The Alamo sculpture in New York has finally got a great makeover bringing it into the 21st century all thanks to some students at CalTech. The Mary Sue has a great list of suggestions for other ways to geek up classic statues.

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These bird sculptures look as if you could wind them up and watch them take off! Created by Jim and Tori Mullan, these marvelous pieces were crafted using found objects attached to wooden bird statues. These would have fit right in during the Victorian era, and you can’t get much more steampunk than that!

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Sculptors often express themselves in strange and mysterious ways, but most sculptors don’t have their works on display in a public park.

Frogner Park in Oslo, Norway has chosen an odd assortment of statues to fill their park, 23 works that center around nude forms in weird poses doing who knows what to each other (nothing pornographic, I assure you) and often looking quite happy doing whatever it is they’re doing.

BuzzFeed has a gallery showing off these enormous oddities, take a gander and i’m sure you’ll be asking yourself the same thing I did- “Wait, what’s going on here?”

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“It was making people gossip,” said one town hall employee. “Remarks were made, during weddings for example.”

Mayor Gerard Cordon persuaded councillors to approve 900 euros in this year’s budget to buy a replacement, a more conventional bust of Marianne modelled on the statuesque French model Laetitia Casta.

The artist who made the rejected bust, Catherine Lamacque, said she gave it outsized breasts deliberately, “to symbolise the generosity of the Republic.”

I suspect that had it been a full nude in the Academic tradition, no one would have noticed.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: AFP

The examples of ancient Greco-Roman statuary that survive to this day may be bare stone and earthenware, but archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann argues that they were originally brightly painted:

Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.

Call them gaudy, call them garish, his scrupulous color reconstructions made their debut in 2003 at the Glyptothek museum in Munich, which is devoted to Greek and Roman statuary. Displayed side by side with the placid antiquities of that fabled collection, the replicas shocked and dazzled those who came to see them. As Time magazine summed up the response, “The exhibition forces you to look at ancient sculpture in a totally new way.”

Link via io9 | Images: Stiftung Archaeologie

Joshua Keating of Foreign Policy magazine has a slideshow of what he considers to be the ugliest monumental statues in public display in the world. Pictured above is one of Tsar Peter I (the Great) of Russia, known for building that country’s first navy:

Just because communism ended doesn’t mean that Russia has stopped building grotesque, propagandistic statues. The master of the form is Georgian-born artist Zurab Tsereteli, best known for the garish 315-foot maritime statue of Peter the Great looming over the Moskva River. The statue was commissioned by Tsereteli’s frequent booster, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and has fast become a popular tourist attraction, if not exactly for the reasons its planners hoped.

Link via Hell in a Handbasket | Photo: flickr user Effervescing Elephant, used under Creative Commons license

Is it true that most people are introduced to gargoyles through a certain Disney film these days?  If so, then perhaps a trip through the various types of gargoyle may not go amiss.  Each one has a message to deliver and while that may be getting mislaid over the course of the centuries, the truth is still out there (as it were).

Gargoyles – they can be strange, bizarre, unpleasant or just plain ugly. They have been hovering around our towns and cities for centuries, for so long that it can be forgotten that they have meaning and purpose. Take a tour of the weird world of the gargoyle.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

The Egyptians had the Book of the Dead to express one’s descent into the afterlife. At the Valley of the Statues in Colombia, however, there are guardians watching over the land. History comes alive in these hand carved figurines, telling the story of various cultures that called San Agustin their home.

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(image credit: Jan Arkesteijn)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.

We’ve all seen them in busy shopping streets and parks, or in front of monuments and tourist attractions: street performers posing as statues. Some whistle when you pass by, some move when you give them money. Some do it as a career, others between jobs. But whatever the case, being a living statue takes guts, strength, creativity and yes, a good deal of exhibitionism.

Environmental Graffiti has photos of 15 living statues, some you’d never know until they moved! Link -via Unique Daily

You may have seen Alex’s crocheted bunny body suit, but I’ll see that handiwork and raise you Urban Knitting. Trees, street signs, statues and gas stations, nothing is safe from these rebels of the wool.

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