for better or worse, they bore the mark of something which could not be created by one brain alone, and that they were endowed with a much greater leeway, which cannot be too highly valued by poetry. Finally, with the Exquisite Corpse we had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind's metaphorical activity. (...)"

A. Breton, V. Hugo, Greta Knuton, Tristan Tzara, 1933

"Ao longo dos anos Alice atravessou éticas e estéticas, entranhas e terras estranhas, o caminho das flores e o caminho da floresta. Alice foi a heroína vitoriana de um livro de histórias infantis, e num fluxo constante, se multiplicou. Nas diferentes artes e linguagens muitas Alices contemporâneas não buscam traduzir em imagens os livros de Alice, mas de viajar com eles e através deles, em novos mergulhos, travessias e narrativas não lineares. Novas estórias podem ser compostas a partir de novas configurações de tempo e espaço, fragmentações, sobreposições, repetições, deslocamentes. Não só figuras, mas diálogos, não só diálogos mas perguntas e paradoxos. Alices brilham entre um mundo lógico, um mundo estranho e um mundo mágico. 

Alice é atravessada por multiplicidades simultâneas, um espelho móvel de mundos oníricos. As imagens poéticas das Alices a descolam do compromisso ao pé da letra com a obra literária, se abrindo para a livre reinvenção, que segundo a poética de cada artista, promove estranhamentos e associações inesperadas. O país das maravilhas pode estimular o encontro com o desconhecido, a incerteza, o mistério e o mundo dos sonhos. “As aventuras de Alice dentro da toca do coelho ou através do espelho encorajam a procurarmos outras brechas para penetrarmos no maravilhoso” , disse Pierre Mabille."

Adriana Peliano