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.
The essay takes ‘bodies of stone’ in its actual, literal sense, discussing
nineteenth-century embalming techniques which involved a material
transformation of human remains into glass, mixed media or stone. These
processes of vitrification or petrification provided, on the one hand,
auto-icons of the dead that seemed to rival the chemical immortality
offered by the emergent media, such as photography or film. On the other
hand, by mimicking natural processes of fossilisation, bodies of glass or
stone were infused with vitalist notions of matter, hinting at states of
suspended animation and latent life. The essay explores this ‘biochemical
constellation of immortality’ through some peculiar nineteenth-century
examples and traces the uncanny survival of these living corpses in today’s
pop cultural imaginary.
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.
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