Follow beinArt
Follow beinArt
I signed up at Deviant Art February 18th 2004. I posted a few drawings and started getting some positive responses. December 22nd of 2004 Bernard Dumaine started watching me. I didnt watch him untill February 6th. By this time we had been talking quite a bit about art and the seeds of the exquisite corpse began. We did our first collaboration! In the description of the post was this message "Bernardumaine and I decided to collaborate on a project. Four days ago I received a package from France. In it was a drawing covered very thightly with a stiff board, exposing only about 3/4 of an inch of his drawing and the rest of the right side of the paper was blank. I took it from there and finished the right side. this is the result!" We obviously had been talking about the Surrealist game "The Exquisite Corpse" and together we thought to make a club for other artists to collaborate in this way! On May 13th 2005, TheExquisiteCorpse club on deviantart.com was launched! We used that first model as the basis for a "how to" in the first journal. I also provided some links to historical EC sites on the web. Artists slowly began to watch us and to collaborate as well. The second collaboration was done with one of the first watchers, Jean-Paul Miller who bought our first subscription!
Bernardumaine - Metahedron remained a silent moderator for the first year, but gave up his artistic endeavours to play in a goth band. It is a shame that one as talented and as young (15) as he is would give it up. May 19th 2005 Ton Haring joined. Username: divee Currently is a co-moderator.
Many months passed and several collaborations later we decided to make an official rules journal, as it would help answer all the questions people had. I based my joining and submitting rules on those of "The Pencil Club" where I was currently a member. It seemed to work well for a huge club like that so I used their format, for the most part, word for word. One year after posting our first collaboration to the EC we had 57 intricately drawn, painted, digitally painted or collaged images as well as one poem.
Today we have 533 people watching our site and 92 official members, with more member requests every day. So many artists have decided to watch and join that we had to narrow the criteria for being able to join. Some people were trying to submit drawings that took under an hour, while others were taking between 5 and 20 hours on their side alone. Because we hate to reject anyone's art, and rejection is as painfull to do as it is for the artist to recieve, we ammended the journal on joining and submitting to include a criteria of standards to join the club. You can imagine that this is an un-popular stance to take. Some of the images were so poorly executed and so quickly drawn that we had no choice. journal on joining and submitting
One huge problem we have had is that incredibly talented members join, but are too shy to ask another member to collaborate with them.. This shyness continues to be our only real problem. The exquisitecorpse continues to evolve with the needs of the members. and it is more and more obvious that it is becoming an important force on the web. Other forums have picked us up or linked to us; the group "an exquisite corpse" as well as Jon Beinart's "Surreal and Visionary Art Forum" & "beinArt International Surreal Art Collective" (this website).
Most of our collaborators have an emotional response when they take the cover off their partner's side after they have finished. Joseph Larkin wrote "this is the second one of these we have done, this time i did the second half...seeing it finsished (removing the cover of the part she had already finished) was an experience beyond words...for those of you who haven't tried Exquisite Corpse collaborations, i highly recommend it...it really is a new experience in art."
By Jon Beinart
The beinArt International Surreal Art Collective features an Exquisite Corpse Gallery dedicated to this group. I have alot of faith in this project and have offered our support to Deborah Valentine's Club The Exquisite Corpse. I have personally collaborated with Bernard Dumaine and plan to collaborate on many more corpses in the future with other great artists from this group. I believe that The Exquisite Corpse Club is a potential art movement in the making, with such a large group of talented artists collaborating in such an innovative way. I hope that more artists from the International Surreal Art Collective join Deborah's club and grow with it.
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