Exquisite Corpse

An Analytical Critique of Two Exquisite Corpse Drawings

By Aaron Kinchen



Two exquisite corpse drawings were completed during Tuesday’s class session, varying wildly in style and appearance. Other than myself, the other two members of the small group included Lisa, the rotund lady from China; and a cheerful, attractive, hirsute young man from Pakistan whose colorful remarks enliven class discussion (unfortunately, his name escapes me.)

The first image seems to caricature a portrait of a man from the late 1500s. The face features a van-dyked gentleman with hair long enough to tuck behind his ears. The forehead is high, with a strong furrowed brow. My initial impression of this grinning face was “Shakespeare”. The Bard’s body is a tree trunk. Over his chest, where his heart should be, there is a hole. This depression appears as a cored out part of the tree where a great branch once embedded its fibers. The rest of the nondescript torso leads the viewer’s gaze down to the hips of the corpse. He appears to be donning gaily decorated tight pants. Around the hips, there are frills accentuating a horizontal line. The garment’s material is full of rapidly struck pen marks, repeating an “x” to create a pattern. The feet look more like cotton blossoms with elongated thorns protruding as phalanges.

The face so clearly masculine, clothing slightly feminine, with the body of a hollowed out tree; these innate elements make it difficult to deduce meaning from this exquisite corpse. Perhaps this man has an urge to wear women’s clothing. Societal pressures force him to repress these feelings. Therefore, where his heart could be, is simply a hole.

The second image depicts a longed necked female’s head, sitting atop a boxy torso. Instead of legs, there is an enormous high heeled shoe with a wheel attached at the metatarsal region. Dissecting this creature from the top down, her hair is large, voluminous, and angular in places. She has a thick head band which covers ears. Her bangs stop at the mid-forehead level, which leaves room to showcase her long eyelashes. Her nose is slight, and her lips are rather large and out of proportion for her face. She has a round jaw, not to pointy, and not much of a chin, either. Her neck is long, nearly twice the length of her head. About two-thirds of her neck is covered in stripes that inch up at intervals from her shoulders. Below her shoulders, there are two circles (meant to be exposed breasts) with dots in the center, to denote her nipples. Overlapping her left breast is a heart, with the letters L O V E oozing out from it toward the floor. Her left arm is much longer than the right arm, and reaches down over her crotch.

From the waist down, she is all stiletto with a wheel. Perhaps this means that she is a woman on the go. Forced to over style her hair and stretch herself to the limit, as is evinced by the overly long arm, it is no wonder that her heart doesn’t hold love.

the influence of money and possessions

Mathilde returns home after hearing the news of the “diamond” necklace being a fake. She would try to cover it up to her husband as much as she could for she knew he would be furious with her over this matter. Mathilde was really hurt deep down over this ironic situation since her and her husband has worked so hard the last 10 years to repay this diamond necklace.
Husband: Hey honey how was your day?
Mathilde: Oh umm… my day, it was alright
Husband: What’s wrong dear? You don’t seem yourself.
Mathilde: Oh nothing, nothing at all. Let me put dinner on would you like a glass of wine?
Husband: Seriously what’s wrong? You seem upset about something. Well listen I was going to wait to tell you this but I went to the bank after work today and I think that we have enough money to spare to treat us to a nice little vacation. We really could use it after all of our hard work these past years.
Mathilde starts crying because she feels guiltier of the situation now.
Husband: Why are you crying dear? I thought that news would make you happy and you are crying, what is the meaning of this?
Mathilde: I’m sorry honey, I didn’t want to tell you please don’t be upset with me, but I spoke with Madame Forestier today while I was walking and told her about the mishap with losing her necklace and that we have finally finished paying off our debts for it after ten long hard years of working and as it turns out the necklace that she lent me was only a clay necklace and was only worth five hundred francs.
Husband: Oh my god! You’ve got to be kidding me?! You’re telling me that I’ve been working 18 hour days 7 days a week to pay the necklace back and it wasn’t even real diamonds?!
Mathilde: I’m really sorry dear I didn’t want to tell you.
Husband: I can’t believe this, had you done what I suggested in the first place and just confronted Madame Forestier about losing the necklace none of this would have ever happened. I wouldn’t have had to work 3 jobs, I wouldn’t be in so much pain from working so hard over the years, and I’d still have my father’s inheritance. Do you know how much that meant to me?
Mathilde: I said I was sorry honey I wish I had done that… I wish I knew the necklace wasn’t real diamonds… but I can’t change the past.
Husband: I can’t bear to look at you right now. I never want to see you again. Get out of my house woman.
Mathilde: No.. What? Why?
Husband: I said leave now damnit. Get out NOW!
Mathilde left the house thinking it would be best to let her husband cool off. So she went wandering around town looking for something to do to pass time. She began to wonder what would happen if she went to Madame Forestier. After thinking about it she decided to talk to Madame Forestier and explain the situation of how this news of the diamond necklace really being a clay necklace has destroyed her life and marriage and her husband kicked her out of the house. Madame Forestier, being a very understanding and generous woman, gave the necklace back to Mathilde. Mathilde then brought the necklace to sell it and she was surprised to get 38,000 francs. She then returned home once again with the money from selling the necklace.
Husband: What are you doing back here woman? I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you again.
Mathilde: Look honey I talked to Madame Forestier and she gave me the necklace back, I sold it for more than what we paid for it so now we won’t have to work anymore and can just enjoy ourselves.
Husband: Wow. I didn’t think she’d give it back. That’s great honey I’m sorry that I was mean to you before but I was just very upset, you have to understand I was very upset learning that working these last ten years was for nothing.
Mathilde: But it wasn’t for nothing dear… just think of what we can do with all of this money…

Twitter and crazy hypertext

1. I think that my life would most likely be described at in stellar time. I feel like our lives were intertwined in some crazy way. It’s like we were at some point going through the same things. We all had midterms the following week and none of us wanted to study. On weekends, we had more time to update our twitter and see what each other was doing on their free time. It was so weird seeing what everyone’s weekend consisted of. Some people were working, hanging out with friends or flying across the country. Yet when our weekend ended, we all went back to our lives going to school and work.
It felt good see what everyone did outside of school. It made me feel like I was bonding with people I didn’t really know so well before. I still don’t know them that well, but I feel close with them by knowing what they are doing. It shows we are not all that different from each other. However, our differences make us who we are define us as a person.

2. I honestly don’t know what the designer intended for us to learn from the hypertext. I spent about thirty minutes on it and didn’t get anywhere! I was definitely running in circles. I wasn’t attracted to any words in particular. I did try to remember which words I clicked on so I wouldn’t click on them again. By that time, I forgot where I was in the story and could never really piece it together.
I think that what this says that while I like things to be stellar, it is easier for me to understand things in teleological time. I think that life in general is stellar, but when a story is being told, it is easier to be told in teleological time.

NEXT STOP !

Stellar scenarios are the basis for me winding up this class, as for just two years ago in my line of business, a great big party that had been taking place for the previous 5 years came to a screeching halt, suddenly the music stopped, the carpet was pulled from under us, and our financial system came to a stop. Now faced with the reality that I may need change my line of work, I register at Baruch and subsequently the path takes me to this class. Unlike many who belong to many social networking sites, this was my first. All my socialization has been always been in person or by phone.
I feel the Twitter assigment has allowed me to identify better with my classmates and place a personality behind the name. Subsequently, I was affected by one student’s who recently informed they dropped the class. The student did not at this point elaborate why they dropped, whether it was trouble understanding the assignments or a briefly discussed health issue. In the sales business, many times I’m forced to strongly compete with other people. I have to beat others to the deal, just as they want to beat me. Its part the high, part of the thrill. I also strongly believe we should reach out and help others when possible.

“A Labyrinth of Labyrinths”, As read this I feel I like I’m on a bus ride in our Professors Mind, and where being taking on a journey discover the other side. For as much as we may plan for our outcome, chaotic events will intervene and we will have to assimilate and integrate these events into our lives and make decisions accordingly. I believe I chose these words because right now I’m at the center of several paths as look to discover where my life will be going next.

Choices, Chance and Circumstances

The type of time that I believe I live my life by is Stellar Time. Entropic Time, as life does seem to be full of random events, I do not believe that there is no purpose or meaning to life. We are all here for a reason. This is an innate intuitive feeling that I have. I strongly believe that it is illogical to feel that our lives serve no meaning. I believe our lives serve great meaning in regard to the big picture as well as to the individuals we share our lives with. As Teleological Time may be of a realistic type of time, it does not seem fitting for me because I do not believe my life unfolds in a streamlined manner and goes from point A to point B. Yes, I have goals set for myself, and yes there are certain steps I must take in order to achieve these goals, but life tends to be more fluid and these steps seem to always shift and change, and my goals, as they are important, there are many other important aspects of my life. Stellar time is one that I feel best resembles the way the time in my life exists because I often find many thoughts or experiences in my life to intermingle with each other and I find that my thoughts and experiences intermingle with the thoughts and experiences of other people. The many random things that we experience affect us as a whole. These collections of experiences make us who we are. Without this intermingling, we would be different people than we are. If our thought process kept each and every experience separate and individual in our minds, with no overlapping or connections, our lives and the world would not make much sense to us. Without others, our experiences would be pathetically minimal. It is experiencing those around us, who each have their own experiences, that enrich our lives. On a typical day, I have my set responsibilities that I must address, whether it be work or school. Outside of these two structured parts of my life, anything is game. But, at the same time, when considering my structured responsibilities of work and school, as they will dependably be there for me to be responsible for, the experiences that I have when at work and school are never repeated. I always have something new to take with me, which becomes a new part of me. These experiences are contributed by those around me. And I contribute to the experiences of others. And these experiences help to make us the people we are. When considering my experience with Twitter, I saw this play out. I saw how, for instance, the occurrence of the springtime morning snowfall affected us or did not affect us. Where some of us wanted to stay home but could not, and others wanted to stay home and did, there were also people that morning who did not even realize it was snowing as they slept through it. Another classmate mentioned how she feels guilty when she eats late after school. I too feel this same way sometimes, and as I know just from logic that others must feel this way, it was assuring to hear from someone that she too goes through this. There were quite a few classmates who have a rough time working as they are students. This is also something that I can relate to as some days it can be a great physical and mental struggle to keep going with this lifestyle, but we all keep going because we know the importance of an education and we know that we will not be students for very long, that we have to just go with the motions and school will be out of our life's equation and we will just have to go to work. As Stellar Time moves on, we collect our experiences, we introduce our experiences to other people, they introduce their experiences to us, and we all grow from these inner and exterior interactions. And Twitter seems to be a new and different platform in which these connections and overlapping of experiences between people can occur.

The author mentioned that the Garden of Forking Paths tried to explain that “time is not uniform and absolute,” time is more fluid and too are our lives because there are numerous possible alternatives. The choice we make is not the only choice available to us. Perhaps what he also meant is that if we all experienced different circumstances, if we all chose one of the other options available, we would be different because of this, and we would contribute to the lives of others differently, helping to make circumstances for them different as well. The author explained how the story plays with “multiple existing realities” and with the “end and beginning, real and unreal, cause and effect…to describe this world of multiple possibilities,” that our lives could have unfolded in numerous different ways, but unfolded in this way due to choice, chance and circumstance. The word “labyrinth” is used frequently in the hypertext to explain the story, as our lives are of a labyrinth and equally so are our minds. Our lives are fluid with no set structure, we have choices we must make, we make the choices, and our lives move on to the next set of choices that are open and available to us due to the previous choices that we made, and so on.

Twitter

1) I think that we are all, as students, pretty much influenced by teleological time. We have one goal: To graduate. We try our best to reach it. We go to school, study, do our homework and so on and so forth. So as students, teleological time is quite influent.
However, I do other things in my life, I’m not only a student, I have a part time job, I have friends, I enjoy watching movies and singing, etc. I would say that my life is then a mix of teleological time and stellar time. My life is affected in multiple ways by different elements and situations. Sometimes I plan to do something, like going on vacation to France visiting my friends there, but some unexpected event happened – my visa application got rejected. In some cases even if you have a very specific goal, intermingling scenarios can slightly or totally change your plans and alter your final goal.
I consider teleological and stellar time as the most influential time for my life.
I wasn’t really affected much by what others wrote on Twitter. However, it did help me to understand my peers better since we only meet each other couple hours a week. Even though nothing unanticipated really happened that ruptured my daily construct of living in Twitter, I felt really good of reading what happened in others’ life. For example, when I’m studying for my exam and I see someone who is also study for his/her exam, I feel like I have a partner who share the same goal with me. Then, I don’t feel like I’m fighting this alone.


2) While reading the hypertext for the first time I’ve found the layout a bit cramped and noticed that I was attracted to the works whose letters l or i are stuck to another letter. At the first reading I was more trying to recognize every word than understanding the whole thing.
Once I read the entire text I look back and notice some different lightening on some words, but at first I thought every word received the same lightening.
After a second reading, where I pay much more attention to the meaning of the story, I found myself I very attracted to the special lighting words, that I didn’t notice before.
I was indeed attracted to some words more than others differing from my first reading to my second one, but I have no idea on what this might say about me. Maybe this says a simple thing: I’m Taiwanese, English is not my mother tongue, so when I read I try to be really careful about each word one after another to make sure I understand everything.

Tweeter open my eyes (second attempt)

1
I was really affected by my peers’ activities during this week. They help me think about myself. Some of my followers tried to cook, to do something that they had never done before. Others went to visit their doctors, their family and relatives. All of those activities are in my agenda and I never had time to realize them. The tweeter experience makes me understand how I neglect my health, my social life, my family and my friends. I realized that there’s a world out there, I had to get out and live my life.
I think during this week I met a beautiful lady that really changes my daily activities. We went to movies and to lunch after work. I learned with this experience and tweeter that my life is unbalanced. I need to start socializing more as before, go practicing my salsa step. However, school and work fulltime don’t give me enough opportunity to realize this part of my life. Maybe next semester, I’ll take less class to balance my life.

2-


The text seems very confusing and odd. I was very lost and felt that I was in the labyrinth and could find the end of the story. I felt that I was turning around without seeing the exit. I think the author want us to understand that our life is sometimes a maze. We, as human beings, should find a way to get out of our problems because we have the power to control our life and our destiny. We can decide to fail or to succeed. It depends of the amount of efforts and willingness we employ to realize our objective in life. In this hypertext, I select the world “murder” because I believe nowadays; this word is one of the words that hinder the world to become a peaceful place for everybody. We kill our brothers and sisters for nothing; we went to war and kill our neighbors for our own agenda. This word is really one the most violent words of the dictionary.