an exquisite corpse, of love

of lovers, loving, beloved

Suggested audio pairing:

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait

---

Cadavre Exquis, Esteban Francés, Remedios Varo, Oscar Domínguez, Marcel Jean. Untitled. 1935. Composite collage of cut-and-pasted printed paper on paper. Courtesy of MoMA.

There's a Surrealist parlor game that started in Paris in the 1920s called Exquisite Corpse (Cadavre Exquis). The rules are simple: players write or draw in turn on a sheet of paper, fold to conceal their contributions, and pass it onto the next player for further contributions. A bizarrely mesmerizing body emerges at the end - the exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine. 

I recently saw Christian Marclay’s Subtitled (2019) video installation (below) at Paula Cooper Gallery - a beautiful contemporary exquisite corpse. In this work, twenty-two cinematic fragments cropped from the bottom of the film’s frame, are stacked vertically on a 20-feet tall LED display. Intermittent dialogue extracts and closed captions appear as subtitles, briefly converging in visual themes and color palettes before quickly scattering into flickering abstraction. 

I’ve always found the intuitive, generative quality of exquisite corpses charming - how our gaze constantly seeks narrative continuity where there is none, to rationalize what resists rationale and interpretation. It’s an imprinted collective of disjoint memories, people, fascinations, desires, and longings. Boundless meaning with no single right answer.  

Just like life, isn’t it?

---

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait (Continued)

Alex left for San Francisco, return indeterminate.

---

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait (Continued)

In college, the first boy I thought I liked left for military service the week after our first date. The first boy I thought I loved graduated ten days after we met. I was never a master of timing - only of some relentless joie de vivre.

Death and the Maiden, Egon Schiele, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Schiele was drafted into the First World War after marrying Edith Harms.

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait (Continued)

But timing with Alex had always been stupidly perfect. Call it kismet - we met on the first day of college. Our birthdays are one digit apart. Even our parents went to college together. And there’s the subtle, intimate synchronies that were only imprinted through years and years of growing together - to know every inch of each other’s bodies, every breath, every eyebrow raise and crease of smile. To be each other’s crutch in the worst of times and celebrate the best of times. 

It was unfathomable that we would ever separate - even if only indeterminately temporary. 

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria, where Alex and I celebrated our three-year dating anniversary in 2023.

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait (Continued)

So the exquisite corpse of kismet builds on - through long phone calls and tough goodbyes - rendezvous and departures, cathedrals and catacombs, kindling and rekindling.

The corpse grows with friendships, kindred souls, and more loves new and old: I marvel at the world through K’s eyes and cheer on L living out her dream in LA. I exchange Paris and CDMX’s secrets with SC. I cry with IL together on the Bryant Park grass, sharing courage and vulnerability in confronting our worst fears. Dinners with SH compressed months of saying nothing into hours of saying everything. I sit shiva with J - a long hug melted away years of distance.

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait (Continued)

Yool Kim, Women of the forest, protect her, Acrylic on linen canvas. 25.5 x 35.5 in, 2024, from her September Solo Show Warm Connection at Court Tree Collective. 

Then we must become our own exquisite corpses from all of love’s imprints - the multitudes we each contain, the costumes we don, the roles we play. The permeable boundary blurs between spectacle and spectator, viewer and vision, subject and object, memory and reality. 

Toni (Green), 2023. Oil on Canvas. 9 x 12’’. Judith Eisler. On view at Casey Kaplan, part of Dreams, Jokes, Mistakes. Eisler paints from willful stilling of film freeze-frames, often immortalizing a partial and fragmented spirit zoomed in on an incident of light, gesture, or expression before it is subsumed in the flow of filmic time

I hope that a I have been a good lover. A good friend. Daughter. Sister. Confidante. Mentor. Disciple. Muse.

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait (Continued)

Exquisite Corpse (Self Portrait), Lyndsey Kong

Exhibition view of Barbara Kruger’s solo exhibition, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., from October 2021. Art Institute of Chicago. Since then I got to see Kruger again twice at LACMA and MoMA

Have I?

Terrance Hayes, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait (Fin.)

---

Notes

• Attaching full version of Terrance Hayes’ beautiful poem, Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait. Published in the Paris Review, Issue 240, Summer 2022. Also in Hayes’ book, So To Speak.

• Feeling tremendous gratitude for lots of recent creative kismet: meeting the phenomenal

Claire Akkan

of

Cappuccino Thoughts

at her bag pop-up in Cobble Hill then catching up over actual cappuccinos at La Cabra, running into the brilliant

Arden Yum

on my one day at Yale, and meeting so many fellow emerging creators all around the city.

• I’m also honored to be a founding creator on Zeen, a new platform for visual, shoppable blogs - consider it a Polyvore 2.0. I’m excited to use Zeen as an outlet for more visual and product-centric fashion content. Thank you to the entire team Zeen (Miri,

liz friedland

,

Katherine Crutchfield

and everyone not on Substack) for spoiling me with all the love!

• Immensely thankful to dearest

Jasmine Sun

for recommending me on

Embedded

and supporting Taming the Light from day 1 <3

---

Thank you for reading Taming the Light. If you enjoyed this piece, please like or share it with a friend - it would mean a lot! You can also reach me on Instagram at @lyndxey :)