What do you get when you mix a subculture full of brass, mahogany and monocles, saints, and torture? The answer is not, in fact, more torture. Michael Landy’s exhibit Saints Alive, currently on display at the National Gallery in London, lets visitors torture sculptures of religious saints when they step on foot pedestals in the way that they were tortured and killed IRL, only in Landy’s exhibit, you get to torture them with tired steampunk ornamentation.
Care to poke Jesus’ wounds on his disembodied torso wounds with a finger attached to a rusty pole? Want to pull out Saint Appollonia’s teeth and smash them in front of her? Or spin Saint Catherine’s breaking wheel? Maybe you just want to indulge in some good old fashioned, sacrilegious steampunk fun. There’s even a Saint Francis “Poverty, Chastity, Obedience” shirt that comes out of St. Francis’s headless body if you’re into repping the Franciscan Order.
[The Independent]
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Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
