Pietro Conte

All framing devices have the effect of sharply demarcating the boundaries of the representational space by ensuring both the island-like structure of pictures and the beholder’s awareness of being in front of ‘nothing but images.’ It is precisely this separateness, and, with it, the equation of representation with depiction, that is being more and more challenged by hyperrealistic, immersive, and interactive virtual environments that blur the threshold between image and reality, thus eliciting in the experiencer a strong feeling of being incorporated into quasi-real worlds. Drawing on phenomenology, media philosophy, visual culture studies and techno-aesthetics, this book introduces (and critically examines) the notion of 'unframing' as a key to understanding this radically new iconoscape.

It looks real! How often have we found ourselves thinking or saying it, feeling both astounded and frightened by an image so closely resembling its model that it could easily be mistaken for a real human being? How often have we been deceived by an extremely lifelike portrait or statue, until we suddenly became aware of such mistake and joked a little about it, yet unable to definitely quiet our unsettling doubt: what if that image were actually living? What if it started moving and speaking?
This book addresses the topic of the animation of the inanimate within the framework of aesthetics and theory of art, focusing on hyperrealism and on an unusual material such as wax, which has been since ages used to produce figures indistinguishable from their models in the flesh. Starting from a fateful meeting between a young Edmund Husserl, still-to-become founder of the phenomenological movement, and a mysterious lady who beckons to him from the top of the stairs in a wax museum, this book goes over the dream (or perhaps the nightmare) of excessive similarity, doubles, surrogates, and the transformation of images into real living beings, from Pygmalion’s myth to cyborgs, and up to the most recent digital editing and computer graphics techniques. Hyperrealism forces observers to doubt the possibility of finding a difference – however small it may be – between appearance and reality, thus evoking the  suspicion that an image is not just an image, an object, a mere thing, but that it actually concerns the life itself of the model, of the original. Or even that the image is the model, and that there is no original at all behind or beyond it.

Hyperrealistic replicas of the human face owe their documentary value to the belief that they result from mechanical reproduction. The idea that a picture is automatically produced through a process of imprint taking is often enough to convince the viewer of its truthfulness and reliability, thus contributing to giving images an aura of authenticity and to creating the myth of pure objectivity. But what happens when the link between hyperrealism, mechanicalness, and truthfulness is disentangled? In 2017, French artist Raphaël Fabre successfully applied for an ID card using a computer-generated picture where the real face was, in fact, an artificial, synthetic mask. Starting from this case study, the essay tackles the issue of the increasing overlapping of actual reality and digital (un)reality, particularly focusing on the concerns raised by the confusion between faces and masks caused by the rapid spread of so-called deepfakes in a world that speeds from documentality towards what I propose to call "mockumentality".

The essay follows the path of the "American dream" imagery, which found one of its most famous and celebrated expressions in a photograph, "Lunch atop a Skyscraper". In 1989, Duane Hanson presented a hyper-realistic sculpture that clearly refers to the very same imagery. However, compared to the serenity and confidence in the future that shone through the photograph, "Lunch Break" conveys a completely different atmosphere, suggesting that the American dream has been slowly turning into a nightmare. By adopting a phenomenological approach, I will show that the change of medium contributed greatly to the radical change in the meaning of the imagery itself, and this, in turn, will allow us to see all the tragic consequences of the "American dream". Duane Hanson’s work has been remediated and resemantized in 2003 by another US artist, Sharon Lockhart. By examining this very last stage of our iconic journey, I shall show that writing the "biography" of an image means writing the biography of a whole nation.

Universally regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most subversive pièces, the Dead Class epitomises Tadeusz Kantor’s concept of what theatre (and, more generally, art) could and should be. In the attempt to eliminate any distance between the stage and the
auditorium, between actors and spectators, the Polish artist reflected on how to do away with the traditional distinction between the reality of everyday life and the (alleged) unreality of theatrical performances. Staging daily and trivial objects played a crucial role in this artistic strategy. Kantor was fascinated, in particular, by hyperrealistic dummies which seem to have more to do with Wunderkammern and fairground booths than with so-called «high» art. By focusing on the material the Dead Class mannequins are made of (namely, wax), the article delves deep into Kantor’s essays and manifestos, exploring the theoretical reasons underlying his aesthetics of theatre.

Starting from a well-known letter from Goethe to Beuth, this essay focuses on the problem of visual representation in plastic anatomy from 18th century wax Venuses to 19th century moulages. I will argue that the very same problem – i.e. the replacement of the real body by means of artificial substitutes – led to very different solutions, with regard to both the depiction and the observer’s gaze.

Building on a morphological paradigm based on the equidistance of any art form from the concept of beauty, Herder explicitly subverts normative aesthetics and its claim to impose an everlasting canon and to measure all cultural products by the very same yardstick. By focusing on Herder’s early writings about ancient sculpture, poetry and mythology, I point out how they will later influence his philosophy of history, as it developed in works such as "This too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" and "Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity".

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.

First Italian edition of Erwin Panofsky's last work, "Tomb Sculpture", published 1964 and based on four lectures delivered at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 1956. A pioneering book that focuses on funerary art history and theory, investigating humankind's hopes and fears facing death.