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Antony Gormley 'another place'
Antony Gormley GORMLEY:
the abortive rebirth
of the slaves
an essay in the
archeology of the image
ANOTHER PLACE
It is an unforgettable sight that, even after the removal of the statues,
will survive for a long time in the minds of all those who have seen it:
Antony Gormley Gormley's hundred iron statues rising from the sand along the long
coastal strip until they stand in full length on the wet, ribbed sand,
staring at the horizon in silent expectation.
The artwork is called
‘Another Place’. It has already been shown on
other places, but is now set up on occasion of 2003 Beaufort in De Panne
at the Belgian coast. There, it strangely merges with the seaside
visitors, equally spread alongside the entire coast, although
in far
greater numbers. And although
they do not stand motionless: they lie
or sit, walk or run. But seen from a distance - a perspective that
imposes itself on the coast of De Panne, which is broad and not broken
through breakwaters - also the living people are turned into motionless
silhouettes. Hence, the life-sized statues would easily merge with the
living seaside visitors, were it not that they slowly rise up from the
sand, in contrast to the seaside visitors, who move horizontally of the
surface of the earth.
Until we realise that it is the statues that are placed on a horizontal
plane, as opposed to the seaside visitors who are walking on a gently
sloping plane. It is not the statues that ascend to the heavens.
Rather do the seaside visitors descend to the depths of the ocean.
From which depths do these statues arise?
And foremost: where does their creator come from?
BRANCUSI ON HIS HEAD
Judging from the works that Antony Gormley(°1950) made in the late seventies,
just graduated from Goldsmiths College (1975-1977) and the Slade
(1977-1979), you would never have fancied that the man would ever make
such a thing like ‘Another Place’. Following the example of Carl André,
who upset the English art-world with his rows of bricks in the Tate in
1976, he arranges pieces of bread or series of hemispheres on a row,
recomposes a trunk sawn into slices into a concentric pattern or into a
row of decreasing piles of slices. A similar concentric pattern is cut
over the rings of a tree-stump or cut into a boulder, strongly reminding
of fingerprints. (A survey of Antony Gormley’s works:
http://www.antonygormley.com )
But Antony Gormley is too much of a sculptor to bring such minimalism to a head.
He prefers to understand it as the completion of the essentialism that
led to the ‘sleeping muse’ of Brancusi. And such approach opens a more
fertile perspective: awakening the muse that Brancusi had sent to sleep
in an egg. The rebirth of the human figure out of the bricks, as it
ware. First, the surface of the egg-shaped stone is inadvertently turned
into magnified skin through cutting concentric figures in it (series
‘Skin’, 1978-79 and ‘Touchstones’, 1981-82). In the series ‘Heavy Stone’
(1982) and ‘Grasp’ (1982) it is hands that embrace the stone. And in
‘Man Rock’ (1982) the hands eventually grow into a full body that
envelopes the stone as if they were its skin.
Also within the framework of the rigid pattern of repetition or
progression, inherited from Carl André, the figure continues to loom up. In ‘Natural
selection’ (1981) Antony Gormley replaces Carl André’s abstract bricks with
concrete objects, from weapons, through utensils, to vegetables and
fruit; or in ‘One apple’ (1982) with a series of apples decreasing in
size. And even the purely formal principle of progression is lent a
figurative freight, as when in ‘Land, sea, air’ (1982) a kneeled figure
first bows its trunk, than holds it upright to eventually stand up; or
in ‘Three places’ (1983), where a reclined figure first lifts its trunk
to eventually stand upright.
But it seems as though Antony Gormley recoils from the resurrection of the
body. He no longer confines himself to fit the figure from without in
the progression of a row, but also submits it to a rigid
geometrical composition from within. In ‘Desert’ (1983) a figure lies prostrate with
the belly on the ground, its left arm stretched at right angles. The
series ‘Untitled’ (1983) comprises a figure standing upright with the
arms at right angles to the front (‘Diving figure’). In ‘Fill’ (1984) a
figures lays prostrate with both arms stretched sideward as a cross, and
in ‘Reach’ (1983) a similar figure lifts both arms, at right angles with
the body. The intention is clear: a body cannot help to adopt an attitude and gestures.
And to prevent it from beginning to tell a story, it has to be
disciplined geometrically.
But even though the gestures and attitudes are essentially negative, the
geometric discipline of the organic lends them an unknown expressive
freight. Which undoubtedly will have inspired Antony Gormley to make a further
stride. In works like ‘Rise’ (1983-1984) the head wants to release
itself from the rigid grip of a body that lies supine with both arms
stretched alongside it. In ‘Vent’ (1984) or ‘Address’ (1984) the right
angles are replaced with a symmetry in three dimensions of the gently
sloping axes of trunk, legs and arms. The figurative freight is further
enhanced when in ‘Peer’ (1984) a penis in erection and a gently inclined
head, that looks down on the phenomenon with some amazement, come to
join the balance of symmetries. Of this brand of already more mature
sculptures, the model of the 100 casts of ‘Another place’ is a direct
descendant.
‘WE ARE THE HOLLOW MEN…’
T.S Eliot
But the body of the muse awakening from the egg, cannot really break
loose from the geometry wherein it is caught. It is not allowed to
adopt gestures and attitudes, let alone facial expressions as the
visible appearance of an invisible inner self.
For instead of infusing it with a soul, Antony Gormley is filling it with
‘inner space’. To Antony Gormley the sculpture has to convey the experience of
how it feels to be in the world within the confines of a body. No inner
world as a soul, hence, but as an ‘interior’ in the literal sense: a
space enclosed by the skin. The idea of such an inner space derives from
the visual representation of the body as an object in the world when we
are falling asleep or meditating. Then, we experience our body merely as
a series of tactile impressions on the skin, the border between inner
and outer world. Since we are still visually oriented, we imagine an
inner space according to the model of outer space. And since we are not
moving any longer nor manipulating objects, we are no longer surrounded
by outer space, to which we have anyhow closed our eyes. We get the
impression that our body has become weightless and seems to expand until
it finally comes to coincide with space as such.
Already as a little child Antony Gormley was fascinated by the death-mask. And
what interested him was not so much the attempt at catching the soul of
the deceased in the expression of the face, but rather the pure
expansion of the flesh, its outward pressure on the plaster – as if the
mould was a vagina containing a swelling penis or a womb enclosing a
growing foetus. And that reminds us of the fact that the skin contains no inner space whatsoever, but flesh and
intestines. Antony Gormley’s lecture of the death-mask reveals the function of
the dawn of such inner space: as the interiorisation of the external
visible space, it is the pure negation of the organs contained by our
skin as well as of the immaterial soul that we equally locate within our
skin, behind the eyes as the mirrors of the soul.
That is why Brancusi’s muse, nearly awakened from her egg, is promptly
covered by another shell: Antony Gormley’s sculptures are moulds of his own
body. He describes how he has to adopt a rigid pose until the hardening
plaster of the mould takes over. In such happening-like ritual are
condensed, as in a symptom, the ascent of the body and its descent alike.
For Antony Gormley is not interested in the content of the mould,
supposed to soon rise up as a cast, but in the mould itself that
contains the body as a void. It is turned into a second skin, like an
Egyptian sarcophagus: a ‘body case’, made of pieces of lead welded
together (Night, 1983; Box, 1983). As heirs of the rigid geometric
composition, the welds form a pattern of horizontal and vertical lines
over the ‘body case’. Instead of being the visual appearance of an
invisible interior, the statues are turned into boxes containing an
inner space. They do not show any expression (except a geometrically
disciplined one). And they seem to have no skin either. No organic life
shimmers through it – we know how much Hegel descried the presence of
the ‘Geist’ in the shimmering through of the veins. And even less does
the surface invite to touching. Apparently, Antony Gormley is not aware of the
irony when, in an attempt to stress that he is out at the invisible
interior of his sculptures and not at their outer appearance, he
provides all the works from this period with the title ‘lead, polyester
and… air’. Which does not prevent that, the lead over the flesh
sometimes shows a sensual quality, that only belies his explicit
intention.
By the way: the ‘inner body’ has its expansion in common with the penis
or the vagina, whose erection, according to Freud, causes the ‘dream of
flying’. The inner life of the ‘Geist’ transformed into the 'phallus’
rising up. Or: the resurrection of the body replaced with the erection
of the penis. This gives a rather sinister overtone to the idea of the
reduplication of the artist in the beholder - the passing on of an
experience. The living body enclosed in the mould, that is – bearing in
mind Freud’s reduction of the body buried alive to the foetus in the
womb – a re-experiencing of the existence as a foetus in the womb. And
according to the equation of body and penis: an endeavour to escape
death by begetting oneself in the womb of the mother. Although Antony
Gormley spares himself even the detour around the mother by making a mould of
himself. Which sheds a new light on the function of sculpture as the
‘passing on of experiences’: a nearly concealed form of cloning one’s
own self.
The resurrection of the figure in sculpture avoided, then, through the
dawn of ‘inner space’. Although such inner space cannot appear but in
the body in which it is enveloped. In an effort to avert the danger that
the soul would come to inhabit this envelope, Antony Gormley goes even further
than containing the expression in purely geometrically determined poses.
He increasingly conceives his bodies in terms of the penis, that flaccid
envelope that hardens under the pressure of the blood. The erectile body
appears first as a penis that emphatically protrudes from the body
('Peer', 1984; ‘Well’, 1990). But soon also other parts of the body seem
to have become erectile. In ‘Tree’ (1984) an extremely long neck
protrudes from the trunk of a sculpture; in ‘Field’ (1983-84) the arms
of a standing sculpture reach to the walls; in ‘Home and the World’
(1986-87) the trunk ends up in an extremely long bar, and in ‘Case of an
Angel II’ (1990) it is elongated wings that extend to the walls.
Eventually the whole body is turned into one single erectile organ: it
expands in all directions into a balloon-like profusion, into a
conglomerate of bubbles clinging to each other ('End product' and 'Still
Running', 1990/93). In a remarkable reversal, the inner content of the
body is turned into its outer envelope: the model used for the
construction of its expanded version is literally buried in those
sculptures. Inner space outgrowing the body as a tomb for the very same
body that once contained it: this process lays bare the true nature of
inner space as the negation not only of the flesh and the soul, but also
of the body’s surface as the outer appearance of the spirit.
The natural relation between interior and exterior seems to be restored
in works where the body itself is visible again, but where real space
seems to take over the function of inner space outgrowing its container,
even though the pneumatic expansion of the balloon is then replaced with
the angular coordinates of the exhibition space. In those works it is as
if the geometric endo-skeleton that structured the figures from within,
is prolonged in a surrounding exo-skeleton. In ‘Sic’ (1987-1989) a
kneeled figure is fixed at the rectangular vertical wall as a
right-angled console. In ‘Testing a world view’ (1993) a trunk at right
angles on joined legs is fitted into ever changing coordinates of the
cubic space. The same is the case in ‘Drawn’ (2000) where a trunk on
spread legs is fitted into the corners of the space. Whereas in the
works with spread arms and wings, space was rather a kind of extended
niche that had to contain the forces radiating from the sculpture, in
these installations the sculptures are rather exemplifications of the
forces radiating from the room: they threaten to be reduced to a mere
function of the very space that once had been a function of sculpture.
The dissolution of the sculpture in the space surrounding it is
completed when the room is replaced with blocks of concrete wherein the
body of the artist is contained as a void, like the bodies of the
inhabitants of Pompei in the lava. The series begins with ‘Flesh’
(1990), a concrete cross that looks like if it walked right out of
Flanders Fields, and culminates in the accumulation of concrete blocks
reminding of a soldier’s churchyard in ‘Allotment’ (1995).
With Antony Gormley Gormley, the body is only allowed to resurrect in function of the
space it contains within and the space containing it from without. In
itself, it will never be allowed to come to life and to begin to speak
through adopting expressions, gestures and poses. Instead of a sensuous
apparition of the idea it is reduced to an element in a concept.
THE REBELLION OF THE MASSES
But there is still a third way out to nip the rebirth of the figure in
the bud: multiplication. No better way to divert the attention from
something than to let it submerge as an element in an encompassing whole.
Whereas figuration first slipped through the net of the elements in Carl
André’s row, the thus reborn figure is neutralised again through letting
it dissolve in the very same row: a mass of figurines moulded in clay (‘Fields’)
or a series of iron casts (‘Another Place’).
But first a detour. The way to repetition leads over mirroring, a more
restricted form of multiplication. In ‘Sculpture for Derry Walls’ (1987)
a figure is carrying its mirror-image on its back: a kind of reversed
‘Kiss’ of Brancusi. The supine version of this dorsal mirroring reminds
of Rodin’s ‘Fugit Amor’. And those forebears remind us of the fact that
also the formal principle of mirroring has its figurative roots: frontal
symmetry is the primeval form of the spatial relationship between
lovers. With Antony Gormley Gormley, such symmetry is formally eroded and negated
through reversal. Somewhat nearer to the mark, although this time
negated through a dorsal approach, comes ‘Holding onto the future’
(1987-1988). Only in ‘Meaning’ (1988-1993) do the figures lie frontally
upon each other, as if in a lying version of Brancusi’s ‘Kiss’.
But how much even here Antony Gormley’s sculpture recoils from being a sensuous
surface, is evidenced by the fact that the heads and bodies are sheer
volumes that interpenetrate each other, rather than faces with kissing
lips kissing or bodies with a sensitive skin. Not only lips and skin are
thus circumvented, but also penis or vagina. And that goes especially
for the 69-mirroring in ‘Present time’ (1987-1988), a stretched version
of Rodin’s Fall of the Angel: not only has the encounter shifted one
phase, it is also rendered impossible in that it is headless trunks that
are joined. The same goes for ‘Bearing II’ (1995), a reissue of Rodin’s
‘Je suis belle’, the perverse lecture of which is immediately negated in
that the trunk of the figure below bluntly penetrates the abdomen
of the figure above. With Antony Gormley Gormley, the encounter of two sensuous
surfaces is replaced with the merger of two inner spaces. That is why
the formal principle of the mirror cannot be elevated to more complex
forms of symmetry, as they are imposed by the fact that what is mirrored
is an opposition: that between man and woman. Containers of inner space
are mere mirror-images of each other: casts of the one and only Antony
Gormley– mystic clones. And at the same time we understand why the motif of
copulation, when reduced to mere mirroring, has inevitably to unfold to
its essence: the endless mirroring of iteration. The sexual freight,
already denied in the obliteration of the sexual surface, is further
hollowed out in that the couple dissolves in the endless repetition of
the one and only. Which is sealed in ‘Word made Fresh’ (1989) where a
figure is curling up – presumably sucking its own penis. With
hindsight, we understand that Antony Gormley’s problems with precisely the very
copulation that suited Rodin and Brancusi so well, may have lain at the
roots of the advent of the erectile inner space, that is now leaving
room for the multiplication of the figure.
Carl André’s row back again, hence. But the repressed erotic élan
betrays itself in the fact that the row is no longer rigid: the
sculptures are never arranged in a row, behind or next to each other, as
if they were soldiers, let alone in other formations of military
geometry such as the platoon. Iterative, hence, but not linear. Only in
‘Fields’ (1989) are the figures arranged in the familiar concentric
circles. Still in ‘Mind-Body column’ (2000), the sculptures are arranged
in a this time vertical row, as in Brancusi’s phallic columns. But
already in ‘ Three Way’s’ (1982) and ‘Islands’ (1082) the erectile row
is replaced with a random arrangement. And in ‘Man asleep’ (1985) the
multiplication of the figures takes the shape of a chaotic procession of
little figurines moving away from a leaden sculpture, whose dream they
seem to embody. And how wet that dream might be - how the avoided couple
bereft of its sexual organs is resurfacing in the flow of sperm – is
apparent from ‘Night and Day’ (1987) where a tube - a late echo of Carl
André’s row – is spawning a stream of homunculi, those little men whom
the Greeks thought were hidden in the sperm, and who are made visible in
Antony Gormley’s ‘Chromosome’ (1984): two figures lying next to each other as a
pair of chromosomes. In the following versions the penis is left out
altogether and the focus is on the rampant abundance of sculptures,
numerous as the progeny promised to Abraham: ‘Field’ (1991), ‘Amazonian
field’ (1991), ‘Field for the British Isles’ (1993), ‘European Field’
(1993), not to mention ‘Asian Field’ (2003) on diverse locations in
China, comprising 120.000 sculptures figurines! The erectile penis that
first took the shape of the expanding inner space of the body, now
appears under the guise of the – although numerous and germinating –
seed. Such blowing up of the human figure has to end up in the further
dissolution of seed into genes. With the homunculus as a catalyst, the
sexual love of the couple is thus transformed into the – although purely
additive – communal love of the undifferentiated mass.
But also the communal aspect of ‘Fields’ is only allowed to break
through in a crippled form. Just as the body recoiled from developing to
the seat of the soul, and just as the couple did not unfold to a unity
of opposites in copulation, just so does the group not grow out to the
harmonious unity of the combined opposition of the sexes and the
generations. What we get to see is the pure addition of sexless and
generationless beings. And even though, in the already cited ‘Fields’,
those gnomes are gazing at the beholder, shrugging shoulders in
solidarity, in ‘Total Strangers’ (1996) and ‘Another Place’ (1997) the
mass is dissolving in a sum of atoms drifting apart in the empty space.
But we still owe it to the erotic impulse that the multiplied figures
are part of a mass and do not dissolve into purely formal elements in a
purely formal order. And nobody will deny it: while the gestures of the
isolated figures were nipped in the bud and the lovers were reduced to
communicating vessels, the mass is allowed to freely speak out. The
effect of those numerous figures covering the entire floor is more then
‘speaking’. Only the amorphous mass is granted what the figure and the
couple were deprived of: the ‘theatrical’, as it was of old to be seen
in the freezes or the tympanum of the Grecian temples, or in the portals
of gothic cathedrals. It is only because in the West the domain of
sculpture has slowly been narrowed to the ‘figura’, whereas the
‘compositio’ was referred to painting, that ‘figuration’ is allowed to
break through on the level of the mass: as long as the figures do not
pose as actors, Moses receives his due.
THE DÉCOR
The ‘narrative’ element that has been banned from the isolated figure
breaks through, not only in the theatrical arrangement of the figures,
but even more perhaps in the scene on which they appear: their décor.
More and more Antony Gormley
comes to place his sculptures in a space inhabited
by living humans: as if they leave the world of art, although they
thereby do not step from a real pedestal, but rather free themselves
from their geometric embedding in a space consecrated to art. In the
beginning they enter urban environments as in ‘Sculpture for Derry Walls’
(1987), ‘Open Space’ (1991/1994), ‘Man (iron)’(1993) and ‘Total
Strangers’ (1996). But eventually Antony Gormley
seems to resolutely prefer
open nature, like land-art. This culminates in ‘Havman’ (1994), staged
in a Norwegian fjord and in ‘Another Place’ (1997) where 100 iron
figures are lined up along the coast, as now in De Panne on occasion of
2003 Beaufort.
It seems as though Antony Gormley
is avoiding the dialogue between real people
and the statue through using water as a threshold. In ‘Another Place’
the relation fluctuates according to the rhythm of the tides. At low
tide people walk amidst the sculptures, but when the tide is coming in,
they are swept from amidst the sculptures and driven to the beach.
But there is more. The places where these sculptures appear are part of
an earth’s surface that has been inhabited for millennia, traversed by
hunters, ploughed by farmers and excavated by miners or just used as a
battle-ground during war. Therefore, every place on earth is saturated
with history. The ‘Angel of the North’ (1995) is elevated above a
deserted coal mine. The exhibition of ‘Asian Fields’ (2003) in China
cannot but remind of the thousands of terracotta warriors that came to
us from the primal beginnings of the Chinese empire, but also of the
insurrection on the Tienanmen square, especially since the terracotta
sculptures are posted in the nearby Imperial Palace.
‘WE ARE THE DEAD…’
(‘In Flanders Fields’)
And that certainly applies to the disposition of ‘Another Place’ in De
Panne on the Belgian coast.
Already in their natural environment are the sculptures integrated
perfectly, just like formerly the statues on squares or in buildings.
For, the beach in De Panne is not only broad, but also long: no curves
are breaking the coastline and no breakwaters are spoiling the panorama.
So that from the no man’s land between France and Belgium the numerous
walkers and seaside visitors appear as black silhouettes on the wet sand
in the twilight zone between sea and mainland. And most striking is that
remarkable sense of immobility: although all those people walk along the
sea, or move back and forth between the sea and the beach, they all seem
to be immobilised. Ever since my earliest youth that sight is stamped on
my retina. When I saw Antony Gormley’s ‘installation’, it seemed as if that
sight suddenly stood magnified there, right before my eyes, in man sized,
immobile statues.
But, as already mentioned, in contrast with the real seaside visitors
and in contrast with the former versions of ‘Another Place’, the statues
are not standing on the ground. No doubt, Antony Gormley
will have been puzzled
by the fact that in former versions the farthest sculptures stood
submerged in the water, while the nearby ones were merely about to
paddle. It then will have dawned on him that the beach is not a
horizontal plane, but a sloping one. And that will have inspired him to
dispose the statues on a horizontal plane, parallel to the surface of
the sea. When the tide is coming in, they elevate themselves above the
surface of the water. But when the tide is low, they seem to rise up
from the sand. Would we complete their movement, they would gently rise
above the water – hang in the skies, like Antony Gormley’s sculptures
disappearing with their heads in the ceiling (‘Learning to think’,
1991), or better still: the sculpture that is hanging under a vault like
Jesus Christ on his cross in former times (Object, 1999). But when the
tide is low, the reminiscence of the statues, protruding on equal heights
from the water, conversely reminds us that the seaside visitors are
standing on a sloping plane. Such balancing of the surfaces on the
rhythm of the tides is already a rather sophisticated form of
integration of the sculptures in their environment.
Which at the same time snatches visitors and sculptures alike from the
real world. So that wholly naturally, a perspective on a historic
dimension is opening up, wherein this seemingly timeless - and carefree
- landscape is situated. For behind the dunes are the polders with the
soldier’s churchyards of the ‘Great War’. And down the coast in Normandy,
soldiers were moving in the opposite direction during the landing in
Normandy. Together with the sight of the thousands of ships in the sea
and the thousands of airplanes in the air – whose movement equally seems
to be immobilised through distance – this vision seems in fact the
completed version of the installation on the beach in De Panne, although
in reversed direction.
This association is not a mere fancy of our own mind, it is firmly
grounded in Antony Gormley’s oeuvre itself. We already pointed at the
counterparts of the leaden ‘body cases’: the concrete blocks wherein the
body of the artist is contained as a void. ‘Flesh’ (1990) is a concrete
cross that just seems to have walked out of Flanders Fields, were it not
for the body of the artist, standing with stretched arms, contained in
it. In ‘Allotment’ (1995) similar concrete blocks are arranged in rows,
just like the graves on a soldiers churchyard. The endless repetition of
the (hollow) crosses on the churchyards in the polders thus finds its
echo in Antony Gormley’s (full) casts on the beach. And that causes a further
irrevocable association: it seems as though the full casts are escaped
from the hollow moulds in the crosses behind the dike – as if Antony
Gormley’s
statues are risen from the dead. They are standing there, gazing
vacantly into space, not knowing why they have been awakened. Until it
dawns on us that they are not staring right to the horizon, but at right
angles of the direction in which the sun is setting in the West: at the
rise of pole star in the North. And that is where, according to psalm
48, is situated Mount Zion, the city of the Great King. From where, in
the end of times, he will descend to pass his Last Judgment on the
resurrected from the dead.
Thus, the sculptures are embedded not only in their natural environment,
but in ever deeper layers of the collective consciousness as well. At
first glance they seem to have become the real monuments sculptures once
were. The expression, banned from the figure, hesitatingly resurfacing
in the addition of the figures to a mass, is now allowed to come to full
bloom on the scene of a landscape saturated with history.
Were it not that the sense wherein they bathe is merely a -
non-compelling - construction in our mind: it is not embodied in an
inescapable apparition there before our eyes. The sense of Antony
Gormley’s
sculptures is bestowed on them from the crosses in the polder behind the
dike, conceived as being hollow against the background of Antony Gormley’s
oeuvre. Therein, the resurrection of the figure, even in the accomplished
form of the theatrical mass on the scene of history – as the
resurrected from death – differs fundamentally from the resurrection of
Michelangelo’s slaves from the marble: whereas their apparition will be
completed when all the marble is cut away, Antony Gormley’s sculptures acquire
their full meaning only when submerged in the spiritual dimension of the
spirit.
That is why Antony Gormley’s statues have rather something of the Parthenon, of
which Heidegger in ‘'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks' philosophises: 'Das
Tempelwerk fügt erst und sammelt zugleich um sich die einheit jener
Bahnen und Bezüge, in denen Geburt und Tod, Unheil und Segen, Sieg und
Schmach, Ausharren und Verfall die Gestalt und den Lauf des
Menschenwesens in seinem Geschick gewinnen'. (Further in this work,
written in 1935, it is phrased somewhat more explicitly: 'Indem eine
Welt zich öffent, stellt sie einem geschichtlichen Mensentum Sieg und
Niederlage, Segen und Fluch, Herrschaft und Knechtschaft zur
Entscheidung...'). Sculptures threaten to become pure – although
figuratively freighted – memorial stones that replace the advent of the
apparition through the flaring up of the spirit in the surrounding
landscape. Somewhat like the historic requisites in Danto’s ‘Gettysburg
Battlefield’. And it is typical of the state of the arts in the
twentieth century that, with Heidegger, meaning is flaring up around the
temple rather than within it: with Hegel the image of the God loomed up
in the interior of the temple. And that the temple has in common with
Van Gogh’s shoes in Heidegger’s ‘Ursprung des Kunstwerks’: both are mere
envelopes of man. In that sense also Antony Gormley’s figures, even though they
are full as Antony Gormley’s casts in De Panne, are sheer empty shells - moulds,
wherein Antony Gormley hopefully once will make the statue arise.
THE ANGEL OF THE NORTH
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most
High.
Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit
Isaiah XIV: 14,15
That very North of Mount Zion, where all the resurrected of the dead are
staring at, made me immediately think of that other sculpture, that made
Gorley famous to a wider public: the ‘Angel of the North’ in Gateshead
on the Tyne. Also that sculpture is embedded in a landscape saturated
with history: at the one end of the wall that the emperor Hadrianus had
built across the isle, not far from the place were nowadays a
‘Millennium Bridge’ has been built over the Thyne. And on the very place
where up until recently coal, that antiquated black gold, has been dug
up…
All the more since also that sculpture is about to ascend to heaven.
Although the ‘Angel of the North’ will never succeed with those stiff
wings of his, even though they have the wingspan of a Jumbo Jet. And
that goes especially for its protoype, exhibited within the confines of
a gallery, just like the hollow cast of the body of the artist in its
concrete block (‘Case for an Angel II, 1990). That the flight of our
angel, the immeasurable erection of its wings notwithstanding, is
irrevocably curtailed, sheds a new light on those ribs wherein its trunk
is caught like a woman’s waist in a boned corset. They immediately made
me think of the equally laced up ‘moules malics’ from Duchamp’s ‘La
mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’. It is well known how this
work circles around Eros, that other winged being. Or shall we – bearing
the swan in mind with which also the Jumbo Jet is irrevocably associated
– rather write: that other winged organ? The curtailed flight - or
erection – of an organ, or: how expanding space is caught within the
confines of the figure’s surface that it was suppose to transcend. That
makes apparent how in Antony Gormley’s ‘sculpture’ the rebirth of the figure is
aborted. For in its colossal dimensions ‘The Angel of the North’ cannot
but remind of other statues such as the 80 meter high Christo Redentor
of Paul Landoviski, whose equally stretched out arms are blessing Rio’s
heathen beaches from 1931 onward. Or – when we let its arms vary
according to Antony Gormley’s cherished coordinates – of the countless statues
that ever since the Statue of Liberty or Lenin are pointing to
democratic or socialistic utopia’s. Receding further in time, we stumble
on the David of Michelangelo, from where we are referred to the colossal
statue of the emperor Constantine, the prefigure of all Western
imperialistic dreams – religious as well as political. And behind this
shadow, still more impressive colossuses loom up: those of the pharaohs
and their Gods alongside that other river, the Nile in Egypt, nearer to
the origin of civilisation. But also in those parts north of Hadrian’s
wall, giants were roaming around. Take Condatis, governing over the
confluence of the Tyne and the Tees, assimilated with Mars by the
Romans, just like another horned war god: Belatucadrus. Not to mention
Hresvelgr in the Norwegian mythology, a giant that dwelled in the utmost
North and the movement of whose wings unleashed storms over the world.
Which reminds us of another statue of Antony Gormley’s: the if not colossal,
still huge ‘Havman’ (1994), posted in a Norwegian fjord. Not yet
hindered by stiff wings or a squeezing corset, he is allowed to freely
render the expansion of inner space…
And then it dawns on us that, in contrast with the identical casts in
‘Another Place’ or the gnomes in ‘Fields’, we are not dealing here with
an ever expanding mass of hand sized or man sized figures, but with one
single colossal figure. Multiplication seems to have made room for
expansion, if not of an inner space, then certainly of something far
more spiritual: power! For this colossal statue seems to be the failing
leader - or at least its messenger - at which the many anonymous hordes
staged by Antony Gormley seem to look up. And the questions remains which
leaders have come to dwell there, in that North of Antony Gormley’s, during the
course of time. Also here the power of the image is emanating from the
historical layers into which the statue is imbedded. And, especially
since the last offspring of those statues with the arm lifted up has
been toppled before the eyes of the entire world, that cannot fail to
stir some musings about all the ‘non-dit’ that lies dormant in all that
‘non-figuré’: the real abyss at the sight of which the visual arts
increasingly recoil…
That is why the slaves no longer rise up so effortless from the marble
as in Michelangelo’s times…
IN THE MIST
And that is also why it must not surprise us – Antony Gormley would not be
Antony Gormley when
the counter-move failed to appear – when also the
spirit of the site is neutralised through a renewed formal violence.
Already in his ‘Fields’, Antony Gormley had countless figures made through
assistants according to a basic scheme. For ‘Asian Field’ (2003) he had
120.000 hand sized figurines made by 300 people of all ages from the Hudau District in Guangzhou. Apart from the contempt for the sculpture
that is evidenced through such relegation, it also testifies to an
effort to replace the creation of the privileged artists with that of
ordinary people, whereby the creation is at the same time rooted in the
local community. But, such integration is of a totally different nature
than the way in which ‘Another Place’ is integrated in De Panne, or the
‘Angel of the North’ in Gateshead. As Antony Gormley phrases it: "Field is part
of a global project in which the earth of a particular region is given
form by a group of local people of all ages. It is made of clay,
energised by fire, sensitised by touch and made conscious by being given
eyes." Nothing shows better how formal violence proceeds. The living
community that inhabited a site for generations, is replaced with a
sample of the population. Instead of building walls, ploughing the earth,
excavating the underground or digging trenches ‘they sensitise the earth
by touch’. And the resurrection of the miners in the pit or the soldiers
in the trenches is replaced with ‘making the clay conscious’. That does
not prevent that Antony Gormley’s description of the project will not
suffice to smother the associations that irrevocably will loom up in
many a mind when Antony Gormley’s ‘Asian Field’ is shown in the Imperial Palace
next to the Tienanmen square on occasion of the campaign ‘Think UK’…
The statues seem even to be further embedded in the community when
Antony Gormley proceeds to make 300 concrete chambers for 300 living
inhabitants of Malmo (Allotment). This time the inhabitants are allowed
to do more than merely mould the clay: their very body is eternalised in
the work of art, albeit as an empty space in concrete blocks. This
approach is refined in ‘Domain Fields’ (2003, Baltic). How much the
rebirth of the figure is curtailed, even in the evasive shape of the
mass, may appear from the fact that Antony Gormley further reduces the living
community to ‘a complete cross-section of the public from age 5 tot 95’.
And the counter-move is completed in that their casts only serve the
construction of sculptures as an accumulation of bars in stainless
steel. The parallel with the ‘letters’ of DNA catches the eye, even
though we have to deal here with three instead of four building blocks:
bars in the height, the breadth and the depth. Just as the ‘letters’ of
the DNA produce the enormous diversity of living beings, so the bars
produce the diversity of figures in the human mass. The figures are no
longer variants or repetitions of each other: they have become rows
again, this time composed of bars. And just like the figures are
dissolving in bars on a lower level, on a higher level they merge in a
kind of amorphous cloud: in that they are now bereft of any expressive
surface altogether, they seem to dissolve into a kind of mist cloud or
energy field – rather like a blown up plus-minus painting of
Mondrian
or the accumulation of tiny strokes to milky ways in the paintings of
Tobey. The reduction of the figure to an accumulation of an – albeit
complex – row of bars thus leads to the dissolution of the group as well.
And, again, a parallel with the way in which Dawkins replaces the group
and the individual with genes, imposes itself. And just as with Dawkins
the group and the individual are promoted to vehicles of the genes, just
so does the figure’s surface first dissolve into a mystic ‘inner space’
to finally, through a detour over the erectile penis, scores of sperm
and pairs of chromosomes, end up in what with Antony Gormley is called ‘quantum
clouds’. Genes would be more in line with the expectations created
through this dizzying blowing up of the human figure. And at the same
time provide a more becoming term for what Antony Gormley used to call ‘body
cases’, but with Dawkins is christened: vehicles of the genes.
Whereby Antony Gormley, rather than sealing the rebirth of the figure, out of
fear of the dangers contained in the figure, prefers to regress to the
numerous anti-mimetic trends against which he first seemed to be reacting.
With concept art he has not only in common that his work, especially
from ‘Domain’ onwards , threatens to evaporate into a mere shadowy
concept, just like the body into Dawkins genes, the mere blueprints of
the body, but also that it is increasingly executed through volunteers.
From the happening, Antony Gormley inherited the involvement of the local
population in the creation of the artwork. And the use of identical bars
joined to complex rows is an plain relapse into minimalism.
Thus, the awakening of the muse that Brancusi sent to sleep in the egg,
does not lead to the resurrection of the image that with Michelangelo
lay dormant in the stone. After first having been reduced to invisible
inner space, enveloped through the surface as a sarcophagus, it
developed into an equally invisible void in a concrete block, to finally
be dissolved, after a detour through the multiplication in the mass, in
an accumulation of bars. Thus the resurrection of Antony Gormley’s statues in
De Panne ends up in a veritable fall in the gene-pool, that new
sublunary domain where the gods, banned from heaven, threaten to find a
new home.
2003 BEAUFORT
That does not prevent Antony Gormley’s contribution in De Panne to tower above
the other contributions to 2003 Beaufort. That is why we only can hope
that ‘Another Place’ will be allowed to remain there: it will probably
never find a better resting-place. Although there will have to be found
a good method for stopping the – up to now eloquent – rusting away of
the iron – a heritage from the predilection of ‘land-art’ for transience.
For the sea will certainly further erode the statues, seaweed will
overgrow them and mussels will attach themselves to them – in so far as
they will not slowly but surely sink in the sand, just like the bunkers
of Hitler’s Atlantikwall...
©
Stefan
Beyst April 2003
Background to this article:
stefan beyst: theory on art and music
'Another Place' has
been
on view on Crosby beach Liverpool as part of the 135 kilometre Mersey
Waterfront
from 17/6/2005 to 30/11/2006.
It has previously been seen in Cuxhaven in Germany
(1997), Stavanger in Norway
(1998) and De Panne in Belgium
(2003). It is expected to move to New York following
its installation in South Sefton which ends in November 2006.
Anthony Gormley stated that his one hundred cast iron figures should
stay on Merseyside beach.
'Waste Man': On 30 September 2006, Antony Gormley's Waste Man,
constructed entirely of the detritus of modern consumer society, was
burned to the ground in front of an audience of thousands in the seaside
town of Margate.
From 11 december 2006 tot 17 February 2007, Anthony Gormley exhibited his
"Critical Mass" installation (1995) in the Museo d'Arte Donna Regina in
Naples: a large group of more than 60 figures cast in lead in a variety
of poses lying on the floor.
Event Horizon/ Blind Light: 31 sculptures of Anthony Gormley Gormley stood atop buildings and public walkways to highlight his show
'Blind Light' at the Hayward Gallery from 17 May to 19 August (See also:
'Blind
Light').
Antony Gormley has been commissioned to produce another piece of public
art for Gateshead – a set of bollards made of the same rusty corten
steel as his 20m tall
‘Angel of the North’ (1995)
Your reaction
(in English, German, French or Spanish):
beyst.stefan@gmail.com
For a totally
different approach of the group in the image see:
the art of virgil brill:
referrers:
Intute
the-artists.org
Artfocus
O Melhor Anjo
the wall
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