The Wax Venus Project

Art History and Critique

Course: Histories of Art History - ARTH 380

Many times throughout the history of visual culture, particularly in the Western, the image of the female body has been meticulously transformed or created to meet ideals of desire, knowledge, and religious devotion: the female body as an object of erotic proximity, the female body as an object of Science, the female body as an object of divine creation, and so the list goes. The Wax Venuses (the Anatomical Venuses) are objects of Scientific, Artistic, and Religious devotion that crystallize well this apotheosis.

The Wax Venus Project is an unfinished investigation into multiple systems of visual representation exploring longstanding aesthetic relations between Death, Ecstasy, and Anatomy manifested in the creation of the Wax Venuses.

The piece aims to be a non-directional 'system of meaning' composed of images resembling Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne–a sort of study that seeks to trace aesthetic relations in image-making by identifiable subjects, yet it is non-conclusive and incomplete in nature.

Concordia University
March 2023

Preliminary Snapshots and Materials

Following the investigation of Joanna Ebenstein and the Morbid Anatomy Museum presented in the book The Anatomical Venus (2016), perhaps the most complete project on the subject yet, I aim to move my study beyond the scope of the history of Artistic and Scientific representation, and bring it closer to a parallel, yet equally radical project, the philosophy of George Bataille, particularly the notions treated in his book Erotism. Death and sensuality (1957). The study tracing the aesthetic developments leading to the conception of the Wax Venuses by Ebenstein and her peers indeed follows a line of subjects that Bataille extensively deals with throughout his philosophy: an articulation of death-erotism-religion-ecstasy. In Erotism, Bataille approaches these from a far more existential front, and although the work of Bataille is in fact brought up in Ebenstein’s book, throughout the study of ecstatic waxworks as a genre it has been scarcely addressed, and so, there are still a handful of insightful connections that can be drawn between these two parallel projects.

Annotated Bibliography