Exquisite Corpse: 1930 — 2026
“What is a dead image? What is deadness? “Dead labor” of the human dead—contains within it the seeds of unpredictable futures that can and do retrace worlds...”
Stanyek/Piekut “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane” MIT Press
Prequel
The Exquisite Corpse project brings together work created by my father Theodore Kliros (1930-1973), who was a painter, sculptor and illustrator, my mother Thea Kliros (1935-2013) who was a painter and an illustrator and myself, Hilary Kliros (1957-), who works in multi-media. I use the title Exquisite Corpse, in reference to the surrealist parlor game consisting of a collaboration between several living artist’s to make an exquisite, disjointed yet connected drawing of a body. This revised game of Exquisite Corpse entails a post humous collaboration with two players, and myself. I see the project as an investigation of image making defined by and produced within the boundaries of specific biological /societal expiration dates. In this case 1930-1973 and 1935-2013 and 1957-- the social and physical life span of the participants.
In the traditional game of Exquisite Corpse, the body is usually figural. In this project the imagery is re-purposed at another moment in time to create a new set of relations, an altered sense of body or a body of work without a body. The Corpse continues to create to live in another form no longer figural. They are generational portraits of another sort. The characters in the project are represented by imagery formed from different influences in the participants lives; art historical, political, and personal, some works were created as art objects some were commissioned for editorial and advertising projects, some for children’s illustration. Now emerging from dusty archives and transformed into the digital realm, they enter a new theatrical space revealing their age and vulnerability.
All works are 16 x16 in dimension and are part of an expanding grid of pieces which are solely comprised of the image and color vocabularies existing within the three participant’s works. In this project I explore the nature of collaboration across time, how the imagery that we grow up with is absorbed into our psyche and often re-asserts itself as an abundance of visual symbols and patterns that are passed on in the form of a familial toolbox, a family archive. The insularity of familial influence brushes against the cultural politics of specific decades in history, exposing the relationship between familial and historic influences. These individual works from the past are brought together in the digital world; pixels not brushstrokes unify the imagery. Here imagery that was once locked into a certain story/composition or formal structure are allowed to circulate, to be freed from the constraints of a specific aesthetic period and have agency in our present historical space. Continuously in the act of being recycled these images bump up against the imagination and question its limits making space for discovery.
All this is to say that collaboration is not fixed, it can take form in a dream or a laboratory. Bodies can be solid or ashes. Collaboration can be transmitted, it can be delivered through a body, through the hands of what appear to be a singular being speaking for many. The collaborator walks through time taking on the atmosphere of the surroundings. Pushing through it, sometimes transforming/recycling what was once into what may become... sometimes a chameleon, sometimes a traitor. The collaborator may have discovered/inherited a treasure of shapes, of colors... once laid to rest by a family in the 20th/21 century. These shapes have been locked in squares; they appear to be frozen. Sometimes they are transformed/have migrated and appear in another square. The collaborator wondered about the square? was it just a frame to hold all the disturbance in place. If the white frame were lifted if the grid disappeared. would the whole atmosphere be full of color and shapes infinite chaos, captured and frozen by a frame? by the limits and restraints of the human imagination? by the call to make order out of our stories…
A statement, (a story) has a head, a body and legs
Head: The head contains the brain which may contain the mind. Something to do with consciousness. Collaborating with my parents posthumously, the head the body the feet are intertwined. Consciousness, spirit, moves from one era to another from the material to the immaterial. The structure of the body is no longer. The mind, spirit, movement all merge together, the ashes are scattered, the ashes are reconstituted as images, particles, pixels, dust like, they are cut off from order.
Body: The torso/body contain the heart which may contain the spirit, intuition and wisdom. The body may take the form of a game where in it finds its structure. Its identity lives in the unruliness of the game; chess, parcheesi, tic-tac-toe, it lives inside symbols and patterns; kaleidoscopes, the cross, the eclipse, the target, a bouquet, all structures to hang on to. Often it fixes on tangible structures so as not to be left out in the coldness of aesthetic composition without a container or an end game.
Legs: The legs are the pillars of stability and motion at the same time. There is movement from one collaboration to another like the legs of a centipede each new corpse follows the last. There is a march forward while walking backwards. There, a forest, a parade an infinite walk.