Stigma and stigmata: medieval hagiography and Michael Landy's Saints Alive. Issue 3 (2nd July 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Dailey, Alice
• Is Part Of: Word & image. Volume 32:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 275
• Page End: 293
• Publication Date: 2016-07-02
• Subjects: Landy -- hagiography -- iconography -- animated sculpture -- stigmata -- Saint Francis; Arts -- Periodicals; Communication in art -- Periodicals; 700.5
• DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2016.1188347
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0266-6286

Abstract

Abstract: This article studies Saints Alive, Michael Landy's recent kinetic sculpture and collage exhibit at The National Gallery, London . Saints Alive featured giant, audience-activated contraptions made out of scrap machinery and body parts from the gallery's collection of fifteenth-century iconography. When set in motion, these gizmo-saints enacted their own persecutions repeatedly, some gradually destroying themselves as the exhibit progressed. The sculptures were complemented by a group of drawings and collages that reconfigure heads, hands, wounds, and weapons out of religious art into fantastical devices of penitential suffering. This article argues that the complex, varied work of Saints Alive engages the underlying semiotics and aesthetics of hagiographic art. Understood in the context of its medieval and Renaissance sources, Landy's self-destroying contraptions expose hagiography's techniques for organizing discontinuous bodies, temporal registers, and figurative modes into unified image and story. Through dismemberment, fabrication, suturing, and reanimation, Saints Alive recovers the stigma—the hole, puncture, wound, or blight—that religious art renders as stigmata, or the corporeal evidence of sanctity. The tension between suppressed stigma and professed stigmata—between an open wound and a closed sign—structures the representational poetics of hagiographic narrative, Christian iconography, and, in turn, Saints Alive.