Discourses of dissolution: Designing the deceased in visual and material culture

How visual and material culture compose death’s presence and the forms in which the mortal body can be reconfigured, is the prevailing thematic thread of the publications included in this thesis. Research foregrounding the dead body and the disposition of the corpse provide a conceptual lens through which to evaluate posthumous star texts, sartorial design, museum exhibitions and film costume.

The papers presented in this collection contribute to existing work on encountering death and the corpse in media and popular culture. (Foltyn, 2008; 2010; Harper, 2010; Campbell, 2007; Fernandez, 2011; Jermyn, 2013; Weber, 2014; Penfold-Mounce, 2016; 2018), with specific attention to the tensions between presence and absence in socio-cultural discourses on death that are frequently assessed in the spaces of visual and material culture, art and design. (Hallam and Hockey 2001; Aaron, 2013, 2015; Penfold-Mounce 2018).

The presence/absence paradox that emerges in the convergence between death, embodiment and image cultures is thus interwoven throughout these studies. Drawing upon the premise that visual and material culture “recover the disappearing body” (Hallam and Hockey, 1999:23), this collection interrogates the tensions at work in the ‘recovery’ process. More specifically, the oscillation from restoration to dissipation, somatic stability to instability, body composition to decomposition in reconfiguring death is considered.

Each of the papers included evaluates qualities that connote death’s presence, essentially positing design features that shape the dead body. This research contribution lies in its emphasis on the corpse as a conceptual paradigm focussing on textual analysis of mise-en-scene, bodily forms, textures and materials. The corpse is not a plot motivator or an identifiable character in the case studies that feature in these papers. It is often not explicitly in the frame at all. Instead, it provides a methodological framework that arguably enables critical insights in the designing of embodiment.

‘Discourses of Dissolution’ interrogates the corpse’s “particular set of bodily characteristics” (Hallam Hockey et al, 1999:62), emphasising how these shape and inflect each case study. How death can manifest itself within representative devices as both an explicit entity and as a residual trace is assessed. Subsequently, this research anthology proposes an aesthetic grammar, a corpse-lexicon, to assess future creative expressions of the deceased in visual and material culture.

Publications omitted due to copyright restrictions