It looks alive! 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 used since ages 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 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.

Sembra viva! Quanto volte lo abbiamo detto o pensato, restando a bocca aperta – sorpresi o impauriti – di fronte a un’immagine talmente simile al vero da venir presa per un essere umano in carne e ossa. Quante volte ci è capitato di ingannarci, di renderci conto dell’errore e di scherzarci un po’ su, senza però riuscire a mettere del tutto a tacere quel dubbio che continua a tormentarci: e se fosse viva davvero? Se quella statua tutt’a un tratto iniziasse a muoversi e a parlare? Questo libro affronta la questione dell’animazione dell’inanimato dal punto di vista dell’estetica, concentrandosi sul tema dell’iperrealismo e su un materiale particolare come la cera, da sempre impiegata per realizzare figure indistinguibili dai modelli reali. Prendendo spunto dal fatidico incontro tra un giovane Edmund Husserl, futuro padre della fenomenologia, e una misteriosa donna che lo invita a raggiungerla in cima alle scale di un museo delle cere, il volume ripercorre le sorti del sogno (o se si preferisce dell’incubo) del duplicato, del sostituto e della trasformazione di un’immagine in un corpo vivo, dal mito di Pigmalione ai cyborg, fino alle più recenti tecniche di animazione digitale. Costringendo l’osservatore a dubitare della possibilità di aggrapparsi a una pur minima differenza tra apparenza e realtà, l’iperrealismo insinua il sospetto che l’immagine non sia soltanto un’immagine, una cosa, un mero oggetto, ma che con essa in certo modo ne vada della vita stessa del modello, dell’originale. O addirittura che l’immagine sia il modello, e che non esista alcun fantomatico originale dietro o al di là di essa.

In carne e cera. Estetica e fenomenologia dell'iperrealismo

Pietro Conte
2014-01-01

Abstract

It looks alive! 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 used since ages 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 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.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3709119
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