Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now)
- Submitting institution
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University of Cambridge
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 12908
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Met Breuer
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- "Like Life, staged over two floors of Met Breuer in 2019, is lead output in this multi-component item, which includes the exhibition book alongside contextual information enabling the reviewer to visualise the exhibition.
Syson conceived the exhibition and selected and interpreted the pre-1900 sculpture. This was the first broad survey of lifelike sculpture, encompassing medieval Europe, early modern polychrome traditions outside the classical tradition and the modern embrace of the uncanny and hyperreal. Syson and Wagstaff (principal co-curator), agreed research should be object-led and transhistorical - allowing connections to emerge that remain buried within orthodox chronology; and that the objects chosen would challenge established hierarchies and the category ‘sculpture’ with works by sculptors like Donatello, Canova, Rodin, Saint-Gaudens (not known for coloured sculpture) juxtaposed with works not usually considered ‘art’: dolls, automata, mannequins, waxworks, anatomical models, proposing a more inclusive history of European sculpture.
Often informally published, objects were sourced and selected; through visiting public collections in Europe and America and New York private collections; by (re)assessment of the Met’s specially acquired or neglected works, and by extensive use of the internet. The research explored ways viewers invest inanimate sculpture with life, responding to motorisation or articulation, colour, or materials like wax. It examined the relationship between sculpture authored by celebrated artists and more popular art forms, and Syson considered the negative critical responses these hybrid works received, still playing out in the making and reception of such sculptures: judged soulless, uncanny, vulgar.
Themes explored in the book were amplified in the display. The installation evoked original contexts for viewing the historic pieces - designed to shock, startle, amuse, titillate, and move, and, in line with the functions of these works, to make visitors feel strongly, and think anew. The exhibition design and installation methods were themselves research outcomes."
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -