The first night of class we jumped right into creating spontaneous drawings. Playing the Surrealist game "The Exquisite Corpse" (Cadavre Exquis) we created a series of drawings. The ones that used the more "traditional" body forms were more successful than those we created based on a theme. The themes we worked with were: Time, Space, Science and Language . Of the ones based on themes, Science was the hardest to work with and the one that yielded the most cliche imagery. That told us we need to work on expanding our ideas about Science and what kind of imagery we might abstract from. The students will be bringing in imagery to fill an image bank and we will revisit the topic in a later class.
To see some other examples of our Exquisite Corpses look here.
Read Andre Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto here.
We read from "A Book of Surrealist Games" by Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding and Selections on Dada ("Hugo Ball's "Dada Fragments", 1916-1917, Tristan Tzara's "Dada Manifesto 1918" and Surrealism (Andre Breton's "First Surrealist Manifesto", 1924) from "Art in Theory" by Charles Harrison and Paul J. Wood.
ReplyDelete"What we are celebrating is at once a buffoonery and a requiem mass"
ReplyDelete--Hugo Ball, 1916