Jeremy Bentham Goes To New York

March 7, 2018 8:53 AM

How to prepare an auto-icon for a flight across the Atlantic.

Jeremy Bentham: Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living.
UCL: Jeremy Bentham, Man and Myth (YT)
UCL: Jeremy Bentham goes abroad (YT)
C. F. A. Marmoy: The Auto Icon of Jeremy Bentham (PDF)
Atlas Obscura: Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon (YT)
Tom Scott: The Man Who Had Himself Taxidermied (YT)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Like Life - Sculpture, Color, and the Body

posted by carter (6 comments total)

Jeremy Bentham was a subject of Caitlin Doughty's (Ask a Mortician) Iconic Corpse series.
posted by muddgirl at 9:20 AM on March 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Rest in pieces, indeed.
posted by LeLiLo at 9:28 AM on March 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Wow, I'm surprised they were willing to lend it, given how fragile it is.
posted by tavella at 10:11 AM on March 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

The Auto-Icon cabinet is in the bit of UCL’s cloisters currently under occupation by students in solidarity with the strike action taking place right now in UK higher education, so Jeremy had to be very carefully evacuated.
posted by bebrogued at 10:22 AM on March 7, 2018 [6 favorites]

Wow, I'm surprised they were willing to lend it, given how fragile it is.

I think the utilitarian calculation checks out :p
posted by Barack Spinoza at 5:32 PM on March 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

I actually made it a point to go to UCL to see the Auto-Icon for myself when I visited London a few years ago and even asked someone to take a picture of me sitting by it. I guess I missed the Panpticon stream by a few years. I remember stopping a staff member walking around campus to ask, "Where do you guys keep Jeremy Bentham?" I think the guy thought I was an incoming student (it was orientation week) about to ask for directions to a room or building and not that and took a second to process my question before giving me directions. It was weird because at the time the Auto-Icon was just kinda kept at the corner of a hallway and looked, to be quite honest, like any trophy case at some high school. Like, here he is, and only thing to indicate what it was being a printed out sheet of paper taped next to it like it was some kid's science project. I enjoyed how just ordinary it was chillin' in it's cabinet like no big deal.

I'll have to go to the Met Breuer for a reunion.
posted by kkokkodalk at 1:09 PM on March 9, 2018