Anthony Gormley is Britain’s most beloved sculptor and “public artist.” From a rather inauspicious artistic beginning following graduation (tellingly, Gormley originally studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge before going on to Goldsmiths and the Slade), in which he was paid to paint psychedelic and apocalyptic murals for nightclubs, Antony Gormley has always chosen projects that display public visibility and public relevance, or resonance, within a space.
Gormley is best known for his Angel of the North, a man-machine with vast wide wings embracing the sky, the hills of Tyne-and-Wear, and the A167 rumbling below. An installation on Crosby Beach in Liverpool, Another Place, featured a hundred figures – all of them casts of Gormley’s own body – standing at evenly spaced intervals across a 2 mile stretch, revealed and concealed in turn by the ebb and flow of the tide. The famous Field featured thirty-five thousand handmade clay figures – “hand-sized and easy to hold, with eyes deep and closed” as Gormley specified to the several generations of Mexican bricklayers and clay workers who created the piece – and won him the 1994 Turner Prize.
Now, with his new show Blind Light, which was unveiled at the Hayward Gallery in London on Thursday 17 May as part of Gormley’s first retrospective, and with the temporary public artwork Event Horizon, Gormley has taken his recurring theme of “bodies in [the context of the] space,” into his most ambitious work yet.
The show marks an important departure for the Hayward. Since its rebranding as part of the Southbank Centre in early 2007, the gallery has been engaged in securing its place on the London art map. At the press viewing of Blind Light on Wednesday, Jude Kelly, recently appointed director of the Southbank Centre, spoke about her commitment to maintaining “The Shock of the New” in her future plans for the burgeoning gallery. She said that Gormley’s exhibition signalled an important event in the Hayward’s development, and described the sentinel figures in Event Horizon as “willing the site into a new state of energy.”
Antony Gormley, at the best of times an ambitious and uncompromising artist (during the 1980s, his expensive obsession with body casting led him to financial and artistic crisis) has set the Hayward a series of titan challenges in executing his new works. Blind Light, for example, is a walk-in glass box filled with a dense white cloud of steam. Maintaining the precise density of vapour – visibility two feet when inside – must require some serious artificial precipitation. To call it a technical feat would be an understatement.
Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward’s artistic director, remarked drolly that original plans for the show had included flooding the gallery with Thames water, and so when Gormley “settled for a giant cloud,” he’d had to heave a sigh of relief. Event Horizon features 31 lifesize figures placed in numerous locations on and around the South Bank — two stand on either side of Waterloo Bridge, for example, and others stand silhouetted on roofs, making up the concrete-and-steel skyline. They’re everywhere, they’re unnerving, they’re wonderfully weird. It’s one of Britain’s largest and most ambitious public artworks. The scope of the work – the sheer area surrounded by the figures – outweighs its physical scale.
Speaking at the press viewing, Gormley said of his work that, “it’s only in the experience of it that it has value.” Certainly his new works demand that we interact, that we experience them. Antony Gormley is challenging the context of the gallery space by forcing us to physically engage, to “cross the threshold” in Blind Light, and by bringing a new context to the public space in Event Horizon, and in much of his earlier work. “The body is the first architecture,” said Gormley, “and the body inhabits a building, which is the second architecture.” As with architecture, too, the building – or artwork – is meaningless without the occupant, the participant.
Antony Gormley gives us a chance to transcend our tendency to be passive observers of life and of art. Most of his work has this aspect in common. In this way, it seems – almost accidentally – that Gormley has become Britain’s most important, and most celebrated, “public artist,” although he has said that it’s something he has never set out to be, nor ever imagined himself in those terms.
Perhaps Gormley is an architect, of sorts, which would explain his continual drive to create works that are both publicly accessible and publicly interactive. Although the work ostensibly concerns the body, it has nothing of the visceral, nothing of the rankly mammal or mortal about it.
Space Station, a gargantuan steel structure that squats in the Brutalist cage of the Hayward, is a city seen from space, is a testament to the transcendent aesthetic of the architectural form, an astral body. Allotment II features concrete figures whose dimensions are based on the bodies of 300 residents of Malmö. Although the figures – human-sized tower blocks resembling, in Gormley’s own words, “a ghost town, a graveyard,” – are all of recognisably human height, topped with a single narrow block that serves for a head, they are no longer bodies as we know them.
Gormley quoted Wittgenstein in saying that “the best way to imagine the soul is to imagine a body, and one of the best ways to think of a body is to think of a building.” Gormley’s work appears to be increasingly architectural in its sensibility and form, and yet there is a sense of “crossing the final threshold,” as Gormley himself said in response to a question about the mortality of the body in his work, and “thinking about where we’ve come from and where we’re going, in the widest possible sense.”
Meanwhile, Blind Light shows at the Hayward Gallery in London until 19 August 2007.
