Memento Mori in Contemporary Art

Memento Mori in Contemporary Art
Author: Taylor Worley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019-11-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0429671059

This book explores how four contemporary artists—Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober, and Damien Hirst—pursue the question of death through their fraught appropriations of Christian imagery. Each artist is shown to not only pose provocative theological questions, but also to question the abilities of theological speech to adequately address current attitudes to death. When set within a broader theological context around the thought of death, Bacon’s works invite fresh readings of the New Testament’s narration of the betrayal of Christ, and Beuys’ works can be appreciated for the ways they evoke Resurrection to envision possible futures for Germany in the aftermath of war. Gober’s immaculate sculptures and installations serve to create alternative religious environments, and these places are both evocative of his Roman Catholic upbringing and virtually haunted by the ghosts of his excommunication from that past. Lastly and perhaps most problematically, Hirst has built his brand as an artist from making jokes about death. By opening fresh arenas of dialogue and meaning-making in our society and culture today, the rich humanity of these artworks promises both renewed depths of meaning regarding our exit from this world as well as how we might live well within it for the time that we have. As such, it will be a vital resource for all scholars in Theology, the Visual Arts, Material Religion and Religious Studies.

Death in Documentaries

Death in Documentaries
Author: Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004356967

Memento mori is a broad and understudied cultural phenomenon and experience. The term “memento mori” is a Latin injunction that means “remember mortality,” or more directly, “remember that you must die.” In art and cultural history, memento mori appears widely, especially in medieval folk culture and in the well-known Dutch still life vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet memento mori extends well beyond these points in art and cultural history. In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori. Bennett-Carpenter shows that documentaries may offer composed transformative experiences in which a viewer may renew one’s consciousness of mortality – and thus renew one’s life.

The Ivory Mirror

The Ivory Mirror
Author: Stephen Perkinson
Publisher: Bowdoin
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: ART
ISBN: 9780300225952

The Ivory Mirror / Stephen Perkinson -- The Light at the End of the Tunnel : Manuscript Illumination and the Concept of Death / Elizabeth Morrison -- Chicart Bailly and the Specter of Death : Memento Mori in a Sixteenth-Century Estate Inventory / Katherine Baker -- Plates -- List of Plates -- Memento mori Beads : Collecting Histories and Contexts / Naomi Speakman -- The Poetry of Death / Emma Maggie Solberg

Nature Morte

Nature Morte
Author: Michael Petry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Thought-provoking and richly visual, Nature Morte brings together, for the first time, the poignant, provocative re-imaginings of the traditional still life by over 180 international contemporary artists. This visually stunning and timely book reveals how leading artists of the 21st century are reinvigorating the still life, a genre previously synonymous with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Masters. Michael Petry's careful selection celebrates works by emerging and established artists alike, from all over the globe, including John Currin, Elmgreen & Dragset, Robert Gober, Renata Hegyi, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Beatriz Milhazes, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Peyton, Marc Quinn, Gerhard Richter, Sam Taylor-Wood and Ai Wei Wei. Short and compelling introductions begin each chapter and are followed by dramatic, visually led spreads that pair each work with a perceptive reading of its significance to the still-life tradition. Petry's engaging, provocative text reveals how contemporary practitioners are revisiting the major motifs of the still life and translating them for the modern world. Petry explores the timeless themes of life, death and the irrevocable passing of time in these new works for our modern world; artworks that invite us to pause and reconsider what it means to be human.

Nature Morte

Nature Morte
Author: Michael Petry
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 050029223X

“Richly rethinks one of art’s everlasting topics.” —Art & Auction Leading artists of the twenty-first century are reviving the still life, a genre that once was more associated with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Masters than with contemporary art. The audacious still lifes celebrated here challenge that historical supremacy and redefine what it means to be a work of nature morte (literally translated from the French: “dead nature”). Whether through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, or other media, contemporary artists have drawn on the centuries-old tradition to create works of conceptual vivacity, beauty, and emotional poignancy. Structured according to the classical categories of the still-life tradition—Flora, Food, House and Home, Fauna, and Death, each chapter explores how the timeless symbolic resonance of the memento mori—a reminder of death, change, and the passing of time—has been rediscovered for a new millennium. Among the artists represented are John Currin, Saara Ekström, Elmgreen & Dragset, Renata Hegyi, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Gary Hume, Jeff Koons, McDermott & McGough, Beatriz Milhazes, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Cy Twombly.

Art of Death

Art of Death
Author: Nigel Llewellyn
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1780231512

How did our ancestors die? Whereas in our own day the subject of death is usually avoided, in pre-Industrial England the rituals and processes of death were present and immediate. People not only surrounded themselves with memento mori, they also sought to keep alive memories of those who had gone before. This continual confrontation with death was enhanced by a rich culture of visual artifacts. In The Art of Death, Nigel Llewellyn explores the meanings behind an astonishing range of these artifacts, and describes the attitudes and practices which lay behind their production and use. Illustrated and explained in this book are an array of little-known objects and images such as death's head spoons, jewels and swords, mourning-rings and fans, wax effigies, church monuments, Dance of Death prints, funeral invitations and ephemera, as well as works by well-known artists, including Holbein, Hogarth and Blake.

Medieval Bodies

Medieval Bodies
Author: Jack Hartnell
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages:
Release: 2018-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 178283270X

A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time in the process. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

Memento Mori - a Collection of Magickal and Mythological Perspectives on Death, Dying, Mortality and Beyond

Memento Mori - a Collection of Magickal and Mythological Perspectives on Death, Dying, Mortality and Beyond
Author: Julian Vayne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2012-11
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781905297146

"Mememto mori is a unique feast of offerings exploring a variety of magickal and mythological perspectives on death, dying, mortality and beyond. With contributions from sixteen international writers, this compilation gathered together by editor Kim Huggens, offers a marvellous diversity of both historical and contemporary, as well as experiential and scholarly, essays."-- p. [4] of cover.

Where We Begin

Where We Begin
Author: Christie Nieman
Publisher: Pan Australia
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1760982881

Seventeen-year-old Anna is running into the night. Fleeing her boyfriend, her mother, and everything she has known. She is travelling into the country, to the land and the grandparents she has never met, looking for answers to questions that have never been asked. For every family has secrets. But some secrets - once laid bare - can never be forgiven. A dark, deeply compelling, coming-of-age YA novel from the author of As Stars Fall. HONOURS BOOK FOR CBCA BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR OLDER READERS 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE DAVITT AWARDS YOUNG ADULT 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE READINGS YA BOOK PRIZE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR WRITING FOR YOUNG ADULTS 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NSW PREMIER'S AWARD ETHEL TURNER PRIZE 2021