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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