Eloquence and Affect in Jacqueline Jung’s Eloquent Bodies

Abstract

Sculpture has lately become good to think with, a medium which tells us something about the field of art history while enjoying its own resistances and possibilities, for a medium is never transparent. Jacqueline Jung’s book has a broad title, but it is really a study of a remarkable phase of ‘naturalism’, however defined, in German sculpture: a phenomenon brilliant, evanescent, critically challenging and, to some, slightly repellent. The stars of the show are the famous founder figures in the west choir of Naumburg Cathedral, realist fashion plates caught in the sudden dazzle of flashlight, like Uta, who stands pensively with Ekkehard as the very image of Tristan and Isolde. Tainted by, but now liberated from, the myths of German nationalism, these famous figures play their part in a study whose leanings are phenomenological and which in style and method owe much to media studies and particularly to film theory....