RARA-AVIS: Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder

From: DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net
Date: 15 Sep 2006


Saw this book in the bookstore today. Seems to be based on a comment in Hodel's book that his father, whom he accused of the murder, had met Man Ray. Man Ray was associated with the Surrealist movement. The surrealists had a game called Exquite Corpse, based on cut-ups (of sentences). Therefore, Hodel's father cut Elisabeth Short in half as an artistic statement to impress the surrealists.

It's so ridiculous I almost picked it up out of sheer perversity.

Mark

Here's their description (www.exquisitecorpsebook.com):

About our book: Exquisite Corpse is a hypothesis, built from a wealth of visual and factual material. Unlike others who have preceded us, we make no definitive claim to solve the murder of Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia murder of 1947. We do suggest that clues about this crime may have been hiding, for decades, in plain sight. Exquisite Corpse presents the theory that Elizabeth Short's murder may have been informed by surrealist art, and that the killer was familiar with surrealist art and ideas. It also proposes that art created after the murder may have made veiled references to it. Our book generally supports Steve Hodel's best-selling book Black Dahlia Avenger, which proposes that George Hodel, the author's father, was the killer. We take exception to some of Steve Hodel's claims in Black Dahlia Avenger, however. For instance, his attribution to his father of many other murders is provocative but highly questionable, in our view. In addition, neither of us believes that the unidentified women pictured in his father's photo album are Elizabeth Short. Foremost, our book asserts that this gruesome but precisely executed murder may have been a deranged attempt to imitate motifs in surrealist art. That said, we do not believe that Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, or any other surrealist artist was directly responsible for the murder, or that the killer himself was an artist. Surrealism was a fascinating and wide-ranging art movement, filled with wonderful and strange imagery. The Black Dahlia's possible connection to it is a small chapter in surrealism's history, another testament to this art's irrepressible and revolutionary allure.

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