Universally regarded as a milestone in the studies of ceroplastic art, Julius von Schlosser’s History of Portraiture in Wax was originally published in 1910-1911. In the very same years, Edmund Husserl was compulsively recalling a destabilizing experience of his youth, when he had met a mysterious «lady» – actually a wax puppet – beckoning to him from the top of a staircase at the Castan’s Panopticum in Berlin. The father of phenomenology took that rather ordinary episode as his cue to start reflecting on the ambiguous relationship between reality and pretense and on the difference between perception [Wahrnehmung] and image consciousness [Bildbewusstsein]. Despite their different backgrounds and perspectives, Schlosser and Husserl raised very similar questions: how to mark out the boundary line between art and craft? When does an image cease to be perceived as an image and suddenly becomes a double, a substitute, an alter ego? And which specific cognitive operations are performed when looking at an image as if it were a living being? By referring to some anecdotic accounts in which mannequins are involved in enigmatic cases of animation of inanimate objects, I will focus on the recurrent issue of wax figures in Husserl’s work, joining together historical-artistic and philosophical-aesthetic perspective, and then moving from the particular case study of waxworks to the general issue of hyperrealism and of (presumed) excessive similarity. From a critical point of view, moreover, I will finally show that, on the one hand (contra Schlosser), the ancient art of ceroplastics has been replaced neither by photography, nor by even more illusionistic digital media; and that, on the other hand (contra Husserl), wax sculpture may – and in some cases should – be considered as a genuine form of art.

Tra il 1910 e il 1911 Julius von Schlosser, fondatore della moderna storiografia artistica, pubblicava la Geschichte der Portraitbildnerei in Wachs, pietra miliare degli studi sulla ceroplastica. Negli stessi anni il padre della fenomenologia, Edmund Husserl, prendeva spunto da un episodio vissuto da ragazzo – l’incontro con una fantomatica «dama di cera» – per riflettere sui limiti della rappresentazione artistica e sulla differenza tra percezione (Wahrnehmung) e coscienza d’immagine (Bildbewusstsein). In entrambi i casi, le domande erano sempre le stesse: quali sono i confini tra arte e artigianato? Quando un’immagine cessa di esser tale e minaccia di trasformarsi in doppio, sostituto, alter ego? E quali sono, a livello cognitivo, le caratteristiche fondamentali che fanno sì che una semplice statua venga percepita come un essere vivente in carne e ossa? Ripercorrendo alcuni aneddoti in cui statue e manichini appaiono al centro di enigmatici episodi di animazione dell’inanimato e focalizzandosi su quello che anno dopo anno diventerà un vero e proprio leitmotiv dell’opera husserliana, il saggio si propone di coniugare la prospettiva storico-artistica e quella estetico-filosofica, esaminando il caso delle statue di cera come chiave d’accesso al problema più generale dell’iperrealismo e del (presunto) eccesso di mimetismo. In prospettiva critica, infine, si dimostrerà da un lato (contra Schlosser) che l’antica ceroplastica ha saputo sopravvivere non solo all’avvento della fotografia, ma anche a quello di ben più illusionistici media digitali, dall’altro (contra Husserl) che essa non si riduce affatto a fenomeni di spettacolarizzazione à la Madame Tussaud, ma può e in molti casi deve essere considerata genuina forma artistica.

«Non più uomini di cera, ma vivissimi». Per una fenomenologia dell’iperrealismo

Pietro Conte
2015-01-01

Abstract

Universally regarded as a milestone in the studies of ceroplastic art, Julius von Schlosser’s History of Portraiture in Wax was originally published in 1910-1911. In the very same years, Edmund Husserl was compulsively recalling a destabilizing experience of his youth, when he had met a mysterious «lady» – actually a wax puppet – beckoning to him from the top of a staircase at the Castan’s Panopticum in Berlin. The father of phenomenology took that rather ordinary episode as his cue to start reflecting on the ambiguous relationship between reality and pretense and on the difference between perception [Wahrnehmung] and image consciousness [Bildbewusstsein]. Despite their different backgrounds and perspectives, Schlosser and Husserl raised very similar questions: how to mark out the boundary line between art and craft? When does an image cease to be perceived as an image and suddenly becomes a double, a substitute, an alter ego? And which specific cognitive operations are performed when looking at an image as if it were a living being? By referring to some anecdotic accounts in which mannequins are involved in enigmatic cases of animation of inanimate objects, I will focus on the recurrent issue of wax figures in Husserl’s work, joining together historical-artistic and philosophical-aesthetic perspective, and then moving from the particular case study of waxworks to the general issue of hyperrealism and of (presumed) excessive similarity. From a critical point of view, moreover, I will finally show that, on the one hand (contra Schlosser), the ancient art of ceroplastics has been replaced neither by photography, nor by even more illusionistic digital media; and that, on the other hand (contra Husserl), wax sculpture may – and in some cases should – be considered as a genuine form of art.
2015
4
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3709112
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