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Dark Mattermaps the invisible dimension of theater whose effects are felt everywhere in performance. Examining phenomena such as hallucination, offstage character, offstage action, sexuality, masking, technology, and trauma, Andrew Sofer engagingly illuminates the invisible in different periods of postclassical western theater and drama. He reveals how the invisible continually structures and focuses an audience’s theatrical experience, whether it’s black magic in Doctor Faustus, offstage sex in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, masked women in The Rover, self-consuming bodies in Suddenly Last Summer, or surveillance technology in The Archbishop’s Ceiling. Each discussion pinpoints new and striking facets of drama and performance that escape sight. Taken together, Sofer’s lively case studies illuminate how dark matter is woven into the very fabric of theatrical representation. Written in an accessible style and grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Dark Matter will appeal to theater and performance scholars, literary critics, students, and theater practitioners, particularly playwrights and directors.

A new conceptual tool for understanding the history of art

From ancient cave paintings to contemporary sculpture, forms of indexical trace are vital to the human practice of artmaking. Through this wide-ranging exploration, Johanna Malt shows how casts, molds, and imprints (“contact images”) offer a paradigm for thinking about our relationship to objects and their surfaces as sites of meaning. Engaging and complicating philosophical dualities of absence and presence, art and non-art, original and copy, Malt introduces the contact image as an important new concept for the study of Western art.

Close reading examples from 30,000 years of art history, Malt cuts across eras and media to unite diverse forms of artistic production created through instances of contact with “the objects of the world.” From holy relics to Napoleon’s death mask to life casts of the human body by artists such as Duane Hanson and Janine Antoni, as well as conceptual and performance work by Jasper Johns and Yves Klein, The Contact Image traces themes of selfhood, time, negation, and vestige in these tactile encounters.

Revisiting fundamental questions about representation, perception, and aesthetics, The Contact Image is a sophisticated provocation for a theory of art built on the tension and oscillations that emerge when we explore how artworks embody opposites.

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