{"product_id":"the-contact-image","title":"The Contact Image","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA new conceptual tool for understanding the history of art\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom ancient cave paintings to contemporary sculpture, forms of indexical trace are vital to the human practice of artmaking. Through this wide-ranging exploration, Johanna Malt shows how casts, molds, and imprints (\"contact images\") offer a paradigm for thinking about our relationship to objects and their surfaces as sites of meaning. Engaging and complicating philosophical dualities of absence and presence, art and non-art, original and copy, Malt introduces the contact image as an important new concept for the study of Western art.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eClose reading examples from 30,000 years of art history, Malt cuts across eras and media to unite diverse forms of artistic production created through instances of contact with \"the objects of the world.\" From holy relics to Napoleon's death mask to life casts of the human body by artists such as Duane Hanson and Janine Antoni, as well as conceptual and performance work by Jasper Johns and Yves Klein, \u003ci\u003eThe Contact Image\u003c\/i\u003e traces themes of selfhood, time, negation, and vestige in these tactile encounters.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRevisiting fundamental questions about representation, perception, and aesthetics, \u003ci\u003eThe Contact Image\u003c\/i\u003e is a sophisticated provocation for a theory of art built on the tension and oscillations that emerge when we explore how artworks embody opposites.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRetail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and\/or extended descriptions.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57504978600309,"sku":"9781517915377","price":128.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/the-contact-image","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}