Exquisite Corpse Meets the Dollar Bill

With the financial crunch at hand, I embarked on a creative project that focused on the symbol of U.S. economics - THE DOLLAR. With the economy bleeding, our financial system has revealed itself as an abstract set of disparate elements that somehow operate as a single entity. I got to thinking about the Exquisite Corpse, a game the Surrealists invented back in the 1920’s that brought fragments together to create a single whole. Here is what I did.  I took 2 dollars and I created a generic ‘A’. I gave that ‘A’ + 2 dollas to the next person, and had them create the ‘B’. If they used only 1 dollar to create their letter, they could  keep the other dollar. Once the ‘B’ was finished, I put away the ‘A’ and gave only the ‘B’ to the next person, who then created the ‘C’. On it went, with the next person only seeing the letter that was done before theirs, and nothing else. Introducing a system of pieces done in isolation that are now acting as one:

In closing, if you would like to see an earlier dollar bill project that is still going on, check out this earlier blog post: Dollar Bill Art is so Money.