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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/81440
- Title
- Events and the exquisite corpse
- Author(s)
- Friedman, Ken
- Abstract
- The twentieth century gave birth to two artistic traditions that remain visible as ways for groups of artist, composers, and writers to generate and realize collaborative works. The first tradition was that of the cadavre exquis, a Surrealist game tracing its origins to the French parlor game known as petits papiers. Developed around 1925, the title 'Exquisite Corpse' comes from one of the earliest historical examples of the game. The Exquisite Corpse allows three or more players to create works of visual art and writing by joining together individual sections through a collage-like meeting of words, lines or images al the edges of each individual contribution. Artists and writers used the Exquisite Corpse to generate collaborative artworks by exploiting the possibilities of communal process and chance operations. The second was the tradition of the event, an idea that emerged from the musical philosophy of composer Henry Cowell as an approach to composing based on sound-creation activities broken into minimal, basic elements. John Cage introduced this term to the composers and artists who rook his courses in new musical composition at the New School for Social Research in the late 1950s. In the early 1960s, this circle of artists and composers adapted the idea of the event to describe the terse, minimal instructions that typified pioneering approaches to intermedia in the international laboratory of art, music, and design known as Fluxus. Events began as a way to explore music composition and performative works, The musical origin of events gave rise to the custom of using the term 'score' for thc concise, verbal instructions used to notate events. Scores transmit instructions that allow a performer to realize an event work in the same way that a music score transmits instructions allowing performers to realize a musical work. While the concept of events began in music, it soon migrated to visual art and intermedia, developing as a significant intermedia form in its own right.
- Publication type
- Book chapter
- Research centre
- Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Design
- Source
- The exquisite corpse: chance and collaboration in surrealism's parlor game / Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman and Tom Denlinger (eds.), Chapter 3, pp. 49-81
- Publication year
- 2009
- FOR Code(s)
- 190102 Art History
- Keyword(s)
- Event score; Events; Exquisite Corpse; Fluxus; Music; Visual art
- Publisher
- University of Nebraska Press
- ISBN
- 9780803227811
- Publisher URL
- http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Exquisite-Corpse,674153.aspx
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. The publisher will not allow this chapter to be made openly available online without restriction.
- Peer reviewed
