Cemeteries as Museums, Museums as Cemeteries: Exhibiting Funerary Sculpture in Spain, ca. 1880 to the present
The nineteenth-century idea that cemeteries are 'museums of sculpture’ has, today, become a cliché, and is often used as away of packaging a visitor experience which is otherwise difficult to classify or sell. This paper critically examines some of the interrelations and differences between the...
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| Format: | book part |
| Publication Date: | 2019 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) |
| Repository: | Docta Complutense |
| Language: | English |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/112859 |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/112859 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | 069.01 Museum Cemetery Spain Monument Museología 5101.06 Museología |
| Summary: | The nineteenth-century idea that cemeteries are 'museums of sculpture’ has, today, become a cliché, and is often used as away of packaging a visitor experience which is otherwise difficult to classify or sell. This paper critically examines some of the interrelations and differences between these two institutions - cemetery and museum - as spaces for the exhibition of figurative sculpture in Spain, focusing on the powerful fact that cemeteries are repositories not only of sculpted bodies, but of dead ones. I discuss how funerary sculpture was adapted and re-worked for exhibition in conventional art spaces, and consider the corresponding shifts in meaning. I also examine examples of highly 'mobile' works of funerary sculpture, which have been repeatedly de-contextualised and re-contextualised as they have moved between cemeteries, museums and art exhibitions, gaining or losing real bodies in the process. |
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