Wednesday, February 22, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Presenter: Kathryn Carney
202 Frick Fine Arts Building
This talk considers two "orans" sculptures produced for German hygiene exhibitions in 1911 and 1930, respectively, to examine the ways they reflect changing ideas about the body informed by different paradigms of science and visuality. Principal to this discussion is the 1930 figure known as the "transparent man," the centerpiece of the German Hygiene Museum's collection, which Carney identifies as an "x-ray in the round." By unpacking the ideological valences of such transparency, Carney makes the case for a critical reevaluation of the figure's modernizing impulses as protofascistic in their surveillant aspirations.