An Eight Week Online Class led my Morbid Anatomy Founder and Creative Director Joanna Ebenstein

Dates: Thursdays, November 3 through January 12 (Please note: No class November 24, December 22 or December 29)
Time: 7-9 pm ET (NYC time) (Final class 7-10 to accommodate final projects)
Admission: Patreon Members $145 / Regular Admission $165

PLEASE NOTE: ALL CLASSES WILL BE RECORDED FOR THOSE UNABLE TO ATTEND

From Egyptian mummies to animated Classical statues, miracle working body parts to crying statues, mediumship to exorcism, the biblical Adam to The Golem, the idea that physical objects—from statues to rocks to human bodies—might serve as containers for soul, spirit or deity was once extremely common around the world. Traces of these ideas live on in the numinous presence of The Work of Art, the mysterious charge of the uncanny, the persistence of miracle working statues, and the teachings of Carl Jung and his followers.

All of these ideas point to the mystery at the heart of life and the life force itself. The enigma of what, exactly, animates us, enlivens us into more than inert matter, and leaves us at bodily death.

This class will explore these ideas, and investigate some big questions: Was the idea of enchanted matter or ensouled objects a universal aspect of human belief before being discredited by our scientific worldview? What commonalities exist between different beliefs and traditions? And, perhaps most importantly, what can all of this teach us about ourselves, our material bodies, our historical moment, and what it means to be alive?

To delve into these questions, we will examine seven traditions via readings, class discussion, and illustrated lectures by scholars and practitioners: Researcher Sydney Stewart Rose will speak on ensouled objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, especially on “objects” that are actually human and humans who have been made into objects; Archaeologist and art historian Ava Forte Vitalli will speak on mummies and statues as containers for souls in Ancient Egypt; art historian Maya Stanfield-Mazzi will discuss the syncretism of Pre-Columbian and Spanish notions of ensouled matter in the Andean Americas; culptor and “lapsed Classicist” Eleanor Crook will speak to the uncanny and the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of animated statues; Bhakti yoga practitioner Bryan Melillo will speak on photographs as containers for deities in Southern Indian Hinduism; Cultural historian and artist Jason Lahman will speak on automatons, AI, and ancient methods of ensouling artificial beings; and Patricia Llosa, Jungian analyst and board member of ARAS (the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) will share ideas of matter and spirit in the teachings of Carl Jung and his followers.

As a final project, students will be invited to create an artwork or written response inspired by what we have learned, or deliver a presentation delving into a tradition not covered, integrating what they have learned over the course of this class.

SCHEDULE

WEEK 1 (Thursday, November 3) Pitt rivers doctoral researcher Sydney Stewart Rose, in a talk entitled “Souls mixed with things; things with souls,” will speak on ensouled objects as they are encountered at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, using Pacific Anthropological Theory as a base to consider two aspects of humanity in materials; first, “objects” that are actually human; second, humans who have been made to be objects.

WEEK 2 (November 10) Archaeologist and art historian Ava Forte Vitali on mummies and statues as containers for souls in Ancient Egypt

WEEK 3 (November 17) Art historian Maya Stanfield-Mazzi on Miraculous Statues and Paintings in Andean Catholicism (could she change date?)

NO CLASS November 24

WEEK 4 (December 1) Sculptor and “lapsed Classicist” Eleanor Crook on the animation of statues and idols ( in Greek, Eidola) in Greece and Rome, the uncanny, and the idea of the animate idol/doll.

WEEK 5 (December 8) Bhakti yoga practitioner Bryan Melillo on statues and photographs as containers for deity in Southern Indian Hinduism.

WEEK 6 (December 15) Cultural historian Jason Lahman on “Living Statues, Digesting Ducks and Legal Rights for Artificial Intelligence: Merging Soul and Simulation in Three Historical Acts,” exploring automatons, AI, and the methods of ensouling artificial beings.

NO CLASS DECEMBER 22 and 29

WEEK 7 (January 5) Patricia Llosa, Jungian analyst and board member of ARAS (the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism), on the teachings of Carl Jung and his followers.

WEEK 8 (Jan 12) Final project presentation (Note: This class will run longer to accommodate all student presentations)

BIOS FOR SPEAKERS AND INSTRUCTOR

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor in wax, bronze, and lifelike media who makes work about anatomy and mortality. She studied Classics and ancient art history which instilled a fascination for statues, effigies and mummies which she found was better explored by making them. Whilst studying sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools she learned anatomy from medical museums and sculpting from Victorian textbooks, adopting neglected techniques. Later she trained as a medical sculptor alongside medical students at Guy’s Hospital. She is artist in residence at the Gordon Museum, teaches classes and workshops for Morbid Anatomy and Camberwell School of Art, and works internationally with medical museums such as the Science Museum London, Vrolik, Amsterdam, La Specola, Florence, GUM Ghent, Hunterian London, and various wax collections. She has a special interest in learning the expressive techniques of former times whilst employing contemporary technology to bring her creatures to a kind of life.

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based artist. writer, curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was co-founder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her books include Death: A Graveside Companion, Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy, The Anatomical Venus and The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey). Her work explores the intersections of art and medicine, death and culture, and the objective and subjective.

Jason Lahman is an American visual artist, sculptor, poet and cultural historian. He studied illustration at Parsons School of Design and art history at the New School in New York City. He holds an MA in modern European history with an emphasis in the history of science and technology from San Francisco State University where he taught in the humanities department. He completed his PhD coursework in the history of science at the University of California at Davis and has lectured widely on the topic of technology and visual culture, with a special emphasis on early cinema and automata. He is currently based in Portugal where he maintains a full-time studio art practice.

Patricia Llosa, MFA, LP, is a Peruvian-American Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City. She earned her undergraduate degree in archaeology and art history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and did graduate work at The School of Visual Arts. For more than 20 years she worked as an administrator and educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A graduate of Marion Woodman’s BodySoul Rhythms® Leadership Training Program and has taught her workshops in Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Peru and Spain. A member of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis she serves on their Gradiva Awards Committee. She is also on the board of ARAS, the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism.

Bryan Melillo has studied meditation in the Jñana and Bhakti yoga traditions for the last 23 years. In the esoteric traditions Bryan studied on ashrams in Southern India, he was responsible for what is called puja. This is the practice of readying a statue or photo of a god to be inhabited with the spirit of the god itself. Bryan recently completed an End of Life Doula certification training as his goal is to integrate eastern understandings of death with the growing western end of life care, death with dignity movement. Bryan has an active art studio and is an assistant professor at NYC’s Parsons School of Design.

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi is an art historian specializing in art of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America, especially that of the colonial Andes. She focuses on the ways in which Indigenous peoples of the Americas contributed to creating new forms of Catholicism. She has published articles in Current Anthropology, Hispanic Research Journal, Colonial Latin American Review, Religion and the Arts, and The Americas. She also wrote bibliographic essays on painting in the Viceroyalty of Peru and Andean textiles for Oxford Bibliographies Online.

Sydney Stewart Rose is a doctoral researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum and is reading for a DPhil in Archaeology at the University of Oxford with Prof. Dan Hicks. Sydney’s current research investigates dispossession and the restitution of materials from the global North to the Pacific. Her research interests focus on understanding debt and reciprocity with regards to museological returns. Sydney has a BA in Classics and a Masters in Museum Studies from the University of Toronto where her research was supervised by Cara Krmpotich, as well as an MPhil in Archaeological Heritage from the University of Cambridge, where she studied conceptualizations of universalism in material culture studies. Sydney has also worked extensively in areas of study such as authenticity, intellectual property rights, and digital heritage.

Archaeologist and art historian Ava Forte Vitali aims to bridge the gap between the educated, academic community and the eager, interested public. She was the Egyptologist-in-Residence at the Morbid Anatomy Library and Museum in Brooklyn, New York, from 2014-2016, where her series "Death and the Occult in the Ancient World," was a Time Out NY's 'Critics Pick." Ava has excavated in both Egypt and Turkey, and completed her Master's Degree at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where she focused on domestic cult and magic in Ancient Egypt. She is an adjunct professor at Adelphi University, where she teaches Intro to Egyptian Art.

IMAGES

Image 1 and 2: Statues of the Virgin Mary in her invocation as the Mourning Mother (Mater Dolorosa)

Image 3: Italian Automaton of The Devil, carved in wood, 15th and 16th centuries, from the Wunderkammer owned by Ludovico Settala. It could, in the words of the Cosmodromium Blog, "roll its eyes and move its tongue, emit a noise and spit smoke from the mouth."

Image 4: Human relics of Italy, photos by the instructor.

Image 5: An unnerving 19th century ‘poppet’ … with a stiletto through its head. Photograph: © The Museum of Wtchcraft and Magic, Boscastle

Image 6: Egyptian mummies and coffins from Chicago’s field museum