Description
Book SynopsisIf 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.
Trade Review"Die Kapitel sind alle fundiert recherchiert und sprachlich klar formuliert, so dass es neben dem Erkenntnisgewinn auch eine Freude ist, die Texte zu lesen. Schon die thematische Einleitung der Herausgeber_innen enthält spannende Informationen sowie philosophische und ästhetik-theoretische Ansätze, die später in einer größeren Tiefe wieder aufgenommen werden, ohne eine zu komplizierte Sprache zu bemühen. Sicher ist es nicht zu viel gesagt, wenn man in dieser umfassenden, interdisziplinären Publikation ein neues Standardwerk zur intermedialen Erforschung visueller Darstellungsformen von ‚Körpern aus Stein‘ erkennt. Somit sei dieses Buch allen, die das Thema interessiert, wärmstens ans Herz gelegt."
- Iris Haist (Köln/Plauen),
MEDIENwissenschaft 01/2022
Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION
Alessandra Violi, Barbara Grespi, Andrea Pinotti, Pietro Conte, Learning from Stone
I. STATUE: THE IMAGINARY OF UNCERTAIN PETRIFICATION
1. Greta Perletti, Theatre and Memory: The Body-as-Statue in Early Modern Culture
2. Silvia Romani, Translated Bodies: A 'Cartographic' Approach
3. Barbara Grespi, Pantomime in Stone: Performance of the Pose and Animal Camouflage
4. Michele Bertolini, Animated Statues and Petrified Bodies: A Journey Inside Fantasy Cinema
5. Vinzenz Hediger, The Ephemeral Cathedral: Bodies of Stone and Configurations of Film
II. MATTER: SIZE, HARDNESS, DURATION
1. Michele Cometa, Bodies That Matter: Miniaturization and the Origin(s) of 'Art'
2. Elio Grazioli, Brancusi's 'Sculpture for the Blind'
3. Cristina Baldacci, Ephemeral Bodies: The 'Candles' of Urs Fischer
4. Pietro Conte, Cinema, Phenomenology, and Hyperrealism
5. Antonio Somaini, The Celluloid and the Death Mask: Bazin's and Eisenstein's Image Anthropology
III. CORPSE: FOSSILS, AUTOICONS, REVENANTS
1. Luisella Farinotti, Funeral Elegy: Post Mortem Figures and Redeemed Bodies, in Images
2. Barbara Le Maître, On Jack Torrance as a Fossil Form
3. Anna Luppi, Technical Images and the Transformation of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany
4. Alessandra Violi, Glass, Mixed Media, Stone: the Bodily Stuffs of Suspended Animation
5. Luca Malavasi, Bodies' Strange Stories: Les Revenants and The Leftovers
IV. MONUMENT: EMBODYING AND GRAFTING
1. Filippo Fimiani, The Impassibly Fleshly, the Statue of the Impossible
2. Elisabeth Bronfen, Frozen into Allegory: Cleopatra's Cultural Survival
3. Federica Villa, The Orphan Image
4. Andrea Pinotti, The Well-Tempered Memorial: Abstraction, Anthropomorphism, Embodiment
5. Sara Damiani, Monuments of the Heart: Living Tombs and Organic Memories in Contemporary Culture
Index
