huzzah they changed the html editor back. here are some books i recently got. the anatomy of torture is about the use of torture during the spanish inquisition, applied to modern cases as well. the other one is a comic from the 70s and a book about anatomical wax figures
an interesting excerpt:
Wax Flesh, Vicious Circles
Georges Didi-Huberman
Wax is the material of all resemblances. Its figurative virtues are so remarkable that it was often considered a prodigious, magical material, almost alive - and disquieting for that very reason. Even if we leave aside Pharaonic Egypt and its spellbinding texts, Pliny the Elder's Natural Hist ory already catalogues, in the Roman period, the entire technical-mythical repertory of the medical, cosmetic, industrial, and religious properties of wax. Closer to our time, a Sicilian wax-worker, a modest supplier of exvotos and crèche figurines, expressed some fifteen years ago his wonder at the strange powers of this material, nonetheless so familiar to him: "It is marvelous. You can do anything with it .]. It moves."
(R. Cedrini, 1991).
Yes, wax "moves." To say that it is a plastic material is above all to say that it gives way almost without resistance before every technique, before every formative process that one would impose on it. It goes exactly where you ask: it can be cut like butter with the sculptor's chisel, or warmed up and easily modeled with the fingers; it flows effortlessly into molds whose volume and texture it adopts with astounding preci-sion. Wax also "moves" in the sense that it permits the inscription, the duplication, the temporal as well as spatial displacement of the forms which impress themselves into it, transforming, effacing, and reforming themselves infinitely. Which is why, from Aristotle to Freud, this material has provided the privileged metaphor of the work of memory, and even of sensorial operations in general.
But still more, wax "moves" in the sense that it "upsets." The unstable material par excellence - if stability is understood as the fixed character of qualities - wax presents a disconcerting multiplicity of phys ical properties. It seems to be a substance unconcerned by the contradiction of material qualities: it is solid, but easily liquefied; impermeable, yet readily soluble in water; it can be opaque or transparent, matte or polished, slippery or sticky, brittle or malleable; its consistency can be endlessly modified through the addition of a wide range of resins. It is a fragile and temporary material, but is most often used for objects destined to endure. It is untouched by the traditional distinction and hierarchy of the plastic arts, for it can be sculpted, modeled, and molded.
