office of surrealist investigations

It’s not often I title these exquisite corpse drawings nor will it become a habit, but I felt a little more inspired with this one. As you probably don’t know, I consider myself a big baseball fan and I have been researching a project regarding Duchamp’s ready-made In Advance of the Broken Arm. What comes to mind for me is pitching mechanics and the recent shut down of Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals. Formerly my beloved Montreal Expos, but I just couldn’t bring myself to be a Nationals fan.  His arm action has been the subject of scout analysis for a while now, mostly in an unfavourable light. The crux (not to be confused with Kruk) of his arm trouble seems to be the inverted “W” rather than the action inferred by the ready-made snow shovel of Duchamp. There is some difference in opinion on this, however it makes for interesting reading, if things like pitching mechanics, Tommy John and various ligament and rotator cuff surgeries spark your interest. All this to bring me to this corpse, that was done a while back and contained both a reference to Duchamp’s ready-made and what appears to be a televised MMA bout. Thoughts of this remind of my MMA junkie friends and the techniques required for arm bars, kimoras and that rather ugly episode in UFC 140 involving Frank Mir and Big Nog. All clear? Ready-made to baseball to mma to exquisite corpse. All comes together nicely if you ask me. Well, except for the Big Nog incident, which if you haven’t checked out already is a little gruesome.