The Exquisite Corpus

Peter Tscherkassky’s “The Exquisite Corpus”, running at 19 minutes long, feels like Plunderphonics crossed with early Russ Meyer; a pastiche cum montage of black and white soft-core porn from what one might fondly refer to as “the golden age”, it does the opposite of what Debord was trying to get at with his inversion of existing art. This is REtournement, if you will, taking various clips and highlights of eroticism of yore and editing it to a sort of ne plus ultra of eroticism.

And so, hands tenderly unzip stiff jeans and stroke the invisible treasures inside; seagulls dominate the soundtrack, along with what sounds like Mogwai turned down; a man casts his net with a naked woman and jaunts around on a boat; a man looks left and right at a woman on either side of the screen, smiles, nods bashfully; a woman seductively crosses her legs. At the end, a haze of erotic pull circles a small boat in a blur; just like the sex obsessed, initially focussed with the desires buzzing around our heads, as Thom Yorke might say.

The real hardcore is hidden from view, as it was in the original works, but this work does more than suggest. It's not coy, and neither will I be.

The result, instead of obscuring the eroticism, instead accentuates it. This is not a deconstruction, but calling it a celebration seems a touch glib. It’s an exercise, but more than that, because it captivates as well as instructs. It’s simply a spellbinding triumph of new meets old, or old meets new, and it does a very clever thing in capturing the rhythms of sex, of lovemaking, and being edited to that beat, whilst at the same time presenting those things. More than a curio; like “Since I Left You”, it works as itself and should be enjoyed as thus.