Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object

Throughout history and around the world, people have interacted with works of art as if they were living beings rather than static objects. People talk to artworks, kiss or punch them, even fall in love with them. The phenomenon is widely documented, yet there have been almost no attempts to formulate a theoretical account of this interaction or assemble a history of how it has been understood. This book fills that gap, focusing on sculpture in the period between 1700 and 1900 and drawing on rhetoric and fetish theory to build an explanation of how the vivid physicality of artworks leads viewers to transgress the typical boundaries between objects and themselves.