Journal articles on the topic 'Renaissance Architecture Germany'

The acculturation Ashkenazic Jews in Italy is the focus of the present discussion. By 1500 Jews had been living in Padua for centuries, but their cemeteries were destroyed in the 1509. Four cemeteries remained with over 1200 inscriptions between 1530–1860. The literary features of the inscriptions indicate a shift from a preference for epitaphs written in prose, like those of medieval Germany, to epitaphs in the form of Italian Jewry's occasional poetry. The art and architecture of the tombstones are part and parcel of the Renaissance ambient, with the portals and heraldry characteristic of Palladian edifices. The lettering, too, presents a shift from the constituency's medieval Ashkenazic origins to its Italian setting. These developments are situated in the broader context of Italian Jewish art and architecture, while the literary innovations are shown to reflect the revival of the epigram among poets of the Italian Renaissance.

At the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, a few steps from the Nazi Germany and USSR pavilions theYishuv(Palestine's Jewish Zionist community) had its own presence, the “Israel in Palestine” pavilion. Initiated by the Zionist leadership, the pavilion was a hybrid construct of modernist and traditional architecture; its front was made from concrete and glass, its rear modelled on Palestine's rural vernacular architecture, with arches and terraces. Inside the pavilion, the exhibition depicted the achievements of the Zionist Jewish resettlement project, presenting it as a solution for the so-called “Jewish question”. Conceived as part of an orchestrated effort by the Zionist movement to use the World Fair, the professional architectural media, writers, and architects to gain support for the movement's activities, the pavilion sought to present Palestine's settler society as both modern and well rooted, and to display the renaissance of nationhood through the representation of the Jewish farmer on the international stage.

The Baroque style is the result of the further evolution of the style of the Renaissance. It began to take its forms from the end of XVI century. Baroque developed in European countries during the first half of the XVII and XVIII century. Germany, Austria and England, which had only some features of this style in the middle of XVII century, occupy a special place. The architecture of Italy Baroque began to take shape in the second half of the XVI century, and the formation of its features was largely due to the work of Michelangelo. Baroque style left its mark not only on the architecture of buildings, but also on the interior of the rooms, furniture design.

The article was written within the framework of a research project “Protestant Church Architecture of the 16th -18th centuries in Europe”, conducted by the Department of the Renaissance and Reformation Art History at the University of Wrocław. It is conceived as a preliminary summary of the project’s outcomes. The project’s principal research objective is to develop a synthesis of Protestant church architecture in the countries which accepted, even temporarily, the Reformation: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Island, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Sweden and The Netherlands. Particular emphasis is placed on the development of spatial and functional solutions (specifically ground plans: longitudinal, transverse rectangular, oval, circular, Latin- and Greek-cross, ground plans similar to the letters “L” and “T”) and the placement of liturgical furnishing elements within the church space (altars, pulpits, baptismal fonts and organs).

The article discusses Polish suggestions of new inscriptions into the UNESCO World Heritage List. The waiting items mentioned in the Tentative List were presented. Currently the Polish version of the List numbers 5 items. They are: Gdańsk, Town of Memory and Freedom (2005), The Augustów Canal (2006), The Dunajec River Gorge in the Pieniny Mountains (2006), Extension to the Joint World Heritage Property “Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians (Slovak Republic and Ukraine) and the Ancient Beech Forests of Germany (Germany)” (2015), “Krzemionki”, prehistoric flint mines (2016). Other offered suggestions were also presented: The Jewish Cemetery in Łodz, the Ponds in Milicz – medieval fishponds in central Europe, Nowa Huta, the paper mill – Duszniki Zdrój, the Elbląg Canal, Nikiszowiec as a factory-related housing complex, the cultural landscape of Żuławy area, wooden mosques in the Podlasie Region – Bohoniki and Kruszyniany, the Valley of Palaces and Gardens – the Jeleniogórska Valley, Żyrardów, Warsaw Water Filters and Księży Młyn in Łodz as industrial heritage, the Citadel in Warsaw, and the Słowiński National Park as natural heritage. Among new suggestions the following were indicated: the collegiate church in Pułtusk as an example of Renaissance solutions of linear perspective applied in architecture, the project of a Gothic vault in the church in Szydłowiec as a unique example of the Gothic construction workmanship, and modern wooden churches (e.g. the church in Boguszyce).

AbstractThe appellation ‘Belgian black “marbles”’ usually designates dark fine-grained limestones present in the Paleozoic substrate of south Belgium. They have been extracted mostly in Frasnian (Upper Devonian) and Viséan (Lower Carboniferous) strata, in various different localities (Namur, Dinant, Theux, Basècles, Mazy-Golzinne among others). Nearly devoid of fossils and veins, they take a mirror-like polished finish, with a pure black colour. These limestones were already known during Antiquity but were only intensively exploited from the Middle Ages. Many different uses were made of these stones, for architecture, decoration or sculpture, in religious or civil contexts, following all the successive styles, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque and so on. All these products, architectural, decorative and sculptural, were probably manufactured close to the quarries and were first exported to neighbouring countries (France and the Netherlands), then to all of Europe (Italy, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Baltic states, etc.) and, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, worldwide. They were always considered as high value-added objects, which allowed them to travel great distances from their origin. Thousands of references document the widespread use of these exceptional natural stones. They were employed, among other famous applications, as the black background of the Pietre dure marquetry of Florence. Some other lesser uses were either for musical instruments or lithographic stones. Today only one underground quarry exploits the black ‘marble’, at Golzinne (close to Namur). This prestigious material, with its dark aura, is suitable for recognition as a Global Heritage Stone Resource.

Most of the homes in the Budzhak region are interesting historical and architectural sites and deserve attention. Considering their current state, one can see the manifestation of a number of architectural features: well-established national traditions, authorship of folk craftsmen, the influence of academic art, historical architectural styles (Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Modernist), as well as the features of serial time. The unifying factor is, on the one hand, the similarity of ideological and creative thoughts and the desire of folk craftsmen to give a compositional and stylistic integrity to the whole object-space environment of the manor (in particular, in the exterior and interior of a dwelling house), on the other-ethnic identity manifests itself perfectly recognizable through ornamental motifs and forms by elements of certain national symbols. The article deals with the national features of the traditional residential architecture of Budzhak Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Gagauzians, Germans, selected for research as the most numerous in the national composition of Budzhak (southern Bessarabia) according to the population censuses from 1822 to 2001. Budzhak's national composition is presented in pie charts. The national identity of the compositional features and decorative and artistic means of expressing the dwellings of Budzhak, in particular its central regions (Saratov and Tatarbunar regions of Odessa region) of the given ethnic groups of the population is revealed. In general, the main large volumes and forms of traditional residential buildings are the construction of walls and roofs. Picturesque volumetric compositions acquire buildings with a combined type of roof that is used to cover the intersecting several volumes of the building, the kind with roofs with artistically decorated attic windows, located both in the plane of the roof slope and on the pediment of the main front. The subjects of detailed consideration and research are: ornamental-plastic decor made of cement, brick, lime, metal. Artistic carving -on wood and metal. Artistic forging, as a rule, has common compositional features with the architecture of the home and the estate as a whole. The entrance to the apartment house is decidedly representative and colorful enough. Borrowing and imitating natural counterparts (prototypes), folk craftsmen have created unique works that clearly reflect interethnic and religious-everyday contacts, professional borrowings, family traditions and the achievements of modern times.Photographic examples of dwellings typical of nationality (the second half of the XIX –the second half of the twentieth century) are given. The collected photos are dated 2015, 2017, 2018. Numerous photo materials of the respective states were considered by the author for the identification of houses by nationality: Ukraine, Russia, Moldavia, ATO Gagauzia, Romania, Germany, Bulgaria. The resulting comparative tables and schemes of ethnic influences are quite large in volume and can therefore be illustrated and analyzed in the next article by the author. However, the features noted briefly atthis stage made it possible to draw some conclusions, which made it possible to distinguish the typical residential homes of the studied national groups from the vast number of mixed types characteristic of the South of Ukraine as a historical and ethnographic region as a whole. The distinctive features of the dwellings of Budzhak Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Gagauzians, Germans are considered and detailed, places of decorative and color accents in the general composition of estates are revealed. Tradition is a form of translation of social experience in the philosophical sense. This or that type of stage borrowing of any object that evolves, including culture, is possible provided that the old goes into the new and works in it productively. Tradition acquires the features of stability when it becomes flexible, dynamic, able to absorb the best qualities of artistic cultures of other nations and groups, and also as a result of self-development. A comprehensive study of the featuresof traditional residential architecture provides the basis for the scientific substantiation of restoration works and the unveiling of the tourist potential of Budzhak. Taking into account the multifaceted architectural forms of residential objects, both geographical and sociocultural, it is possible to identify not only the visual and morphological features of traditional residential buildings of different ethnic groups, but also the semantic structure of the image of traditional architecture, which meansto develop certain techniques for the use of ethnic styles. houses for the future. The obtained factual material of this scientific article can be implemented in a wide range of architectural and design activities, as well as cultural, ethno-cultural and art-science practices.

Gdansk architecture of last decade of 20th century by all means tried to reconnect to the Gdansk architectural tradition, especially the glorified 19th-century German/ Gdańsk Renaissance. The essay aims to present a preliminary analysis of the phenomenon strongly present in the Gdańsk architectural discussion in the nineties: the phenomenon of reconstruction. The city’s architectural achievements of the 19th-century were reinterpreted. Moreover, not only did architects in democratic Poland have to face a new economic situation, but also the need to emphasize the departure from the visual form imposed by the communist system, which, particularly in Gdańsk, took a form of historicism. The complex history of the city, preserved in its architecture, had a huge impact on the aesthetics of buildings designed during the transformation period. Tis thorough introduction is aimed to show commitment to the great tradition of the harbour city, which often resulted in neglecting innovations and modern architectural standards, these forced by the diffcult times of the economic change, as well as the concept of the city’s identity. The article focuses on the examples of buildings erected after 1989, as well as the public opinion debate, which jointly attempted to emphasise the mythical greatness of old Gdańsk.

Abstract Frederick the Wise (1463– 1525), Elector of Saxony, was the leading cultural figure among the German princes of the early 16th century. He showed a special interest in architecture, but only little remains of his ambitious building projects except for Colditz Castle (rebuilt 1519 – 1525). This paper explores his active role as patron at Colditz focussing on the palace’s spatial structure and interior. Putting the Elector’s ideas into practice, the Saxon court painter Lucas Cranach the Elder was in charge of a uniform design which reflected humanist approaches to classical antiquity and different Renaissance styles. Following the model of Emperor Maximilian I, Frederick the Wise realised a sophisticated architectural concept at his residences that suited his noble status and ceremonial needs.

This article focuses on four foreign architects who attended Blondel's school during the 1740s and 1750s: the Dutch architect Pieter de Swart, Sir William Chambers, and German architects Simon Louis du Ry and Karl Philipp Christian von Gontard. Through analysis of relatively unknown documentary evidence, the author reconstructs the actual content of Blondel's teachings. These sources underline Blondel's importance as a promoter of the study of architecture at all levels of society, a principal teacher of both theory and design, a master of spatial organization, a critic of contemporary architectural taste (Rococo and early neoclassicism), and an enthusiastic advocate of the interests of the architect as a professional in control of the entire building process. On the whole Blondel's views were heartily embraced by his foreign students. These facts suggest that, from an international perspective, Blondel should be regarded as a major propagator of the renewal and revival of the language of classicism and not merely as a traditionalist or as the last great theoretician of the Renaissance. Designs completed by his foreign students in their subsequent careers illustrate Blondel's efficacy in changing attitudes to classical architecture and theory, particularly outside France. After their schooling at Blondel's École des Arts, Chambers, de Swart, du Ry, and Gontard all rose to important positions in their homelands and, thanks to their acquired skills, used their education to redirect the practice of architecture. Moreover, their approaches to architectural education, theory, design, history, and contemporary taste clearly distinguished them as disciples of Blondel. To a large extent, they personified Blondel's new professionalism and were responsible for spreading his doctrine and renewed classicism throughout Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century and, at least in part, for carrying it well into the nineteenth century.

Friedrich Schmidt, the foremost Gothicist of Austria, exerted seminal influence in central Europe through his activities as architect, restorer of historic buildings, and professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. His unorthodox teaching methods included personal tuition near the drawing board and study trips to examine medieval buildings, attended by students of different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds from all corners of the monarchy and even beyond. The students' school society, called Wiener Bauhütte, or Vienna Building Lodge, published their drawings in albums under the same name. The reception of Gothic in the countries of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy differed according to local traditions, historical associations, and political circumstances. Revived Gothic best suited church building, in which Schmidt's pupils, often relying on their teacher's models, excelled. Gothic did not fare so well in monumental public architecture, though in the Budapest Parliament House by Imre Steindl, Schmidt's school witnessed the summation of its ambitions and the transcendence of its limitations. Schmidt's orientation in his later life toward German Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Romanesque found echo in several of his pupils' work; these styles again carried national connotations, which were nowhere more apparent than in German- and Czech-inhabited Bohemia. Schmidt and his pupils virtually monopolized the restoration of historic buildings in the monarchy, though their puristic and often destructive practices gave rise to severe criticism as a new century dawned.

The historical research of the illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle [Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel’s World Chronicle)] of Hartmann Schedel com­prises the complex historical knowledge about numerous woodcuts which pre­sent views of various cities important in the world’s history, e.g. Jerusalem, Constantinople, or the European ones such as: Rome, some Italian, German or Polish cities e.g. Wrocław and Cracow; some Hungarian and some Czech Republic cities. Researchers have made a serious study to recognize certain constructions in the woodcuts; they indicated the conservative and contractual architecture, the existing places and the unrealistic (non-existent) places. The results show that there is a common detail in all the views – the defensive wall round each of the described cities. However, in reality, it may not have existed in some cities during the lifetime of the authors of the woodcuts. As for some further details: behind the walls we can see feudal castles on the hills shown as strongholds. Within the defensive walls there are numerous buildings with many towers typical for the Middle Ages and true-to-life in certain ways of building the cities. Schematically drawn buildings surrounded by the ring of defensive walls indicate that the author used certain patterns based on the previously created panoramic views. This article is an attempt of making analogical comparisons of the cities in medieval painting. The Author of the article presents Roman mosaics and the miniature painting e.g. the ones created in the scriptorium in Reichenau. Since the beginning of 14th century Italian painters such as: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto di Bondone, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted parts of the cities or the entire monumental panoramas in various compositions and with various meanings. One defining rule in this painting concerned the definitions of the cities given by Saint Isidore of Seville, based on the rules which he knew from the antique tradition. These are: urbs – the cities full of architecture and buildings but uninhabited or civita – the city, the living space of the human life, build-up space, engaged according to the law, kind of work and social hierarchy. The tra­dition of both ways of describing the city is rooted in Italy. This article indicates the particular meaning of Italian painting in distributing the image of the city – as the votive offering. The research conducted by Chiara Frugoni and others indica­ted the meaning of the city images in the painting of various forms of panegyrics created in high praise of cities, known as laude (Lat.). We can find the examples of them rooted in the Roman tradition of mosaics, e.g. in San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. They present both palatium and civitas. The medieval Italian painting, especially the panel painting, presents the city structure models which are uninha­bited and deprived of any signs of everyday life. The models of cities – urbs, are presented as votive offerings devoted to their patron saints, especially to Virgin Mary. The city shaped as oval or sinusoidal rings surrounded by the defensive walls resembled a container filled with buildings. Only few of them reflected the existing cities and could mainly be identified thanks to the inscriptions. The most characteristic examples were: the fresco of Taddeo di Bartolo in Palazzo Publico in Siena, which presented the Dominican Order friar Ambrogio Sansedoni holding the model of his city – Siena, with its most recognizable building - the Cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. The same painter, referred to as the master painter of the views of the cities as the votive offerings, painted the Saint Antilla with the model of Montepulciano in the painting from 1401 for the Cathedral devoted to the Assumption of Mary in Montepulciano. In the painting made by T. di Bartolo, the bishop of the city of Gimignano, Saint Gimignano, presents the city in the shape of a round lens surrounded by defence walls with numerous church towers and the feudal headquarters characteristic for the city. His dummer of the city is pyramidally-structured, the hills are mounted on the steep slopes reflecting the analogy to the topography of the city. We can also find the texts of songs, laude (Lat.) and panegyrics created in honour of the cities and their rulers, e.g. the texts in honour of Milan, Bonvesin for La Riva, known in Europe at that time. The city – Arcadia (utopia) in the modern style. Hartman Schedel, as a bibliophile and a scholar, knew the texts of medieval writers and Italian art but, as an ambitious humanist, he could not disregard the latest, contemporary trends of Renaissance which were coming from Nuremberg and from Italian ci­ties. The views of Arcadia – the utopian city, were rapidly developing, as they were of great importance for the rich recipient in the beginning of the modern era overwhelmed by the early capitalism. It was then when the two opposites were combined – the shepherd and the knight, the Greek Arcadia with the medie­val city. The reception of Virgil’s Arcadia in the medieval literature and art was being developed again in the elite circles at the end of 15th century. The cultural meaning of the historical loci, the Greek places of the ancient history and the memory of Christianity constituted the essence of historicism in the Renaissance at the courts of the Comnenos and of the Palaiologos dynasty, which inspired the Renaissance of the Latin culture circle. The pastoral idleness concept came from Venice where Virgil’s books were published in print in 1470, the books of Ovid: Fasti and Metamorphoses were published in 1497 and Sannazaro’s Arcadia was published in 1502, previously distributed in his handwriting since 1480. Literature topics presented the historical works as memoria, both ancient and Christian, composed into the images. The city maps drawn by Hartmann Schedel, the doctor and humanist from Nurnberg, refer to the medieval images of urbs, the woodcuts with the cities, known to the author from the Italian painting of the greatest masters of the Trecenta period. As a humanist he knew the literature of the Renaissance of Florence and Venice with the Arcadian themes of both the Greek and the Roman tradition. The view of Constantinople in the context of the contemporary political situation, is presented in a series of monuments of architecture, with columns and defensive walls, which reminded of the history of the city from its greatest time of Constantine the Great, Justinian I and the Comnenus dynasty. Schedel’s work of art is the sum of the knowledge written down or painted. It is also the result of the experiments of new technology. It is possible that Schedel was inspired by the hymns, laude, written by Psellos in honour of Constantinople in his elaborate ecphrases as the panegyrics for the rulers of the Greek dynasty – the Macedonians. Already in that time, the Greek ideal of beauty was reborn, both in literature and in fine arts. The illustrated History of the World presented in Schedel’s woodcuts is given to the recipients who are educated and to those who are anonymous, in the spirit of the new anthropology. It results from the nature of the woodcut reproduc­tion, that is from the way of copying the same images. The artist must have strived to gain the recipients for his works as the woodcuts were created both in Latin and in German. The collected views were supposed to transfer historical, biblical and mythological knowledge in the new way of communication.

Categorization of Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533) is a matter of defining modern at the turn of the sixteenth century. His depiction of Late Gothic and Classic architectural forms in his prints shows an interaction between the Italian Renaissance and the Netherlandish traditions. The use of urban setting is to familiarize the viewer with the story. This technique of grabbing the attention of the viewer by situating him within the audience in the image is a traditional characteristic of medieval art. On the other hand, he employs the new method of Renaissance spatial perspective in order to create the three dimensional effect in the print. Ornaments work as metalingual elements giving away subtle information on the subject. A symbol exists by being a reference to a former incidence, which adds to the discussion of whether Lucas van Leyden was a Renaissance or an early modern artist. His concern is with the narrative rather than the idealistic illustration of architecture. His German contemporary Albrecht Dürer also appears to come and go in representing two styles of architecture. Therefore there will be a comparison between Lucas van Leyden, Albrecht Dürer and Italian contemporaries such as Perugino and Raphael. Yet it is still a question to where to position Lucas van Leyden.

Concern with the decay or demolition of inner cities was an underappreciated factor contributing to the discontent preceding the revolutions of 1989 in east-central Europe. Although there has been some scholarly work on the topic, particularly on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), multinational studies are lacking. This examination of parallel developments in the GDR and Czechoslovakia identifies similar trajectories of discontent and activism in the two socialist states. It follows the evolution of architectural and planning theories and practices from the high point of postwar modernism to the widespread embrace of the very styles and districts once despised. By the 1980s, this acceptance of pre–World War I buildings, districts, and urban scale had pervaded expert circles and reached even the highest levels of party and government. However, both states’ failure to carry out policies that satisfied residents and defenders of old districts fueled the discontent that exploded in 1989.

Julia Kristeva’s famous essay Powers of Horror conceptualises the abject as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous” (4). While the social forms of the abject are clearly implicated here, Kristeva illustrates it primarily in corporeal terms, suggesting that filth, excrement, those things injected and expelled by the body, and disturb the epidermic surfaces of it (Grosz 244) are visible signifiers of the abject. In this semiotic schema, the corpse is the ultimate site of the abject because it is here that all meaning to the unity of body and mind, to the control of the border between inside and outside collapses (Kristeva 3). The corpse “signals the precarious grasp the subject has over its identity and bodily boundarie” (Grosz qtd. in Wright 198); the corpse excites fear and fascination as it represents the future for all of us- the unbecoming of the self. Kristeva’s views remind us how central the in tact body is to identity, and how much we seek reassurance in that which reifies the corps proper, despite our knowledge of its mutability. The exhibition of plastinated corpses, entitled The Amazing Human Body currently touring Australia, underscores secular society’s ongoing desire to gaze at that which we will eventually become, but constantly disavow. Unlike corpses that are preserved as life-like in the rituals of the funeral parlour, exhibitions of plastinated cadavers artistically frieze-frame corpses that are like and not like the body as we are invited to know and value it. In simultaneously exposing the inside and outside of bodies, and in posturing that which is both alien and familiar, the “amazing” human bodies on show fix an abject moment – one that does not “respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4). Western civilization experiences extreme unease with the dead body which has resulted in all kinds of aesthetic interventions to negate its ‘reality’ as decaying matter. Post death, behind the scenes bio-scientific techniques preserve in the corpse a ‘life-likeness’; morticians cosmetically enhance the dead body on display so as not to disturb the living. In identifying the role of undertakers in the ritual disposal of the corpse, Glennys Howarth comments that when the “funeral director assumes custody of the corpse it is contaminated in the sense that it is a receptacle for disease and a symbol of mortality” (147). The task of the embalmer then is to revile this contamination, to “revitalize characteristics of the corpse” which will “enhance human-likeness, for example, facial colour and elasticity of skin.” Howarth’s descriptions identify the dead body as an abject site and the embalmer as artist whose task is to resurrect/reconstitute the corpse propre to “supply, not merely a representation, but the physical presence of the individual” as they were in life; a physical immortality as it were (Howarth 147). Central to the embalmer’s and mortician’s art is an interesting paradox- the signification of death without physical corruption of the body. Howarth’s analysis of the “humanization techniques” in sustaining the fiction of living, points not only to “theatrical strategies” involved, but to the necessary concealment of the artist (the embalmer, the undertaker) in the process. The object is to re-create the fullness, not reveal the abjectness, of being. This preparation of the body for burial enacts what Michael Mendelson identifies as the “domestication of Death” which is to “assuage the unease Death provokes by making is something less than Death, by depicting it as an accessible and manageable place within the landscape that stretches out before us…”(191). German anatomist, Gunther von Hagens in 1977 was the first to perfect a technique called plastination capable of preserving corpses for thousands of years. His travelling exhibition of plastinated corpses, Bodyworlds, has been shown in major international cities and has generated facsimiles such as The Amazing Human Body attracting thousands of visitors wherever they are staged. Ostensibly set up for morally instructive purposes, to “teach children about human physiology and help adults lead healthier lives” (brochure for The Amazing Human Body), these exhibitions incite a voyeuristic curiosity about the dead. The exhibited corpses are not cushioned in coffins, looking life-like; rather they often resemble the enamelled body models that have been manufactured for medical and anatomical purposes or the mummified remains, periodically unearthed, of people from an earlier age. The difference however is that we know that the plastinated bodies are in fact real bodies donated by ‘real’ people before their deaths (the sub-title of the exhibition reads –The Anatomical Display of Real Human Bodies). At one level von Hagens and others who have followed him, are, like undertakers, concealing the reality of the decaying body. Entering the exhibition one is assured that there is no odour and, unlike the autopsy table, there is no visible visceral messiness – no ‘blood and gore’. These bodies, like those in Howarth’s funeral parlour have been preserved (in this instance by the technique of plastination), and they too, like those composed for burial or cremation are artistically sculpted into shape. (Plastination as described in the book distributed for sale, entitled The Amazing Human Body, involves Fixation, where “specimens are fixed with 5% formalin”; Dissection, where “specimens are dissected as required”; Dehydration, where “body fluid and fat are replaced by increasing concentrations of ethanol at room temperature, and then treated in a cold acetone bath”; Delipidation, where “Fat is replaced in a bath of warm acetone”; Vacuum Impregnation, where “acetone is replaced by plastic under a vacuum” and finally, Gas Curing, where “each structure is positioned and then gas cured” (10).) Often these shapes mimic the actions of the living – for example men (and they are mostly male) running or skiing, riding bicycles or playing chess. The difference however is that the plastinated corpses invariably disclose their artifice; obviously stage managed and somewhat fake, they fail to preserve the life-likeness of the corpse propre, yet at the same time they are vaguely familiar and we know, as we discreetly test the air for odours, that they are/were ‘real’. (In his analysis of von Hagens’s Bodyworlds, Jose Van Dijck contends that “plastination is an illustrative symptom of postmodern culture” in that it reveals how “categories such as body vs model, organic vs synthetic/prosthetic, fake and real have become obsolete”. These binaries are increasingly interchangeable in the postmodern world of virtual reality (62).) In disturbing the boundaries between the real and the not-real, these plastinated cadavers engender the kind of ambiguity and in between-ness that Kristeva claims for the abject. The Bodyworlds website celebrates this ‘abject d’art’ in its promotional spiel in phrasing that is uncannily close to Kristeva’s descriptors. Spectators, the site claims, are “gripped with a deeply moving fascination for what has been fixed in this novel way on the border between death and decomposition” (http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/exhibitions/anatomy_everyone.html). Other forms of aesthetic delivery of the cadavers in these exhibitions also highlight the abject. Many displays of bodies and body parts evince gross disturbance to the epidermic surface of the body, a visible and violent tampering with its wholeness, to reveal what lies beneath. Bodies have been sliced up, dissected, cut in half; skin has been removed to display cross sections through limbs, or flayed off to reveal central nervous systems; trunks have been cut out in horizontal planes and set out in neat racks that resemble meat trays, heads and trunks have been sliced in vertical planes, pressed between sheets of plastic and hung from hooks resembling the animal body parts in cold storage at the back of butchers’ shops. Perhaps most compelling is the display of an entire body skin complete with preserved subcutaneous tissue, revealing on close inspection, nipples and navel hole and occasionally body hair. The skin is the most abject of sites; a reminder of the body’s permeable boundaries. (One of Gunther von Hagens’s plastinated cadavers is “Man with Skin on his Arms” featuring a body of a man holding up his entire skin, which van Dijck points out is an “imitation of a representation” of Vesalius’s copper engraving in Anatomia Humani Corporis (1685) of a man carrying aloft his own skin “as if he has just taken off his coat” (53).) On a final point, the combination of physical, spatial and linguistic signs that constitute The Amazing Human Body; The Anatomical Display of Real Human Bodies potently, even amusingly, signifies the flimsiness and of the border between life and death, dirt and decontamination. In Kristeva’s words – “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (3). The annotations accompanying the exhibits are pitched in pseudo scientific/bio-medical language to allay dread and anxiety about death by fixing the abject within an assuaging and ‘legitimate’ discursive frame, while the coffee and cake stall outside the walls of the exhibition space, offers us the comforting condiments for corporeal continuity. References Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies – Cities.” In Sexuality and Space. Ed Beatrice Colomina. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 241-253. Howarth, Glennys. Last Rites. NY: Baywood Publishing Company, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Mendelson, Michael “The Body in the Next Room” Images of the Corpse from Renaissance to Cyberspace. Ed. E. Klaver. Wisconsin: Univeristy of Wisconsin/Popular Press, 2004. 186-205. Van Dijck, Jose. The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging. Seattle & London: U of Washington P. Wright, Elizabeth. Ed. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Zhang, Shu qin, ed. The Amazing Human Body: The Anatomical Display of Real Human Bodies. No publication details provided, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Muller, Vivienne. "Abject d’Art." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/04-muller.php>. APA Style Muller, V. (Nov. 2006) "Abject d’Art," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/04-muller.php>.

Since the late 1990s, W. G. Sebald’s innovative contribution to the genre of prose fiction has been the source of much academic scrutiny. His books Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants and Austerlitz have provoked interest from diverse fields of inquiry: visual communication (Kilbourn; Patt; Zadokerski), trauma studies (Denham and McCulloh; Schmitz), and travel writing (Blackler; Zisselsberger). His work is also claimed to be a bastion for both modernist and postmodernist approaches to literature and history writing (Bere; Fuchs and Long; Long). This is in addition to numerous “guide to” type books, such as Mark McCulloh’s Understanding Sebald, Long and Whitehead’s W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, and the comprehensive Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Here I have only mentioned works available in English. I should point out that Sebald wrote in German, the country of his birth, and as one would expect much scholarship dealing with his work is confined to this language. In this article I focus on what is perhaps Sebald’s prototypical work, The Rings of Saturn. Of all Sebald’s prose fictional works The Rings of Saturn seems the example that best exhibits his innovative literary forms, including the use of lists. This book is the work of an author who is purposefully and imaginatively concerned with the nature of his vocation: what is it to be a writer? Crucially, he addresses this question not only from the perspective of a subject facing an existential crisis, but from the perspective of the documents created by writers. His works demonstrate a concern with the enabling role documents play in the thinking and writing process; how, for example, pen and paper are looped in with our capacity to reason in certain ways. Despite taking the form of fictional narratives, his books are as much motivated by a historical interest in how ideas and forms of organisation are transmitted, and how they evolve as part of an ecology; how humans become articulate within their surrounds, according to the contingencies of specific epochs and places. The Sebald critic J. J. Long accounts for this in some part in his description “archival consciousness,” which recommends that conscious experience is not simply located in the mind of a knowing, human subject, but is rather distributed between the subject and different technologies (among which writing and archives are exemplary).The most notable peculiarity of Sebald’s books lies in their abundant use of “non-syntactical” kinds of writing or inscription. My use of the term “non-syntactical” has its origins in the anthropological work of Jack Goody, who emphasises the importance of list making and tabulation in pre-literate or barely literate cultures. In Sebald’s texts, kinds of non-syntactical writing include lists, photographic images, tables, signatures, diagrams, maps, stamps, dockets and sketches. As I stress throughout this article, Sebald’s shifts between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing allows him to build up highly complex schemes of internal reference. Massimo Leone identifies something similar, when he notes that Sebald “orchestrates a multiplicity of voices and text-types in order to produce his own coherent discourse” (91). The play between multiplicity and coherence is at once a thematic and poetic concern for Sebald. This is to say, his texts are formal experiments with these contrasting tendencies, in addition to discussing specific historical situations in which they feature. The list is perhaps Sebald’s most widely used and variable form of non-syntactical writing, a key part of his formal and stylistic peculiarity. His lengthy sentences frequently spill over into catalogues and inventories, and the entire structure of his narratives is list-like. Discrete episodes accumulate alongside each other, rather than following a narrative arc where episodes of suspenseful gravity overshadow the significance of minor events. The Rings of Saturn details the travels of Sebald’s trademark, nameless, first person narrator, who recounts his trek along the Suffolk coastline, from Lowestoft to Ditchingham, about two years after the event. From the beginning, the narrative is framed as an effort to organise a period of time that lacks a coherent and durable form, a period of time that is in pieces, fading from the narrator’s memory. However, the movement from the chaos of forgetting to the comparatively distinct and stable details of the remembered present does not follow a continuum. Rather, the past and present are both constituted by the force of memory, which is continually crystallising and dissolving. Each event operates according to its own specific arrangement of emphasis and forgetting. Our experience of memory in the present, or recollective memory, is only one kind of memory. Sebald is concerned with a more pervasive kind of remembering, which includes the vectorial existence of non-conscious, non-human perceptual events; memory as expressed by crystals, tree roots, glaciers, and the nested relationship of fuel, fire, smoke, and ash. The Rings of Saturn is composed of ten chapters, each of which is outlined in table form at the book’s beginning. The first chapter appears as: “In hospital—Obituary—Odyssey of Thomas Browne’s skull—Anatomy lecture—Levitation—Quincunx—Fabled creatures—Urn burial.” The Rings of Saturn is of course hardly exceptional in its use of this device. Rather, it is exemplary concerning the repeated emphasis on the tension between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing, among which this chapter breakdown is included. Sebald continually uses the conventions of bookmaking in subtle though innovative ways. Each of these horizontally linked and divided indices might put the reader in mind of Thomas Browne’s urns, time capsules from the past, the unearthing of which is discussed in the book’s first chapter (25). The chapter outlines (and the urns) are containers that preserve a fragmentary and suggestive history. Each is a perspective on the narrator’s travels that abstracts, arranges, and uniquely refers to the narrative elaborations to come.As I have already stressed, Sebald is a writer concerned with forms of organisation. His works account for a diverse range of organisational forms, some of which instance an overt, chronological, geometric, or metrical manipulation of space and time, such as grids, star shapes, and Greenwich Mean Time. This contrasts with comparatively suggestive, insubstantial, mutable forms, including various meteorological phenomena such as cloudbanks and fog, dust and sand, and as exemplified in narrative form by the haphazard, distracted assemblage of events featured in dreams or dream logic. The relationship between these supposedly opposing tendencies is, however, more complex and paradoxical than might at first glance appear. As Sebald warily reminds us in his essay “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” despite our wishes to inhabit periods of complete freedom, where we follow our distractions to the fullest possible extent, we nonetheless “must all have some more or less significant design in view” (Sebald, Campo 4). It is not so much that we must choose, absolutely, between form and formlessness. Rather, the point is to understand that some seemingly inevitable forms are in fact subject to contingencies, which certain uses deliberately or ignorantly mask, and that simplicity and intricacy are often co-dependent. Richard T. Gray is a Sebald critic who has picked up on the element in Sebald’s work that suggests a tension between different forms of organisation. In his article “Writing at the Roche Limit,” Gray notes that Sebald’s tendency to emphasise the decadent aspects of human and natural history “is continually counterbalanced by an insistence on order and by often extremely subtle forms of organization” (40). Rather than advancing the thesis that Sebald is exclusively against the idea of systematisation or order, Gray argues that The Rings of Saturn models in its own textual make-up an alternative approach to the cognitive order(ing) of things, one that seeks to counter the natural tendency toward entropic decline and a fall into chaos by introducing constructive forces that inject a modicum of balance and equilibrium into the system as a whole. (Gray 41)Sebald’s concern with the contrasting energies exemplified by different forms extends to his play with syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing. He uses lists to add contrast to his flowing, syntactically intricate sentences. The achievement of his work is not the exclusive privileging of either the list form or the well-composed sentence, but in providing contexts whereby the reader can appreciate subtle modulations between the two, thus experiencing a more dynamic and complex kind of narrative time. His works exhibit an astute awareness of the fact that different textual devices command different experiences of temporality, and our experience of temporality in good part determines our metaphysics. Here I consider two lists featured in The Rings of Saturn, one from the first chapter, and one from the last. Each shows contrasting tendencies concerning systems of organisation. Both are attributable to the work of Thomas Browne, “who practiced as a doctor in Norwich in the seventeenth century and had left a number of writings that defy all comparison” (Sebald, Rings 9). The Rings of Saturn is in part a dialogue across epochs with the sentiments expressed in Browne’s works, which, according to Bianca Theisen, preserve a kind of reasoning that is lost in “the rationalist and scientific embrace of a devalued world of facts” (Theisen 563).The first list names the varied “animate and inanimate matter” in which Browne identifies the quincuncial structure, a lattice like arrangement of five points and intersecting lines. The following phenomena are enumerated in the text:certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horse tail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies. (Sebald, Rings 20-21)Ostensibly quoting from Browne, Sebald begins the next sentence, “Examples might be multiplied without end” (21). The compulsion to list, or the compulsiveness expressed by listing, is expressed here in a relationship of dual utility with another, dominant or overt, kind of organisational form: the quincunx. It is not the utility or expressiveness of the list itself that is at issue—at least in the version of Browne’s work preserved here by Sebald. In W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, Long notes the historical correspondences and divergences between Sebald and Michel Foucault (2007). Long interprets Browne’s quincunx as exemplifying a “hermeneutics of resemblance,” whereby similarities among diverse phenomena are seen as providing proof of “the universal oneness of all things” (33). This contrasts with the idea of a “pathological nature, autonomous from God,” which, according to Long, informs Sebald’s transformation of Browne into “an avatar of distinctly modern epistemology” (38). Long follows Foucault in noting the distinction between Renaissance and modern epistemology, a distinction in good part due to the experimental, inductive method, the availability of statistical data, and probabilistic reasoning championed in the latter epoch (Whitehead; Hacking). In the book’s final chapter, Sebald includes a list from Browne’s imaginary library, the “Musæum Clausium.” In contrast to the above list, here Sebald seems to deliberately problematise any efforts to suggest an abstract uniting principle. There is no evident reason for the togetherness of the discrete things, beyond the mere fact that they happen to be gathered, hypothetically, in the text (Sebald, Rings 271-273). Among the library’s supposed contents are:an account by the ancient traveller Pytheas of Marseilles, referred to in Strabo, according to which all the air beyond thule is thick, condensed and gellied, looking just like sea lungs […] a dream image showing a prairie or sea meadow at the bottom of the Mediterranean, off the coat of Provence […] and a glass of spirits made of æthereal salt, hermetically sealed up, of so volatile a nature that it will not endure by daylight, and therefore shown only in winter or by the light of a carbuncle or Bononian stone. (Sebald, Rings 272-73)Unlike the previous example attributed to Browne, here the list coheres according to the tensions of its own coincidences. Sebald uses the list to create spontaneous organisations in which history is exhibited as a complex mix of fact and fantasy. More important than the distinction between the imaginary and the real is the effort to account for the way things uniquely incorporate aspects of the world in order to be what they are. Human knowledge is a perspective that is implicated in, rather than excluded from, this process.Lists move us to puzzle over the criteria that their togetherness implies. They might be used inthe service of a specific paradigm, or they might suggest an imaginable but as yet unknown kind of systematisation; a specific kind of relationship, or simply the possibility of a relationship. Take, for example, the list-like accumulation of architectural details in the following description of the decadent Sommerleyton Hall, featured in chapter II: There were drawing rooms and winter gardens, spacious halls and verandas. A corridor might end in a ferny grotto where fountains ceaselessly plashed, and bowered passages criss-crossed beneath the dome of a fantastic mosque. Windows could be lowered to open the interior onto the outside, and inside the landscape was replicated on the mirror walls. Palm houses and orangeries, the lawn like green velvet, the baize on the billiard tables, the bouquets of flowers in the morning and retiring rooms and in the majolica vases on the terrace, the birds of paradise and the golden peasants on the silken tapestries, the goldfinches in the aviaries and the nightingales in the garden, the arabesques in the carpets and the box-edged flower beds—all of it interacted in such a way that one had the illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured. (Sebald, Rings 33-34)This list shifts emphasis away from preconceived distinctions between the natural and the manufactured through the creation of its own unlikely harmony. It tells us something important about the way perception and knowledge is ordered in Sebald’s prose. Each encounter, or historically specific situation, is considered as though it were its own microworld, its own discrete, synecdochic realisation of history. Rather than starting from the universal or the meta-level and scaling down to the local, Sebald arranges historically peculiar examples that suggest a variable, contrasting and dynamic metaphysics, a motley arrangement of ordering systems that each aspire to but do not command universal applicability. In a comparable sense, Browne’s sepulchral urns of his 1658 work Urn Burial, which feature in chapter I, are time capsules that seem to create their own internally specific kind of organisation:The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog’s grass wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman. Browne records other objects known to have been placed with the dead, whether as ornament or utensil. His catalogue includes a variety of curiosities: the circumcision knives of Joshua, the ring which belonged to the mistress of Propertius, an ape of agate, a grasshopper, three-hundred golden bees, a blue opal, silver belt buckles and clasps, combs, iron pins, brass plates and brazen nippers to pull away hair, and a brass Jews harp that last sounded on the crossing over black water. (Sebald, Rings 25-26)Regardless of our beliefs concerning the afterlife, these items, preserved across epochs, solicit a sense of wonder as we consider what we might choose for company on our “last journey” (25). In death, the human body is reduced to a condition of an object or thing, while the objects that accompany the corpse seem to acquire a degree of potency as remnants that transcend living time. Life is no longer the paradigm through which to understand purpose. In their very difference from living things these objects command our fascination. Eric Santner coins the term “undeadness” to name the significance of this non-living agency in Sebald’s prose (Santner xx). Santner’s study places Sebald in a linage of German-Jewish writers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, whose understanding of “the human” depends crucially on the concept of “the creature” or “creatureliness” (Santner 38-41). Like the list of items contained within Sommerleyton Hall, the above list accounts for a context in which ornament and utensil, nature and culture, are read according to their differentiated togetherness, rather than opposition. Death, it seems, is a universal leveller, or at least a different dimension in which symbol and function appear to coincide. Perhaps it is the unassuming and convenient nature of lists that make them enduring objects of historical interest. Lists are a form of writing to which we appeal for immediate mnemonic assistance. They lack the artifice of a sentence. While perhaps not as interesting in the present that is contemporary with their usefulness (a trip to the supermarket), with time lists acquire credibility due to the intimacy they share with mundane, diurnal concerns—due to the fact that they were, once upon a time, so useful. The significance of lists arrives anachronistically, when we look back and wonder what people were really up to, or what our own concerns were, relatively free from fanciful, stylistic adornment. Sebald’s democratic approach to different forms of writing means that lists sit alongside the esteemed poetic and literary efforts of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, and François René de Chateaubriand, all of whom feature in The Rings of Saturn. His books make the exclusive differences between literary and non-literary kinds of writing less important than the sense of dynamism that is elicited through a play of contrasting kinds of syntactical and non-syntactical writing. The book’s closing chapter includes a revealing example that expresses these sentiments. After tracing over a natural history of silk, with a particular focus on human greed and naivety, the narrative arrives at a “pattern book” that features strips of colourful silk kept in “the small museum of Strangers Hall” (Sebald, Rings 283). The narrator notes that the silks arranged in this book “were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds” (283). This effervescent declamation continues after a double page photograph of the pattern book, which is described as a “catalogue of samples” and “leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival” (286). Here we witness Sebald’s inclusive and variable understanding as to the kinds of thing a book, and writing, can be. The fraying strips of silk featured in the photograph are arranged one below the other, in the form of a list. They are surrounded by ornate handwriting that, like the strips of silk, seems to fray at the edges, suggesting the specific gestural event that occasioned the moment of their inscription—something which tends to be excluded in printed prose. Sebald’s remarks here are not without a characteristic irony (“the only true book”). However, in the greatercontext of the narrative, this comment suggests an important inclination. Namely, that there is much scope yet for innovative literary forms that capture the nuances and complexity of collective and individual histories. And that writing always includes, though to varying degrees obscures, contrasting tensions shared among syntactical and non-syntactical elements, including material and gestural contingencies. Sebald’s works remind us of what potentials might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.ReferencesBere, Carol. “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz.” Literary Review, 46.1 (2002): 184-92.Blackler, Deane. Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2007. Catling Jo, and Richard Hibbitt, eds. Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Oxford: Legenda, 2011.Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh, eds. W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Fuchs, Anne and J. J. Long, eds. W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Gray, Richard T. “Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” The German Quarterly 83.1 (2010): 38-57. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London: Cambridge UP, 1977.Kilbourn, Russell J. A. “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Leone, Massimo. “Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald.” W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Ed. J. J. Long and A. Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.Long, J. J. W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.Long, J. J., and Anne Whitehead, eds. W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2004. McCulloh, Mark. Understanding W. G. Sebald. Columbia, S. C.: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Patt, Lise, ed. Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Critical Inquiry and ICI Press, 2007. Sadokierski, Zoe. “Visual Writing: A Critique of Graphic Devices in Hybrid Novels from a Visual Communication Design Perspective.” Diss. University of Technology Sydney, 2010. Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Schmitz, Helmut. “Catastrophic History, Trauma and Mourning in W. G. Sebald and Jörg Friedrich.” The German Monitor 72 (2010): 27-50.Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1998.---. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.---. Campo Santo. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Print. Theisen, Bianca. “A Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” MLN, 121. The John Hopkins U P (2006): 563-81.Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and The Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932.Zisselsberger, Markus. The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.

The German anatomist and artist Gunther von Hagens’s exhibition Body Worlds has toured Europe, Asia and the US several times, provoking both interest and dismay, fascination and disgust. This “original exhibition of real human bodies” features whole cadavers as well as specific body parts and it is organized thematically around specific bodily functions such as the respiratory system, blood circulation, skeletal materials and brain and nervous system. In each segment of the exhibition these themes are illustrated using parts of the body, presented in glass cases that are associated with each function. Next to these cases are the full body cadavers—the so-called “plastinates”. The Body Worlds exhibition is all about perception-in-motion: it is about circumnavigating bodies, stopping in front of a plastinate and in-corporating it, leaning over an arm or reaching towards a face, pointing towards a discrete blood vessel, drawing an abstract line between two organs. Experiencing here is above all a matter of reaching-towards and incorporeally touching bodies (Manning, Politics of Touch). These bodies are dead, still, motionless, “frozen in time between death and decay” (von Hagens, Body Worlds). Dead and still eerily animate, just as the surface of a freeze-frame photograph would seem to capture spatially a movement in its unfolding becoming, plastinates do not simply appear as dead matter used to represent vitality, but rather [...] as persons who managed to survive together with their bodies. What “inner quality” makes them appear alive? In what way is someone present, when what is conserved is not opinions (in writing), actions (in stories) or voice (on tape) but the body? (Hirschauer 41—42) Through the corporeal transformation—the plastination process—that these bodies have gone through, and the designed space of the exhibition—a space that makes possible both innovative and restrictive movements—these seemingly dead bodies come alive. There is a movement within these bodies, a movement that resonates with-in the exhibition space and mobilises visitors.Two ways of thinking movement in relation to stillness come out of this. The first one is concerned with the ordering and designing of space by means of visual cues, things or texts. This relates to stillness and slowness as suggestive, imposed and enforced upon bodies so that the possibilities of movement are reduced due to the way an environment is designed. Think for example of the way that an escalator moulds movements and speeds, or how signs such as “No walking on the grass” suggest a given pattern of walking. The second one is concerned with how movement is linked up with and implies continuous change. If a body’s movement and exaltation is reduced or slowed down, does the body then become immobile and still? Take ice, water and steam: these states give expression to three different attributes or conditions of what is considered to be one and the same chemical body. But in the transformation from one to the other, there is also an incorporeal transformation related to the possibilities of movement and change—between motion and rest—of what a body can do (Deleuze, Spinoza).Slowing Down Ever since the first exhibition Body Worlds has been under attack from critics, ethicists, journalists and religious groups, who claim that the public exhibition of dead bodies should, for various reasons, be banned. In 2004, in response to such criticism, the Californian Science Centre commissioned an ethical review of the exhibition before taking the decision on whether and how to host Body Worlds. One of the more interesting points in this review was the proposition that “the exhibition is powerful, and guests need time to acclimate themselves” (6). As a consequence, it was suggested that the Science Center arrange an entrance that would “slow people down and foster a reverential and respectful mood” (5). The exhibition space was to be organized in such a way that skeletons, historical contexts and images would be placed in the beginning of the exhibition, the whole body plastinates should only be introduced later in the exhibition. Before my first visit to the exhibition, I wasn’t sure how I would react when confronted with these dead bodies. To be perfectly honest, the moments before entering, I panicked. Crossing the asphalt between the Manchester Museum of Science and the exhibition hall, I felt dizzy; heart pounding in my chest and a sensation of nausea spreading throughout my body. Ascending a staircase that would take me to the entrance, located on the third floor in the exhibition hall, I thought I had detected an odour—rotten flesh or foul meat mixed with chemicals. Upon entering I was greeted by a young man to whom I presented my ticket. Without knowing in advance that this first room had been structured in such a way as to “slow people down”, I immediately felt relieved as I realized that the previously detected smell must have been psychosomatic: the room was perfectly odourless and the atmosphere was calm and tempered. Dimmed lights and pointed spotlights filled the space with an inviting and warm ambience. Images and texts on death and anatomical art were spread over the walls and in the back corners of the room two skeletons had been placed. Two glass cases containing bones and tendons had been placed in the middle of the room and next to these a case with a whole body, positioned upright in ‘anatomically correct’ position with arms, hands and legs down. There was nothing gruesome or spectacular about this room; I had visited anatomical collections, such as that of the Hunterian Museum in London or Medical Museion in Copenhagen, which in comparison far surpassed the alleged gruesomeness and voyeurism. And so I realized that the room had effectively slowed me down as my initial state of exaltation had been altered and stalled by the relative familiarity of images, texts and bare bones, all presented in a tempered and respectful way.Visitors are slowed down, but they are not still. There is no degree zero of movement, only different relations of speeds and slowness. Here I think it is useful to think of movement and change as it is expressed in Henri Bergson’s writings on temporality. Bergson frequently argued that the problem of Western metaphysics had been to spatialise movement, as in the famous example with Zeno’s arrow that—given that we think of movement as spatial—never reaches the tree towards which it has been shot. Bergson however did not refute the importance and practical dimensions of thinking through immobility; rather, immobility is the “prerequisite for our action” (Creative Mind 120). The problem occurs when we think away movement on behalf of that which we think of as still or immobile.We need immobility, and the more we succeed in imagining movement as coinciding with the immobilities of the points of space through which it passes, the better we think we understand it. To tell the truth, there never is real immobility, if we understand by that an absence of movement. Movement is reality itself (Bergson, Creative Mind 119).This notion of movement as primary, and immobility as secondary, gives expression to the proposition that immobility, solids and stillness are not given but have to be achieved. This can be done in several ways: external forces that act upon a body and transform it, as when water crystallizes into ice; certain therapeutic practices—yoga or relaxation exercises—that focus and concentrate attention and perception; spatial and architectural designs such as museums, art galleries or churches that induce and invoke certain moods and slow people down. Obviously there are other kinds of situations when bodies become excited and start moving more rapidly. Such situations could be, to name a few, when water starts to boil; when people use drugs like nicotine or caffeine in order to heighten alertness; or when bodies occupy spaces where movement is amplified by means of increased sensual stimuli, for example in the extreme conditions that characterize a natural catastrophe or a war.Speeding Up After the Body Worlds visitor had been slowed down and acclimatised in and through the first room, the full body plastinates were introduced. These bodies laid bare muscles, tissues, nerves, brain, heart, kidneys, and lungs. Some of these were “exploded views” of the body—in these, the body and its parts have been separated and drawn out from the position that they occupy in the living body, in some cases resulting in two discrete plastinates—e.g. one skeleton and one muscle-plastinate—that come from the same anatomical body. Congruent with the renaissance anatomical art of Vesalius, all plastinates are positioned in lifelike poses (Benthien, Skin). Some are placed inside a protective glass case while others are either standing, lying on the ground or hanging from the ceiling.As the exhibition unfolds, the plastinates themselves wipe away the calmness and stillness intended with the spatial design. Whereas a skeleton seems mute and dumb these plastinates come alive as visitors circle and navigate between them. Most visitors would merely point and whisper, some would reach towards and lean over a plastinate. Others however noticed that jumping up and down created a resonating effect in the plastinates so that a plastinate’s hand, leg or arm moved. At times the rooms were literally filled with hordes of excited and energized school children. Then the exhibition space was overtaken with laughter, loud voices, running feet, comments about the gruesome von Hagens and repeated remarks on the plastinates’ genitalia. The former mood of respectfulness and reverence has been replaced by the fascinating and idiosyncratic presence of animated and still, plastinated bodies. Animated and still? So what is a plastinate?Movement and Form Through plastination, the body undergoes a radical and irreversible transformation which turns the organic body into an “inorganic organism”, a hybrid of plastic and flesh (Hirschauer 36). Before this happens however the living body has to face another phase of transition by which it turns into a dead cadaver. From the point of view of an individual body that lives, breathes and evolves, this transformation implies turning into a decomposing and rotting piece of flesh, tissue and bones. Any corpse will sooner or later turn into something else, ashes, dust or earth. This process can be slowed down using various techniques and chemicals such as mummification or formaldehyde, but this will merely slow down the process of decomposition, and not terminate it.The plastination technique is rather different in several respects. Firstly the specimen is soaked in acetone and the liquids in the corpse—water and fat—are displaced. This displacement prepares the specimen for the next step in the process which is the forced vacuum impregnation. Here the specimen is placed in a polymer mixture with silicone rubber or epoxy resin. This process is undertaken in vacuum which allows for the plastic to enter each and every cell of the specimen, thus replacing the acetone (von Hagens, Body Worlds). Later on, when this transformation has finished, the specimen is modelled according to a concept, a “gestalt plastinate”, such as “the runner”, “the badminton player” or “the skin man”. The concept expresses a dynamic and life-like pose—referred to as the gestalt—that exceeds the individual parts of which it is formed. This would suggest that form is in itself immobility and that perception is what is needed to make form mobile; as gestalt the plastinated body is spatially immobilised, yet it gives birth to a body that comes alive in perception-movement. Once again I think that Bergson could help us to think through this relation, a relation that is conceived here as a difference between form-as-stillness and formation-as-movement:Life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form; form is only a snapshot view of a transition (Bergson, Creative Evolution 328, emphasis in original).In other words there is a form that is relative to human perception, but there is “underneath” this form nothing but a continuous formation or becoming as Bergson would have it. For our purposes the formation of the gestalt plastinate is an achievement that makes perceptible the possibility of divergent or co-existent durations; the plastinate belongs to a temporal rhythm that even though it coincides with ours is not identical to it.Movement and Trans-formation So what kind of a strange entity is it that emerges out of this transformation, through which organic materials are partly replaced with plastic? Compared with a living body or a mourned cadaver, it is first and foremost an entity that no longer is subject to the continuous evolution of time. In this sense the plastinate is similar to cryogenetical bodies (Doyle, Wetwares), or to Ötzi the ice man (Spindler, Man in the ice)—bodies that resist the temporal logic according to which things are in constant motion. The processes of composition and decomposition that every living organism undergoes at every instant have been radically interrupted.However, plastinates are not forever fixed, motionless and eternally enduring objects. As Walter points out, plastinated cadavers are expected to “remain stable” for approximately 4000 years (606). Thus, the plastinate has become solidified and stabilized according to a different pattern of duration than that of the decaying human body. There is a tension here between permanence and change, between bodies that endure and a body that decomposes. Maybe as when summer, which is full of life and energy, turns into winter, which is still and seemingly without life. It reminds us of Nietzsche's Zarathustra and the winter doctrine: When the water is spanned by planks, when bridges and railings leap over the river, verily those are believed who say, “everything is in flux. . .” But when the winter comes . . . , then verily, not only the blockheads say, “Does not everything stand still?” “At bottom everything stands still.”—that is truly a winter doctrine (Bennett and Connolly 150). So we encounter the paradox of how to accommodate motion within stillness and stillness within motion: if everything is in continuous movement, how can there be stillness and regularity (and vice versa)? An interesting example of such temporal interruption is described by Giorgio Agamben who invokes an example with a tick that was kept alive, in a state of hibernation, for 18 years without nourishment (47). During those years this tick had ceased to exist in time, it existed only in extended space. There are of course differences between the tick and von Hagens’s plastinates—one difference being that the plastinates are not only dead but also plastic and inorganic—but the analogy points us to the idea of producing the conditions of possibility for eternal, timeless (and, by implication, motionless) bodies. If movement and change are thought of as spatial, as in Zeno’s paradox, here they have become temporal: movement happens in and because of time and not in space. The technique of plastination and the plastinates themselves emerge as processes of a-temporalisation and re-spatialisation of the body. The body is displaced—pulled out of time and history—and becomes a Cartesian body located entirely in the coordinates of extended space. As Ian Hacking suggests, plastinates are “Cartesian, extended, occupying space. Plastinated organs and corpses are odourless: like the Cartesian body, they can be seen but not smelt” (15).Interestingly, Body Worlds purports to show the inner workings of the human body. However, what visitors experience is not the working but the being. They do not see what the body does, its activities over time; rather, they see what it is, in space. Conversely, von Hagens wishes to “make us aware of our physical nature, our nature within us” (Kuppers 127), but the nature that we become aware of is not the messy, smelly and fluid nature of bodily interiors. Rather we encounter the still nature of Zarathustra’s winter landscape, a landscape in which the passage of time has come to a halt. As Walter concludes “the Body Worlds experience is primarily visual, spatial, static and odourless” (619).Still in Constant MotionAnd yet...Body Worlds moves us. If not for the fact that these plastinates and their creator strike us as gruesome, horrific and controversial, then because these bodies that we encounter touch us and we them. The sensation of movement, in and through the exhibition, is about this tension between being struck, touched or moved by a body that is radically foreign and yet strangely familiar to us. The resonant and reverberating movement that connects us with it is expressed through that (in)ability to accommodate motion in stillness, and stillness in motion. For whereas the plastinates are immobilised in space, they move in time and in experience. As Nigel Thrift puts it The body is in constant motion. Even at rest, the body is never still. As bodies move they trace out a path from one location to another. These paths constantly intersect with those of others in a complex web of biographies. These others are not just human bodies but also all other objects that can be described as trajectories in time-space: animals, machines, trees, dwellings, and so on (Thrift 8).This understanding of the body as being in constant motion stretches beyond the idea of a body that literally moves in physical space; it stresses the processual intertwining of subjects and objects through space-times that are enduring and evolving. The paradoxical nature of the relation between bodies in motion and bodies at rest is obviously far from exhausted through the brief exemplification that I have tried to provide here. Therefore I must end here and let someone else, better suited for this task, explain what it is that I wish to have said. We are hardly conscious of anything metaphorical when we say of one picture or of a story that it is dead, and of another that it has life. To explain just what we mean when we say this, is not easy. Yet the consciousness that one thing is limp, that another one has the heavy inertness of inanimate things, while another seems to move from within arises spontaneously. There must be something in the object that instigates it (Dewey 182). References Agamben, Giorgio. The Open. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2004.Bennett, Jane, and William Connolly. “Contesting Nature/Culture.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (2002) 148-163.Benthien, Claudia. Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. New York: Columbia U P, 2002. California Science Center. “Summary of Ethical Review.” 10 Jan. 2009.Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Trans. Mabelle Andison. Mineola: Dover, 2007. –––. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, 2005.Doyle, Richard. Wetwares. 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