Talk Rehearsal: Zoe Copeman, "Making a Murderer: The Death Mask and the Criminal Portrait"
Talk Rehearsal: Zoe Copeman, "Making a Murderer: The Death Mask and the Criminal Portrait"
In 1849, phrenologists examined the "Killer in the Fog" James Bloomfield Rush's death mask at least five times to ascertain the "seat" of his criminal nature. Months later Madame Tussaud's placed another wax mask of Rush in their "Chamber of Horrors" exhibit to scare ticketholders. Decades later another exhibit entitled "Murderer's Row" displayed a plaster mask of Rush's decapitated head alongside others to show a unified corpus of criminality. These afterlives of Rush's face expose not o the documentary nature death masks held in the nineteenth century, but a glamorization of the criminal persona that lives on in true crime dramas to this day. Join Zoe on October 26th in the Collaboratory as she investigates how these glamorizations challenge the way that the art historical field currently defines portraiture, in a paper she will give at the upcoming SECAC conference.