#Waxworks cork movie
#Waxworks cork full

The attributes he identifies are naturalistic colour, movement, flesh-like material such as wax, and ready-made elements such as clothing. Kelley applied Freud's The Uncanny (1919) and Ernst Jentsch' s On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) to the question of why the attributes of these various figurative objects have been repressed so long in discourses about Western sculpture.

#Waxworks cork movie

Kelley's 'harem', as he called it, brought together mannequins, waxworks, automatons, medical dolls, sex dolls, movie stand-ins, religious and ancient statuary, along with recent sculpture and photography that evoked these various sources, by Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Charles Ray, Laurie Simmons and others. Had Mike Kelley known of them when he curated 'The Uncanny' for Sonsbeek '93, I doubt he would have passed them up. It also meant that the body parts were interchangeable, somewhat like Hans Bellmer's La Poupée. Joints allowed Bartlett to remove heads, arms and feet so that he could dress the dolls without risking damage to the fragile plaster.

#Waxworks cork full

Alongside the full figures were a number of individual body parts: heads, arms and torsos. The wigs came from shops, but he customized them to suit each doll. He pored over anatomy books, and knitted and embroidered the clothing himself. Bartlett laboured over these figures and their accessories for around 30 years, with each doll taking some ten months to complete. Though the dolls share a certain family likeness, which may resemble Bartlett's own appearance as a child, each is a recognizable individual, with a distinctive haircut, facial expression and body pose - one girl licks her lips flirtatiously, another bawls plastic tears. One of the boys has sunburnt cheeks and tan lines beneath his shorts. Those with open mouths reveal two sets of teeth and a three-dimensional tongue. Each figure has finger- and toenails, nipples and a navel. They'd been lying there undisturbed since 1965.īartlett's dolls are half life-size and anatomically accurate. The boxes, it turned out, had been acting as tiny coffins for twelve girls and three boys, ranging from infancy to puberty, made of painted plaster. He made no mention of the contents of a number of handmade wooden boxes his executors found in the basement of his Boston town house, which are now worth considerably more than that sum. On his death in 1992, at the age of 89, Morton Bartlett, a complete recluse, instructed that his estate, worth $300,000, be 'divided between orphan charities'.