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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.
From the archaic funerary and sacred stones to the most recent
three-dimensional objects, sculpture has been determined by a
dualistic tension between the urge for imitation of natural forms
(mimesis) and the desire to freely shape autonomous configurations
(abstraction). Within such a complex history, the second half of
the 20th century has been a particularly intense period. Besides
their abstract works, many sculptors developed an extraordinarily
rich theoretical discourse. This collection of essays presents some
of the most eminent protagonists of this crucial historical moment
by focusing on the artists' "own words". In their analysis, the
contributors have followed three key-notions - "Sensation", "Idea",
and "Language" - that fruitfully collect different artists under a
common conceptual arch and show the aesthetic relevance of
abstraction in sculpture. This book addresses high-level
undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the scholarly
community in the fields of aesthetics and art criticism, art
history and art theory, visual, cultural and media studies.
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