Dead or Alive!

Tracing the Animation of Matter in Art and Visual Culture

Maria Fabricius Hansen, Gundhild Ravn Borggreen, Rosanna TindbAek, Maria Fabricius Hansen, Gundhild Ravn Borggreen, Rosanna TindbAek

• Publisher: Aarhus University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9788771843514
• eBook ISBN: 9788771843521
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The image is an ontological paradox; it is made of dead matter, yet appears to be alive. For millennia, artists have created images of the living world - images that are static and yet possess the power to bring to life a frozen moment in time. While this tension has constituted a fundamental challenge for as long as theories on the nature of images have existed, recent scholarship has rekindled interest in the question of what images 'do to us'. Despite the rational discourse of Modernity, we must acknowledge that we view images as half-living entities. This book addresses the perpetual relevance of images' enigmatic life-likeness through studies that engage with a variety of visual material by asking the same question: what qualifies animation? Covering a wide range of image practices, such as early paleolithic stone engravings, medieval tomb sculpture, renaissance death masks and baroque painting to modern fashion, park design, early cinema and BioArt, the twelve chapters, written by scholars of art history and visual culture, demonstrate that the ontological paradox of the image is not limited to a specific historical period or certain types of images, but can be seen throughout the history of images across different cultures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dead or Alive!: Tracing the Animation of Matter in Art And Visual Culture (Rosanna Tindbæk, Gunhild Borggreen And Maria Fabricius Hansen)
• Fugitive Mirror: Art Neither Dead Nor Alive (Alexander Nagel)
• The Most Difficult of All: The Life and Death of Italian Tomb Sculpture, c. 1280–1490(Frank Fehrenbach)
• Animating The Crystalline: A Posthumanist Elaboration Of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion Und Einfühlung (1907) (Jacob Wamberg)
• Ghosts In The Gallery: Animated Images From Rembrandt To Bendz (Mikkel Bogh)
• Living Sculptures: Natural Art And Artificial Nature In Sixteenth-Century Ornamental Frescoes (Maria Fabricius Hansen)
• Two Fifteenth Century Italian Death Masks: Made Of Earth And Absences (To Make Hearts Grow Fonder) (Katerina Harris)
• The Image As Nymph: On Affect, Animation, And Alchemical Affinities (Chris Askholt Hammeken)
• A Sleeping Girl On A Silver Tray: Animate Fantasies Of Consumption In A Nineteenthcentury Still Life (Rosanna Tindbæk)
• ‘Catch That Monster!’: Immobilization Of The Simulacrum In Cinema (Jérémie Koerin G)
• Invisible Mechanics Life In Android And Robot Representations (Gunhild Borggreen)
• Fashion Bodies Swinging Between The Animate And The Inanimate (Franziska Bork Petersen)
• R A Contemporary Paragone Staging Aliveness And Moist Media (Jens Hause)
• Authors
• Colophon