Through this attention to the activity of memorialization, we might also remind that public memory is constructed, that understanding of events depends on memory's construction, and that there are ...worldly consequences in the kinds of historical understanding generated by monuments. James E. Young, The texture of memory, p. 15
Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema is the first book to focus on the relationship between sculpture and the silver screen. It covers a broad range of magical, mystical and phenomenological ...interactions between the two media, from early film's eroticized tableaux vivants to enigmatic sculptures in modernist cinema. Sculptures are literally brought to life on the silver screen, while living people are turned into, or trapped inside, statuary. The book examines key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through a series of case studies and through an extensive reference gallery of 150 different films. Considering the work of directors like Georges Méliès, Jean Cocteau and Alain Resnais, as well as films like House of Wax, Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, this is an innovative exploration of two different media, their artistic traditions and their respective theoretical paradigms.
The dramatic story behind the 3,200-year-old colossal Grand Egyptian Museum Ramesses statueKing Ramesses II ruled Egypt for an extraordinary sixty-six years (1279-1213 BC) during the Nineteenth ...Dynasty. A great warrior and lavish builder, he fathered dozens of children and is widely regarded as the most celebrated and powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom.This wonderfully clear, engaging book recounts the dramatic history of the famed red granite colossal statue of Ramesses II now residing in Egypt's Grand Egyptian Museum. One of the biggest statues ever made and part of the urban landscape of modern Cairo, the statue lent its name to Ramses Square and the city's mainline train station, and was so much a symbol of Cairo that it featured in countless Egyptian films. Susanna Thomas recounts the full history of the statue's creation and installation in the Great Temple of Ptah at Memphis during the reign of Ramesses II, its reuse by Ramesses IV, and the later history of the statue during the Greco-Roman and Islamic Periods. The book also provides an overview of how statues were made in ancient Egypt and includes a brief discussion of the statue cults of Ramesses II, kingship, temples, and the expansion of the New Kingdom capital city of Memphis and its temples. The final section covers the history of the statue since its rediscovery and subsequent rescue in the mid-nineteenth century until its installation in the entrance hall of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza.Written by a New Kingdom specialist and curatorial expert and illustrated with over 150 images, Ramesses, Beloved by Ptah tells the fascinating story of this magnificent statue within the wider context of statue cults and the reign of Ramesses II, and its subsequent rescue and restoration in modern times.
Abstract In what way might public statues wrong people? In recent years, philosophers have drawn on speech act theory to answer this question by arguing that statues constitute harmful or ...disrespectful forms of speech. My aim in this paper will be add a different theoretical perspective to this discussion. I will argue that while the speech act approach provides a useful starting point for thinking about what is wrong with public statues, we can get a fuller understanding of these wrongs by drawing on resources from recent work in situated affectivity. I will argue that public statues can be understood as affective artifacts and that this can both help us understand both the deep affective wrongs caused by public statues and offer a possible explanation as to why some people are so strongly opposed to their removal.
This study provides an analysis of more than 60 statues and fragments depicting the god Amun and his consorts which Tutankhamun, Ay, and/or Horemhab commissioned to replace those destroyed by the ..."heretic pharaoh" Akhenaten.
Drawing on analysis of press reporting, museum display and a large-scale survey undertaken in Bristol in the aftermath of the 2020 toppling of the Colston statue, this article examines the shifting ...meanings given to the statue across a range of material and imagined sites. It works with two ways that history and geography intersect: the history of the sites/aftersites of this statue, and the materiality of histories in the sites/aftersites of this statue. Rather than the toppling of the Colston statue being a simple story of iconoclasm, a more complex historical geography was – and is – at play. As they imagined future aftersites for the Colston statue, people in the city saw this as an opportunity for some form of return of the statue – metaphorically if not materially – to one of its previous longer or shorter-lived homes. These former sites were seen to offer very different framings of the statue, as well as radically different ways of thinking about history. It is not simply historical geographers who are aware of the power of place in attributing meaning to statues. This can also be seen in popular responses to the afterlives, and aftersites, of the recent wave of fallen statues.
•First study of popular views on the future of the toppled Colston statue•Toppled statues continue to be, physically and discursively, on the move.•Individuals seek to enact material or imaginative return of toppled statues.•Sophisticated public awareness of the significance of location in framing meaning.•Popular understanding of the politics of museum display.
Relegated to the Crypt of the Capitol building for 76 years, the Portrait Monument has stood in the Rotunda since 1997. Often referred to as the Suffrage Statue, it memorializes pioneering feminists ...Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and is the sole sculptural representation of women in the Rotunda. From its conception by sculptor Adelaide Johnson as three separate busts to its laborious execution and celebrated placement in the Rotunda, the seven-ton sculpture has provoked frustration, jubilation and hullabaloo. Drawing on diaries, letters, newspapers and historic photographs, this first-ever history of the monument explores the controversy, myths and artistry behind this neoclassical yet unconventional work of art.
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