Ernest Gusella, "Exquisite Corpse"

This video, produced in 1978 by Canadian-born artist Ernest Gusella, engages in two of the debates at the forefront of the video art movement in the 1970's: it exists as a re-contextualization of the manner in which the human body can be depicted, as well as a challenge to dominant modes of video production as they have been practiced throughout the 20th century.

An understanding of both critiques requires an examination of the process through which Gusella achieved this piece, as well as what its title refers to. Gusella created the entire film himself live, by setting up two cameras (one of which depicts him in a standard medium close-up, the other an extreme close up of his face), and switching between the two using an analog video mixer on an automatic program. In other words, the two separate processes of video production and video editing are collapsed into one single moment of creation, with no plan of post-production other than adding the pulsing soundtrack and recording the product on to video. As such, the piece feels as spontaneous as a single brush-stroke, for it not only captures a single sequence of moments in Gusella's life, but all elements of production take place in this moment as well. In this way, Gusella challenges the dominant mode of video production (movies and television), which requires an extreme ammount of manpower and time in order to achieve the final product. The fact that the quick cuts in the piece are done mechanically fly in the face of conventional modes of editing, in which every cut between images is done consciously by an editor.

Despite this, the composite video collage feels purposeful in its juxtaposition. Because the video is cut together live, Gusella's motions match perfectly, so that when it cuts between his open mouth and the wider shot depicting his whole body, the viewer can follow his sequence of motions with little effort despite the frequency of cuts (there are hundreds in the piece). Therefore, Gusella attempts to depict the body in a new way, from multiple anges as the same time. In this way, "Exquisite Corpse" can be thought of as a video art attempt at a cubist portrait.

In fact, the video's title refers to a game played by surrealist artists in the early 20th century. Supposedly started by surrealist author Andre Breton, the game is played by two or more people who alternate adding words or images consecutively to the same piece of paper or canvas, finally ending up with an image bred of "random" insertions of graphical elements. This final image is called the exquisite corpse. Gusella plays with this title by using his own body as the image/collection of images, and his collaboration is between himself and the video mixer.