The material history of wax is a history of disappearance--wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since ancient times--from phallic amulets offered to heal distressing conditions and life-size votive images crammed inside candlelit churches by the faithful, to exquisitely detailed anatomical specimens used for training doctors and Medardo Rosso's "melting" portraits. The critical history of wax, however, is fraught with gaps and controversies. After Giorgio Vasari, the subject of wax sculpture was abandoned by art historians; in the twentieth century it once again sparked intellectual interest, only soon to vanish. The authors of the eight essays in Ephemeral Bodies--including the first English translation of Julius von Schlosser's seminal "History of Portraiture in Wax" (1910-11)--break new ground as they explore wax reproductions of the body or body parts and assess their conceptual ambiguity, material impermanence, and implications for the history of Western art.

The material history of wax is a history of disappearance--wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since ancient times--from phallic amulets offered to heal distressing conditions and life-size votive images crammed inside candlelit churches by the faithful, to exquisitely detailed anatomical specimens used for training doctors and Medardo Rosso's "melting" portraits. The critical history of wax, however, is fraught with gaps and controversies. After Giorgio Vasari, the subject of wax sculpture was abandoned by art historians; in the twentieth century it once again sparked intellectual interest, only soon to vanish. The authors of the eight essays in Ephemeral Bodies--including the first English translation of Julius von Schlosser's seminal "History of Portraiture in Wax" (1910-11)--break new ground as they explore wax reproductions of the body or body parts and assess their conceptual ambiguity, material impermanence, and implications for the history of Western art.

'Learning Bodies’ addresses the lack of attention paid to the body in youth and childhood studies. Whilst a significant range of work on this area has explored gender, class, race and ethnicity, and sexualities – all of which have bodily dimensions – the body is generally studied indirectly, rather than being the central focus. This collection of papers brings together a scholarly range of international, interdisciplinary work on youth, with a specific focus on the body. The authors engage with conceptual, empirical and pedagogical approaches which counteract perspectives that view young people’s bodies primarily as ‘problems’ to be managed, or as sites of risk or deviance. The authors demonstrate that a focus on the body allows us to explore a range of additional dimensions in seeking to understand the experiences of young people. The research is situated across a range of sites in Australia, North America, Britain, Canada, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of disciplines including sociology, education and cultural studies in the process. This collection aims to demonstrate – theoretically, empirically and pedagogically – the implications that emerge from a reframed approach to understanding children and youth by focusing on the body and embodiment.

This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform. Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early modern studies.

We first discussed the possibility of organizing a symposium on helminth communities in June, 1986. At that time, we were engaged in writing a joint paper on potential structuring mechanisms in helminth communities; we disagreed on a number of issues. We felt the reason for such debate was because the discipline was in a great state of flux, with many new concepts and approaches being introduced with increasing frequency. After consider able discussion about the need, scope and the inevitable limitations of such a symposium, we decided that the time was ripe to bring other ecologists, engaged in similar research, face-to-face. There were many individuals from whom to choose; we selected those who were actively publishing on helminth communities or those who had expertise in areas which we felt were particularly appropriate. We compiled a list of potential participants, contacted them and received unanimous support to organize such a symposium. Our intent was to cover several broad areas, fully recognizing that breadth negates depth (at least with a publisher's limitation on the number of pages). We felt it important to consider patterns amongst different kinds of hosts because this is where we had disagreed among ourselves.

Gendered Bodies introduces readers to women's visual art in contemporary China by examining how the visual process of gendering reshapes understandings of historiography, sexuality, pain, and space. When artists take the body as the subject of female experience and the medium of aesthetic experiment, they reveal a wealth of noncanonical approaches to art. The insertion of women's narratives into Chinese art history rewrites a historiography that has denied legitimacy to the woman artist. The gendering of sexuality reveals that the female body incites pleasure in women themselves, reversing the dynamic from woman as desired object to woman as desiring subject. The gendering of pain demonstrates that for those haunted by the sociopolitical past, the body can articulate traumatic memories and psychological torment. The gendering of space transforms the female body into an emblem of landscape devastation, remaps ruin aesthetics, and extends the politics of gender identity into cyberspace and virtual reality. The work presents a critical review of women's art in contemporary China in relation to art traditions, classical and contemporary. Inscribing the female body into art generates not only visual experimentation, but also interaction between local art/cultural production and global perception. While artists may seek inspiration and exhibition space abroad, they often reject the (Western) label "feminist artist." An extensive analysis of artworks and artists—both well- and little-known—provides readers with discursively persuasive and visually provocative evidence. Gendered Bodies follows an interdisciplinary approach that general readers as well as scholars will find inspired and inspiring.

For forty years, Andy Goldsworthy has worked with an extraordinary range of natural materials, often at their source. On an almost daily basis, he makes works of art using the materials and conditions that he encounters wherever he is, be it the land around his Scottish home, the mountain regions of France or Spain, or the pavements of New York City, Glasgow, or Rio de Janeiro. Out of earth, rocks, leaves, ice, snow, rain, sunlight and shadow he makes artworks that exist briefly before they are altered and erased by natural processes. They are documented in his photographs, and their larger meanings are bound up with the conditions, forces and processes that they embody: materiality, temporality, growth, vitality, permanence, decay, chance, labour and memory. Ephemeral Works features approximately two hundred of these works, selected by Goldsworthy from thousands he has made between 2001 and the present, and arranged in chronological sequence, capturing his creative process as it interacts with material, place, and the passage of time and seasons.