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Ever since my first encounter with Antony Gormley’s sculptures, I have had a sense of great affinity with his work and later, as I started reading various of his writings and interviews, also with his thought. What attracted me to his sculptures initially is not verbalizable, but reflecting on it leads me to a recognition of shared experience and of shared values. And I am thinking here of existential and ontological values first, although not to the exclusion of moral ones.
Being in the presence of one of his pieces has always given me a profound sense of incarnation - of a beyond in the here - and of communion, of a blurring of boundaries. The latter is obvious in sculptures since his Domain series (and also in Quantum Could, Hive and other, later ones) but I feel it is also there in his earlier work that, at first sight, may suggest the polar opposite - isolation, separation, individuation. Already the Three Part Lead Bodycase works, which on the face of it are solid, lead boundaries, impermeably encasing individuals, are such strong pointers to that “darkness of the body” that Gormley presents as “objectless”, that they too bring out a sense of a collective, shared place - to which each one of us has access in their own bodies, open to encounter and communion.
Instead of talking more about how I see Gormley’s work, I’d like to share some of his thoughts with you, and encourage you to go an see his sculptures next time you get a chance.
To begin with, Gormley has a concept of art that is extreme (a matter of life and death), paradoxical (useless yet vital), but at the same time profound (potentially life-changing confrontation rather than illustrative decoration):
“Art is the way that life tests and expresses itself, without which we are already dead. [... A]rt […] is useless but vital; it is through art that we communicate what it feels like to be alive.” (Art In The Time Of Global Warming, 2010)Gormley’s art is very much also about meaning and has parallels with religion: “[My] work comes from the same source as the need for religion: wanting to face existence and discover meaning. The work attempts by starting with a real body in real time to face space and eternity. The body - or rather the place that the body occupies is seen as the locus on which those forces act.” (Concerning The Religious Dimension In My Art, 1987) While rejecting the Christianity of his childhood, which he recounts as something that he was “indoctrinated” with and where he speaks about how he was told that the Devil is inside him, Gormley looks to art as the means also for preserving what is good in religion, while excluding its past errors:
“Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past that was mixed up with other illustrative duties but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern. Art is not necessarily good for you or about communicating “good things”. […] Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful thing to do - making life flow more easily - but art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps change direction - they are completely different.” (BBC Forum Questions And Answers, 2002)
“I am interested in reviving this idea of presence. Can we have presence without the God? Can we resurrect the monument without bringing the shadow of bad history? The idea of an image that is open enough to be interpreted widely, that has multiple and generative potential for meaning but is strong enough to be a focus. How do we construct such an image? In its being someone’s can it become everyone’s? It has seemed for quite a long time obvious to me that the body can represent at the present time what abstraction did at the beginning of the twentieth century. That is, the ground on which all the seeds of emancipated identity are to grow: the last frontier, the inner realm. (Space has been probed but what do we really know of the body’s darkness.) The body, not as an object of idealisation that should be forced to carry allegorical, symbolic or dramatic readings, but the body as a place. The body not as hero or as sexual object, but the body in some way as the collective subjective - the place where we all live. The place on which the pressures of society are inscribed and out of which expression, language, feeling can come.” (Still Moving, 1996)In the same interview, Gormley emphasizes communion as a purpose of art - also a deeply Christian teleology:
“Can we use the space of art for communion? A contact not only between ourselves but between ourselves and history? In doing this can we also derive the energy necessary to believe in our part in the construction of the future? Is it possible for art to provide a space that can be regenerative? Is it possible to use the space of art to resist this restlessness, this sense of fragmentation, this sense of alienation from self and from place?”In fact, Gormely sees art as closely tied to beliefs about the value of life and its future not only in the context of an individual but of society and humanity as a whole:
“It is necessary these days to hold on to the crucial function art has in the continuance and regulation of life. It provides us with images and acts by which we identity ourselves but so often now in an unstable way. Art can be a focus for life by reasserting in times of vicissitude the central belie[fs] of a people. In tribal cultures it is a collective act whether in dance, carving, self-decoration that reasserts the body of the people and it is from this that the individual draws his or her power. Art and the practice of non-utilitarian skills is an act of will for the future and is as critical an aspect of survival as hunting or gathering food. What has happened to this urgency expressed in a collective creativity that projects into the future and ensures the belief necessary for life? It is not that we have lost it, but the repositories of dance, dream and art are dispersed into the hands of individuals who have responsibility not simply to a single family or tribe but as points of consciousness of the whole world.” (The Impossible Self, 1988)The desire for community and an undoing of alienation and fragmentation through art is also a strong theme in Gormley’s 2010 talk about the specific role of art in the context of Global Warming, which is highly relevant also to the upcoming UN conference on climate change that starts on Monday in Paris and deeply consonant with Pope Francis’ Laudato si’ encyclical:
“Is it possible to re-think art and take it from this finished-object status and make it into a verb, a participatory, open space, a place of transformation and the exchange of ideas and reflection on our state and status? Can we use art as a way of investigating this perilous time? Can we change from our obsession with production values? Instead of the perfection of an Asprey’s catalogue or the gloss of the desirable branded object can we accept that art has to find its own raw and direct way of existing?I particularly like that Gormley self-applies his thinking about the state of the world - to his own most immediate environment: his studio. At the same time his perspective is anything but parochial and extends to a global scale [in same text as above]:
[In my studio w]e create here situations and objects that can become catalysts for a form of reflexivity that allows the viewing subject not simply to be a passive consumer of an already tested experience but for the experience of art itself to be testing ground for both the model of art and the model of the human subject. We have in making art a specialisation and its exchange as a matter of high monetary worth lost its central subject - the human being. In the art of the 20th century the Duchampian breakthrough was the examination of human labour and mass production in the ‘found object’. I would like art to re-focus on the lost subject.” (Art In The Time Of Global Warming, 2010)
“In facing the challenges of global climate crisis in a culture which encourages us to do more, produce more, be seen more - my initial response is paralysing fear, I want to shrink, to go into a hibernating state with minimum muscular effort and put minimal demand on any kind of fuel.Given the above context, let’s turn to what is at the basis of Gormley’s own work as an artist, a sculptor:
This position is not helpful but perhaps is a good place to start to rethink one’s place in the world.
[...] We can no longer assume that more is better. We have to change our cultural heroes from generals and captains of industry to meditators and mediators, from Rambo and Terminator to Ghandi and the Dalai Lama.
Our tool systems, no longer stone, having separated us from the rest of the planet and biosphere, are now what will, without this revolution, destroy both. The notion that human life was going to be improved by an empirical march of tool making that would make life stronger, longer and safer is challenged by the fall out effects of this very technology. Technology that was in some senses made to make life better has now become the problem.”
“I’m interested in art’s ability to bear witness, and I start with what I know, the bit of the material world in which my consciousness is embedded: my body. And I try to present that bit of material (to myself as much as to anybody else) in a way in which its trace is registered. So my work always starts with the idea of a body at a particular moment in a particular position, fixed by a negative just like a photographic negative, except that this is a three-dimensional negative and we call it a mould. I still think of a mould as being the most magical and mysterious thing. The mould is a testament, a proof of the existence of an object or a body and, for my sculpture, the particular body that I inhabit. […]I get a great sense of humility from Gormley’s words: a starting from one’s own body, a witnessing first to oneself, a recognition of one’s work being an empty vessel (immediately making me think of Christ’s kenotic self-emptying).
I think of my work as instrumental. My sculptures will be seen as very boring objects if you look at them in terms of Western art history, or a kind of desire to make beautiful objects or a “picture” of reality. But if you look at them as instruments then they can become vessels, empty things that can be used for a type of thinking or a kind of feeling, then they begin to get more interesting.” (Silence And Stillness: Antony Gormley Interviewed By Enrique Juncosa, 2002)
This impression is further strengthened by seeing how Gormley explains the need for starting from the body, which represents common ground and which he sees as an invitation for others to inhabit his work:
“The issue for me is that it is impossible to make art that can truly be shared without acknowledging the body as a starting point of common experience. So I have to acknowledge the body and at the same time try to find a way of not representing it, or presenting it simply as an object. This is the reason why I’m not interested in the perfect copy, in representation. We probably never did it better than Mantegna or Masaccio, and anyway, photography does it perfectly. […]A final point in this thread is also that Gormley sees art as non-elitist, as a landscape open to all:
[My sculptures] are tools for carrying nothing, nothing else than emptiness, shadow, darkness, carrying the condition of embodiment. They each carry the condition we all know. All you have to do is to shut your eyes when you are awake you are in the place that the bodyforms and the bodycases carry. […]
I completely disagree with the [...] proposition that the highest aspiration of art is to have a specific object that is purely itself and refers to nothing. I want people to inhabit my sculpture with their own lives, feelings, thoughts, emotions, whatever. I would like the logical and affective to be in the right balance.” (Interview With Pierre Tillet, 2008)
“We could say that for most of European art’s progress, it’s been about picturing. Then in Modernism it turns to interpretation and deconstruction. And now, I think, we’re into a completely new phase in which art is about providing a place where the human subject is somehow able to concentrate on his/her own being. [...] The subjective experience of space-time, the condition of life, rather than being in some way the assumed background condition for refined perceptions of the object, now becomes a landscape in itself. And I think this is a new paradigm in the evolution of art.” (Interview With Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2008)While Gormley has been extremely successful in his appreciation by the art world, there is an explicit desire in his thought to not be confined by it and to live “in the wild” instead:
“All art now has to be lost: to be an awkward interloper within life, that is its job. What Heidegger talks about in The Origin of the Work of Art, the idea that the temple is part of its landscape and the landscape part of the temple is an ideal, and we have lost it. This is a classical image of interdependence of site and object. And while I recognise this ideal, I think that sculpture does not have a home. For me, sculpture is a lost subject, an alien body that infects and interrupts the cohesion of place. The museum is just one place amongst many wherein you might find art - but not art at work but in refuge. I’m not against museums because I think they have a very important part to play in the memory of a culture. But before my work has any need to be in the museums it has to have a life, it has to have adventures in the real world. For me, art has to be part of everyday life and every one of my pieces is an attempt to look at a new context and say: how can I deal with this opportunity?” (Interview With Pierre Tillet, 2008)Gormley then positions the scope of art even beyond inter-personal communication, between artist and viewer:
“I’m not so interested in formal validations of work, where people called artists make something called art that belongs in a gallery. It’s tiny the ecology and economy of the art world. Art is not simply human communication or a way of explaining ourselves to ourselves. I’m interested in art that speaks of our vulnerability in time, in the same way that a figure on Easter Island looks up at the sky somewhere above the horizon and is evidently not a substitute for me speaking to you. It’s not about communication between human beings; it’s about communication between human beings and deep time and deep space. This is the broader horizon that I’m interested in positioning the work against. I want to make an art that has to do with survival, that thinks about where human beings fit in the chain of being, that asks who we are, and where we’re going...well, these big, big questions.” (Silence And Stillness: Antony Gormley Interviewed By Enrique Juncosa, 2002)On the basis of the above, it should come as no surprise that Gormley is an admirer of Teilhard de Chardin, whose concepts of a continuum between matter and spirit and of an evolution towards collective consciousness bear strong resemblance to his art:
“The Internet, for better or worse, is an objectification of Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the communion of human mind - the noosphere, which is the third encirclement of the globe, the first being the biosphere and the second the atmosphere. With this possibility of instant communication, created by a non-space that is everywhere, the idea of place becomes very important.” (Still Moving, 1996)To conclude, let’s look at how Gormley positions his own work in such a continuous world view, speaking about the Earth in not dissimilar ways to St. Francis’ Canticle of Brother Sun:
“I love Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the ‘Noosphere’; the idea that there is a deep connection between the mineral and the mental. This has everything to do with sculpture. But in some way the history of material transformation on the planet is a progress from slower, less complex forms to faster, more complex forms and that, in some way, human consciousness is a kind of atmosphere. He calls it ‘Noosphere’ - the idea of an encirclement of the entire surface of the globe by ‘mind’. I think that mind is collective; a collective subjective and one of the tasks is to make that collectivity more apparent.” (Interview With Marjetica Potrc, 1994)
“Sculpture is a direct way of allowing mind to dwell in matter. It is a means of becoming aware of the connections between matter, space and time in a way that complements (but is completely different from) the connections that science has demonstrated. I firmly believe that we are part of a chain of being and that sculpture is a way of providing instruments in which our place within it can be tested, made manifest and perhaps transformed.
Where does the world begin? Of course we can make it moment by moment and most intimately in what we call the self - but world and self cannot be separated - they are continuous. Where consciousness ends and the world begins is not so easy to define. We are, after all, borrowing our bodies from the earth and is it not likely that the earth knows more of us than we of it? Nothing is ever lost.” (Present Time, 1996)
I'd also recommend a great BBC documentary about Antony Gormley that has only come out recently.
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