Somatic Sculpture : Pre-modern Bodily Encounters with Contemporary Art

This book explores the return of the somatic – the bodily and emotional response that an object produces in the viewer – in contemporary life-cast sculpture, revealing how the body-centricity of pre-modern Christian artistic traditions can play out in contemporary art practices. Connecting a chocolate Jesus with the Eucharist, bodily fluids with Adam and Eve, and corporeal fragmentation with medieval relics, it considers how art objects can play on our innate sense of self, trauma, and mortality, and how the literal imprint of the body in an artwork, can evoke strong feelings of loss, grief, fear, and above all, disgust.

The book presents detailed readings of four influential artworks from the last 30 years: Cosimo Cavallaro’s Sweet Jesus (2005), Kiki Smith’s Untitled (1990), Marc Quinn’s Self (iterative, 1991-present), and Berlinde de Bruyckere’s Elie (2009), revealing a rich kaleidoscope of references to pre-modern imagery and traditions. Constructed from transient, organic materials, these intimate works close the gap between artist, artwork, and audience; we see the artist, and ourselves, within them. Sharing an inherent ambiguity, they represent life yet embrace death: individual and universal, present yet absent, disgusting yet alluring.

Building on recent debates in contemporary art practice, this book will add an important perspective to discourses surrounding the survival of the image, embedded memory, audience participation, the recurrence of Christian imagery in contemporary art, and the impact of sight as multifaceted mediator of aesthetic reception. Author Lisi Linster deconstructs the aesthetic encounter by looking at the semiotics of each artwork alongside their phenomenological aspect, revealing how pre-modern Christian themes interact directly with the unique tangible quality of life-cast sculpture, and exploring how this can play out sensorially in the contemporary art gallery.