Glass, Mixed Media, Stone : The Bodily Stuffs of Suspended Animation

Abstract

The essay takes ‘bodies of stone’ in its actual, literal sense, discussing nineteenth-century embalming techniques which involved a material transformation of human remains into glass, mixed media or stone. These processes of vitrification or petrification provided, on the one hand, auto-icons of the dead that seemed to rival the chemical immortality offered by the emergent media, such as photography or film. On the other hand, by mimicking natural processes of fossilisation, bodies of glass or stone were infused with vitalist notions of matter, hinting at states of suspended animation and latent life. The essay explores this ‘biochemical constellation of immortality’ through some peculiar nineteenth-century examples and traces the uncanny survival of these living corpses in today’s pop cultural imaginary.