2 results
4 - Ephemeral Bodies: The ‘Candles’ of Urs Fischer
- Edited by Pietro Conte, Andrea Pinotti, Barbara Grespi, Alessandra Violi
-
- Book:
- Bodies of Stone in the Media, Visual Culture and the Arts
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 29 June 2020, pp 179-188
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Abstract
At the 54th Venice Biennale, Urs Fischer presented the most monumental of his ‘candles’: a 1:1 scale replica of Giambologna's The Rape of the Sabine Women. Together with two other wax sculptures—a copy of his favourite studio chair (a self-portrait) and the life-size statue of Rudolf Stingel (an alter ego)—it formed quite an eclectic sculptural group. But this ‘untitled’ installation was far from being an exercise in monumentality. At the Biennale opening, the sculptures were lit through candle wicks hidden in their bodies and started to melt. Though copies replaced the ‘originals’, Untitledresulted in a mass of ruins. More than a memento mori, it showed the passage of time focusing on the afterlife of images.
Keywords: Contemporary art; Urs Fischer; Venice Biennale; reenactment
At the 2011 Venice Biennale, in one of the spacious rooms of the Arsenale, Urs Fischer presented his most monumental ‘candle’: a 1:1 wax replica of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women(c. 1580), a Mannerist masterpiece which, standing over four metres tall, is still to be found under the righthand arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence's Piazza della Signoria.
Fischer's choice was very fitting. Giambologna had shown proof of great technical virtuosity by carving his complex dynamic sculpture group from a single block of marble. And despite what legends say, not even the ancients had achieved so much. What's more, the sculpture was conceived in such a way as to be viewed from more than one standpoint, giving the impression of closing in on itself in an upwards spiral motion like a twisted column and encouraging the viewer to walk around it. Giambologna's skill in treating marble to make it look like malleable material is unprecedented: some bodily details of the three figures (a young woman raised by a man and an older man who crouches beneath them) are so life-like that they seem shaped in wax rather than carved from marble. Only Bernini would achieve comparable effects when representing Proserpina and her abductor, Pluto, in the Rape of Proserpina(1621).
Two other circumstances might have influenced Fischer's decision to take the Rape of the Sabine Womenas a theme and a model.
4 - “Visible World”: The Atlas as a Visual Form of Knowledge and Narrative Paradigm in Contemporary Art
- Edited by Marta Boni
-
- Book:
- World Building <i>Transmedia Fans Industries</i>
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 10 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 13 September 2017, pp 77-90
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Abstract
With his Bilderatlas dedicated to Mnemosyne, Aby Warburg anticipated a number of issues that would have arisen in art history only in the second half of the 20th century, such as: giving primacy to visual communication; choosing an anthropological approach that gives value to all images; using a method by which to offer an overview as well as a diachronic look on things well before the advent of the internet. This method, which can be referred to as “atlas-form”, is characterized by certain constant features, e.g. the montage of visual fragments, the grid arrangement, the simultaneous view of the singular and plural, the non-hierarchical relationship among the elements, heterogeneity, the open structure, intertextuality, the desire for wholeness, anachronism. It is therefore an important aesthetic and epistemic apparatus, not just in theory but also in artistic practice, because it allows, as Georges Didi-Huberman has highlighted, a continuous review of history, knowledge, and the world through images. This paper aims to trace the evolution of the atlas form as a way to rethink the organization of contemporary knowledge through some significant case-studies.
Keywords: Maps, Atlas, Contemporary Art, Geography, Warburg
Traditionally, an atlas is a systematic collection of maps with which humans have redefined the world. We also know that, even before designating maps and their representations, Atlas was the mythological Titan who, for the ancients, held up the sky. The Flemish geographer Gerhard Kremer (1512-1594) chose Atlas for the cover of his Renaissance compendium, the first geographical atlas in the modern sense of the term, along with the one by the Flemish Abraham Ortelius (1528-1598).
The geographical atlas as a collection of maps is literally at the fingertips of users as a “handy and consultable” book, as an ordered succession of plates (or images) striving towards completeness (Castro 2011, 165). For, as far as it may be detailed, exhaustive, and updated, an atlas cannot truly be considered complete. As Georges Didi-Huberman observes, the “multiple”, the “diverse”, the “hybrid”, define any type of montage, and therefore a map representation or combination of images. The inclusion of these characteristics leads to the deconstruction of “the ideals of uniqueness, of specificity, of purity, of total knowledge” (Didi-Huberman 2011, 13).
![](/core/cambridge-core/public/images/lazy-loader.gif)