Mark Sandberg

Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums and Modernity

Mark Sandberg
2002

In the late nineteenth century, Scandinavian urban dwellers developed a passion for a new, utterly modern sort of visual spectacle: objects and effigies brought to life in astonishingly detailed, realistic scenes. The period 1880-1910 was the popular high point of mannequin display in Europe. Living Pictures, Missing Persons explores this phenomenon as it unfolded with the rise of wax museums and folk museums in the largest cities of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Mark Sandberg asks: Why did modernity generate a cultural fascination with the idea of effigy? He shows that...

Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny

Mark Sandberg
2015

Henrik Ibsen's plays came at a pivotal moment in late nineteenth-century European modernity. They engaged his public through a strategic use of metaphors of house and home, which resonated with experiences of displacement, philosophical homelessness, and exile. The most famous of these metaphors - embodied by the titles of his plays A Doll's House, Pillars of Society, and The Master Builder - have entered into mainstream Western thought in ways that mask the full force of the reversals Ibsen performed on notions of architectural space. Analyzing literary and performance-related...