If mediatization has surprisingly revealed the secret life of inert matter and the 'face of things', the flipside of this has been the petrification of living organisms, an invasion of stone bodies in a state of suspended animation. Within a contemporary imaginary pervaded by new forms of animism, the paradigm of death looms large in many areas of artistic experimentation, pushing the modern body towards mineral modes of being which revive ancient myths of flesh-made-stone and the issue of the monument. Scholars in media, visual culture and the arts propose studies of bodies of stone, from actors simulating statues to the transmutation of the filmic body into a fossil; from the real treatment of the cadaver as a mineral living object to the rediscovery of materials such as wax; from the quest for a "thermal" equivalence between stone and flesh to the transformation of the biomedical body into a living monument.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Learning from Stone
- Alessandra Violi, Barbara Grespi, Andrea Pinotti
and Pietro Conte
- I. Statue: The Imaginary of Uncertain Petrification
- 1. Theatre and Memory: The Body-as-Statue in Early Modern Culture
- 2. Translated Bodies: A ‘Cartographic’ Approach
- 3. Pantomime in Stone: Performance of the Pose and Animal Camouflage
- 4. Animated Statues and Petrified Bodies: A Journey Inside Fantasy Cinema
- 5. The Ephemeral Cathedral: Bodies of Stone and Configurations of Film
- II. Matter: Size, Hardness, Duration
- 1. Bodies That Matter: Miniaturisation and the Origin(s) of ‘Art’
- 2. Brancusi’s ‘Sculpture for the Blind’
- 3. Cinema, Phenomenology and Hyperrealism
- 4. Ephemeral Bodies: The ‘Candles’
of Urs Fischer
- 5. The Celluloid and the Death Mask: Bazin’s and Eisenstein’s Image Anthropology
- III. Corpse: Fossils, Auto-Icons, Revenants
- 1. Funeral Eulogy: Post-Mortem Figures and Redeemed Bodies, in Images*
- 2. On Jack Torrance As a Fossil Form
- 3. Technical Images and the Transformation of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany
- 4. Glass, Mixed Media, Stone: The Bodily Stuffs of Suspended Animation
- 5. Bodies’ Strange Stories: Les Revenants and The Leftovers
- IV. Monument: Embodying And Grafting
- 1. The Impassibly Fleshly, the Statue of the Impossible
- 2. Frozen into Allegory: Cleopatra’s Cultural Survival
- 3. The Orphan Image
- 4. The Well-Tempered Memorial: Abstraction, Anthropomorphism, Embodiment
- 5. Monuments of the Heart: Living Tombs and Organic Memories in Contemporary Culture
- Index
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