Icons in Ash: A Collaborative Conceptual Artist's Book

Barrytown, NY: Station Hill of Barrytown, 2017. Cloth, 267 pages, illustrations; 25 cm. Near fine. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Light shelfwear to boards. Variant cover. OVERSIZE! No priority/international, except by arrangement. "The art of the human image arose millennia ago as a way beyond impermanence and, especially, to keep the dead among us. The pictorial object the icon often carried a charge as ritual or ceremonial artifact and, indeed, as a thing with a certain power. The artist Heide Hatry has extended this tradition by creating realistic portraits made out of the actual ashes of the departed person portrayed. Are the results reminiscent of ancient sacred and secular traditions and their complex, even mysterious function to, say, calm, enrich or transform our experience? Icons in Ash includes twenty of Hatry's portraits and twenty-seven contemporary writers who explore this phenomenon in original and engaging meditations on death, the dead body, art, relics, psychology, philosophy, religion, mourning, evolution, transformation, and immortality." - Publisher. CONTENTS: The Ones Who Are Left Behind, by Michael Amy; Image and Death: Embodiment in Early Cultures, by Hans Belting; Postmortem Photography in Europe and America, by Stanley B. Burns, MD and Elizabeth A. Burns; Dead Religion, by Mark Dery; Mommia, My Mother: Pigment, Paint, and Death, by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve; Art and Death, by Anthony Haden-Guest; Corruptible Bodies: Catholic Morbidity, by Eleanor Heartney; Untitled, by Phoebe Hoban; Stones and Ashes, by Siri Hustvedt; The Matter of Ashes, by Thomas Laqueur; Relics of Death, by Deborah Lutz; Weegee's and Maciunas' Ashes and Ginsberg's Beard, by Jonas Mekas; From the Library of . . . , by Lydia Millet; Notes on Lazarus, by Rick Moody; A Conversation Between Heide Hatry and Mark Pachter, by Mark Pachter; Mind and Body, Form and Essence, the Unbearable and the Inconceivable, by Steven Pinker; Dead Talk, by George Quasha; An Artist's Reply to Evolution's Cynicism, by Wolf Singer; Untitled, by Claudia Steinberg; Melancholic Relics, by Adele Tutter; Death and Life, by Peter Weibel; SAP (ient) (iens) (ro), by Linda Weintraub; How Much Death Can Life Bear?, by Franz Josef Wetz; The Pornography of Death, the Fading of Grief, by Naief Yehya; Ashes to ashes? Not at all, by Luisa Valenzuela.. Hardcover. Very Good. 8vo.