BRITISH ARTIST ANTONY GORMLEY
INTERVIEW WITH PIERRE TILLET
From ANTONY GORMLEY: BETWEEN YOU AND ME, Kunsthal Rotterdam,
Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2008
Pierre Tillet: The human being in your sculptures is most often
anonymous, even when you call one of your works ANOTHER SINGULARITY. Are you
trying to erase individuality in your work?
Antony Gormley: I'm not seeking for the generic, the symbolic or
the emblematic. I'm trying to renegotiate a connection between the subjective
and the collective in the most direct way. Since I'm not interested in
portraiture, the registration of the subjective is coming from under the skin
rather than from the outside of it. Each work comes from a lived moment of a
particular body, at a particular time, in a particular position . This is its
ontological origin. You can infer a number of philosophical propositions from
this, of which the most important is that it is conceptual, but not
ideologically motivated. It reaffirms subjective experience as the point of
authenticity in human life.
PT: In his philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas makes the face of the other
man the ground for ethics, in so far as it escapes possession, representation.
In other words, the face of the other man eludes my power. Why can't we find
any face in your sculptures?
AG: According to Levinas, we can only become completely ourselves
when we register the fact that our actions and even our thoughts are given a context
by being shared. What I try to give form to is the subjective experience of
living behind our faces. Whether it's an actor on a stage or you and me sitting
opposite to each other, I'm convinced that our faces belong more to the other
than they do to ourselves. I agree with Emmanuel Levinas, even if the question
of the face is not the real issue in my 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.
PT: According to Luc Boltanski, "the question of the
singularity of the persons have been long ignored in the realm of
sociology." In his opinion, the reason for this is that sociology had
to get rid of psychology, regarded as too individual. Do you consider that you
left psychology behind in your work?
AG: It's impossible to ignore psychology. I am not well versed in
Lacanian psychology, but perhaps one could usefully apply it to my work. I
underwent analysis for three years, four times a week, and I'm interested in
anything that helps understand the relationship between memory, consciousness
and character.
PT: To go back to Luc Boltanski, he also insists on the tension
between singularity or uniqueness and similarity or substitutability. Identity,
according to him, arises from the confrontation between these opposite poles.
Could this dialectic be useful to understand such a work of art as FIELD
(AMERICAN FIELD, EUROPEAN FIELD, ASIAN FIELD…)? The little
body-surrogates that compose it are all different, singular and, at the same
time, similar, substitutable…
AG: The two pieces from EVENT HORIZON that were on Waterloo Bridge
had a particular effect on the crowds who walked in dense streams. These still
naked bodyforms reveal the tension between singularity and similarity by
insisting on a measure that is not universal, it emphasises what we share and
what makes us different. The situation is different with FIELD: the viewer
stands in front of a space entirely occupied by the little bodysurrogates, he
is stopped by it, and becomes a singular example in the face of a mass.
PT: There are two categories of pieces in your work. Some consist
only in one or two, sometimes three, sculptures. Others are like groups of
human beings, composed of hundreds or even thousands of sculptures. What leads
you to the first or to the second category?
AG: I make works one at the time, which each time focus on what it
feels like to be alive. But I realise you can't do that simply from the aspect
of the singular object. You have to somehow make a context also out of objects
and therefore out of place. My work acknowledges this as a time of mass
production, and acknowledges the collective body. The urban condition of humanity
is to live in a body shared with many bodies.
PT: The presence of the group is different in FIELD, ALLOTMENT and
CRITICAL MASS II. In FIELD and ALLOTMENT, the links between each of the
individual seem to be strong - stronger in FIELD than in ALLOTMENT. On the
contrary, even if they share a similar problem - the difficulty or
impossibility to stand - the statues which make up CRITICAL MASS II don't form
a coherent set, geometrically speaking…
AG: The sculptures
of CRITICAL MASS II share a common fate of an inability to stand - the whole of
the work is about falling, is about those who don't fit and have no place in
the collective body. The subject or the sub-text of CRITICAL MASS II is the
loss of social order. In ALLOTMENT, it's a social order of architecture and in
FIELD, it's a collective body that faces a common future - the little
body-surrogates are all looking together in the same direction. CRITICAL MASS
II is the most helpless thing I have ever made.
PT: You said once that CRITICAL MASS II "is an anti-monument
evoking the victims of the twentieth century…"
AG: You could say that ALLOTMENT and FIELD both refer to the
dignity or order that you see in Arlington Cemetery and attempt to disrupt it.
The twentieth century has been a time of mechanisation of war in which life
becomes rubbish. CRITICAL MASS II has to do with how the rejected touch the
ground - there is acceptance of inertia. There are twelve body positions which
if put in a line would become a diagram of the ascent of man, from the state of
fish-like amphibia to standing man. In spite of being thrown down and
chaotically distributed, I have tried to express the dignity of each of
these stages. Because they are fallen, this developmental structure
is lost and you have to work quite hard to find it. CRITICAL MASS II is a key
work for me. It combines the idea of a compressed moment of lived time and the
idea of mechanical production, (there are twelve original bodyforms and they
are each cast five times). Each one of these twelve pieces is an object that
can have different values according to the way it falls. There is a crouching
bodyform that literally can land on any one of its six sides and in each
position, it feels different. There is a work that is like a mourning figure in
a Renaissance crucifixion, which when inverted becomes like a jongleur, a kind
of acrobat. I am very interested in this mutability.
PT:You sometimes describe your sculptures as cases. Does it mean
that they are carrying something?
AG:They 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.
PT: Could we say that this emptiness is like an energetic void
which is the condition of existence of the bodyform, which is animating the
body? This emptiness could be what the ancient philosophers called the anima…
AG:Yes, the anima or the pneuma. The first works, like CRITICAL
MASS, are a materialisation of the space inside the skin of the lead. It's
still cast but this is what you are not allowed to see. This is a
materialisation of that space, of that darkness. It's the same with Rodin's Âge
de Bronze: this is actually a case, but he doesn't want us to think about his
work as a bronze skin that is 6 millimeter thick, with a dark space inside. I
wanted to make the void inside sculpture count in the lead cases: the darkness,
the air contained within it is an important part of the material reality and
the immaterial purpose of the work.
PT: The emptiness inside the sculptures of CRITICAL MASS II is not
the same as it is inside the sculptures of ALLOTMENT…
AG: ALLOTMENT is a bit like SENSE or the other concrete works. You
are given a chance to see the darkness, the life space of somebody. With the
lead body cases (apart from one or two that have holes at the eyes, the anus or
whatever) you have no access to that.
PT: ALLOTMENT II is a constructed landscape made up of 'buildings'
realised from the measurements of 300 different people. What do all those
measurements mean?
AG: The measurements are the registration of the vital statistics
of the people who participated. This is an obvious reference to all forms of social
control that we accept as a necessary part of collective life. It is important
that this is done very carefully: little differences between each individual
are registered in the final sculpture. With the right attention, you can find
the same level of difference and personality between each sculpture as you can
see between each body surrogate in FIELD.
PT: The first thing I thought of when I saw ALLOTMENT was the
Modulor of Le Corbusier…
AG: I think ALLOTMENT is much closer to Malevich and the Suprematist
notion of ordered space. Le Corbusier lived at a time when modernism had not
revealed its dark side. ALLOTMENT is a post-Auschwitz work.
PT: Another difference is that the Modulor is theoretical, it is an
ideal form, while ALLOTMENT comes from the existence of real people.
AG: There is no ideal form in ALLOTMENT. This is very important: I
start from a position of the highest value being given to the subject and not
to the form. Even if the individual is determined by some specific conditions
of measurement, nevertheless she is acknowledged and celebrated in her
individuality. Even though every one of the rooms in ALLOTMENT has a number,
which could be in a sense the diminishment of individual into statistics,
whenever it is shown, you can go from the number to the name and then, if you
want to - and some people do - you can find the face that connects with the
name.
PT: How do you choose the position of every piece of ALLOTMENT II ?
AG: Even though this is not apparent at first, the relationship of
male to female, of child to adult, is very carefully articulated in the
distribution of the whole. There is no fixed distribution of the work, like
there is no fixed distribution of FIELD. Every time we do it differently. But I
always make a plan that simply indicates the size of the pieces, whether it's
big, middle or small, the orientation, whether the pieces are standing back to
back, face to face, side to side, and the distribution within the block. There
are usually twelve or fourteen blocks, with two avenues and four or five cross
streets and every block has between fifteen and twenty-five pieces. For me it
is very fascinating how the order and disorder of the distribution work with the
living bodies, how people get lost and find their own places to
stand and register not just spaces that are contained within the work, but also
spaces that are created collectively between them.
PT: For me, ALLOTMENT also refers to the Bunker Archeology of Paul
Virilio.
AG: I love bunkers and I saw many on the North Atlantic Wall, from
Jutland to Normandy. Virilio's assertion that the bunker is the 'ur' form of
modernism in architecture is correct. In many ways, the early body case works
were like bunkers. They reproduce in a small scale the amplification of
tensions between inside and outside that are present in a bunker. A bunker has
orifices, the anus, the ear, the eye, in solid concrete.
PT: Your sculptures are often cast from your own body. What is the
reason for that?
AG: The reason I use my own body is that it's very convenient, it's
very practical. I don't have to force anybody to do something they don't want
to. I want to bear witness to my experience of the human condition not as an
objective observer but as a participating experiencer and my body is the best
tool, material, subject. The best case that I can argue is my own, because it's
the one that I'm working with everyday. You can argue that there is a
narcissistic element in the project, but it is not the only thing to say. The
issue is: how can you use the particularity of experience as a way of
investigating a common condition? Since all human beings are
embodied, to use the body that you have got as your laboratory is a good place
to begin. And I would say that I'm still beginning. But since I began, I have
also moulded hundreds of other people. When I was confident that I knew what I
was doing and how I was going to use these moulds in an effective way, I felt I
could ask others to do what I had done myself.
PT: I saw a video in which two assistants were applying hessian and
plaster on your body in order to cast it. It seems to be very hard to stand
still until the materials get dry so that the mould is ready and you can get
out of it. How can you do so?
AG: I use a meditative technique in order to establish a special
relationship not just to the body and its activities, but to time. To get a
good register in the work, you have to be in the right state of mind. The
ritualised repetition of the engendering of the sculptures is part of the work
as a whole. This has to do with finding balance, finding that form of
concentration, finding acceptance, an acknowledgement of dependency, not just
on consciousness and on the body itself but on the work of others, putting
yourself into others hands. These things are interesting not as abstractions, but
as part of the practice of sculpture.
PT: The relationship with time sometimes gets weird, like in the
sculpture called PEER (1984), in which we see a man having an erection…
AG: The idea of bearing witness to the condition of being an animal
with a reflexive mind is what this sculpture is about. All of the works are
traps for time. The difference between PEER and Rodin's Kiss is that PEER is
not an illustration of sexuality: it's the thing itself.
PT: For me, PEER was closer to Bruce Nauman than to Rodin's Kiss.
What do you think about his work?
AG: I'm interested in the early pieces of Bruce Nauman, the work he
made in the 60's walking in his studio, walking a line, playing the violin. He
is close to the question: what does a man do when he's left on his own? You
have to deal with your body in time and that's what Bruce Nauman does in the
early videos. He questions the constructed human environment, he begins with
light and abstracts wall from ground in the corridor pieces. One of my
favourite Nauman works is the double cage piece. What I like about Nauman is
the sense of experimentation and the complete withdrawal from formal concerns.
The sickness of art in the late twentieth century was that issues of style and
formal language have overtaken existential problems.
As far as I'm concerned, art is useless unless it helps us deal
with survival, psychologically and physically. It's useless unless it helps us
investigate our predicament. I think Bruce Nauman was a pioneer in this, unlike
Carl Andre whose work I admire, but which was clearly an attempt to find an
industrial continuation of Brancusi's work.
PT: Sometimes, the form of the body is present only in an allusive
way in your work. FLOOR (1981), for example, consists in a rubber circle
suggesting a stump, whose lines draw two footsteps in the center. In the same
way, the BLANKET DRAWINGS (1983) register the sleeping body as an absence. In
SENSE (1991) you cast a void in the form of a body inside a concrete block. Is
there a link between these pieces?
AG: Absolutely, they all talk about the skin as a boundary but try
to allow us to go in it and out of it. FLOOR says: this is where a man might
stand, where does he begin and end; can we think of him as a wave condition
rather than a particle condition? The BLANKET DRAWINGS are about sleeping,
swimming and drowning. The head that disappears out of the top is like an x-ray
of the position of the body in the sleep. It becomes this floating body with
the head as free as the sky. With SENSE, I'm just trying to do what I did with
BLIND LIGHT : suggest that there is a continuum between the internal condition
of the body and space at large. You can see this as a cave in human form, in
the shape of a blind man registering his environment.
PT: I also see SENSE as a work dealing with the missing body. Is
the idea of the missing body the main issue of FREEFALL or the QUANTUM CLOUDS
series?
AG: Rather than trying to reconcile the dialectic of mass and space
by inversion or concentration (turning the body into a space is inversion, and
turning the space of the body into a solid mass is concentration: the collapse
of dialectic), perhaps a better way to deal with the body, which is more
contemporary and closer to post-particle physics of David Bohm, Heisenberg and
Niels Bohr. The search for the Quantum Theory of Gravity is a fascinating
parallel field of research which has refused the dialectics of mass and spaces
and applies the functions of a changing energy field to the mutability and
interdependence of mind and matter. I agree with the Buddhist proposition that
the western idea of an absolute individual with an everlasting soul has to be
replaced by the idea of the individual as provisional, mutable and non-lasting.
So, with the QUANTUM CLOUDS, FREEFALL and many of the recent works, the
classical position of sculpture as an absolute object placed in space has been
replaced by constructing a provisional energy field in space.
PT: You declared once that "it is an open question in the
QUANTUM CLOUDS, whether the body is emerging from a chaotic energy field or the
field
from the body…"
AG: It's important that this is not clear. We've just made the first
void QUANTUM CLOUD, with no a body inside. It's a void space in a trajectory
field, which will be a very important point in the show.
PT: Another thing that surprised me was the duality of, on the one
hand, the mechanical transcription or registration of the body and, on the
other hand, the fact that it's still an organic body. What do you think about
that?
AG: In all of the experiments that I'm making at the moment the
best are the ones where every element has its own position in space, its own
rotation, its own way of connecting to the field matrix, but is essential to
the structure. In other words, you can't take it away without the structure
disintegrating.
At the same time, this element is also registering indexically this
borderland, this limnality between presence and absence, between the
possibility of something and the possibility of disappearance. Is this an
emergence or a concentration? Is this about disintegration and entropy or
origination? In the work I'm doing at the moment, I'm trying hard to allow
every participating element - whether it's a block, a ball, a linear element or
a polygon – to be in the only place it can be in the total distribution but to
have its individual identity. Now within the individual works, there is the
same balancing of the particular and the universal that we discussed earlier in
relation to FIELD or ALLOTMENT but that the tension between the chaotic and
the ordered has increased with the development of different types of
construction.
PT: The
structures of the QUANTUM CLOUDS, the DOMAIN SERIES, or the BLOCK WORKS can
suggest a sort of mathematic modelisation transcribed in 3-D by an engineer…
AG: I like
that idea of the model if you mean by this a blueprint or a proposal for the
way that something might be built or understood. I like the idea that part of
what art can do is not only make a picture or describe, but actually make a
proposition about the underlying dynamics of structures. This is something that
Paul Klee talked about in his Pedagogical Sketchbook, the idea that it's not
just what you see, it's what you know, it's not just what you know, it's what
you experience and it's not just simply about giving a documentary account of
the experience, it's actually animating and conveying that experience so that
it can become shared. What I'm describing is quite a difficult challenge
because, on one hand, you want this to be like a philosophical syllogism, a
logical proposition, to do with clear thinking, but at the same time you also
don't want this to become a cage that stops people getting in. I completely
disagree with the Judd 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.
PT: You also
question the issue of the placement of sculpture by realising what you call
'SUSPENDED / GRAVITY works', such as LOCK I (1994).
These works
develop a particular link with architecture, with walls and ceilings that
become grounds for them… Do you want to strengthen the ties between sculpture
and architecture, even if there had been, in the history of art, an
autonomisation of sculpture against architecture?
AG: I want to
make the living bodies of the viewers more conscious of their place in space. I
also want to make the spaces, the rooms or the beaches, the mountains that I
occupy more conscious. So I think that my work is more like the revenge rather
than a rebirth of the caryatid. Take LOST HORIZON, for example . I presented
this work as an internalised response to the EVENT HORIZON installation over
the rooftops of Central London. LOST HORIZON is made of thirty-two bodyforms:
six on the ceiling, six on the floor, six on the two long walls, four on the
two short ones.
They
completely undermined any sense of the room's autonomy and your position in it.
They undermined one's assurance that gravity is constant, that the room has a
defined position in space at large and put the whole thing into free fall. As a
result, you feel nausea, you lose the senses of up/down, left/right, front/back.
Part of my strategy is disorientation. In order for you to begin to feel again
your spacetime relation, I have to disrupt the certainties of the architectural
context.
PT: Wondering
about what inhabiting a place means, Martin Heidegger asks himself: where a
work of art is at home? He answers that a museum or a collection can be a home
for a work of art, on condition that it is not reduced to an object. With you,
there are many different placements or sites where we would least expect to
find works of art. What does it mean to work in a museum or a gallery and in an
old tram storage station in Vienna, along a coast in Germany, inside a water
tower in Italy, in the Great Australian Desert, in a class room, at a swimming
pool, etc?
AG: 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 where in 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?
In EVENT HORIZON I was exposing the bodies that you might say are normally
contained and protected within architecture exposed in elemental space in order
to ask where does human being fit, undermining the normality of the urban
context.
PT: In other
words, you are very interested in getting your sculptures out of the protective
context of the museum…
AG: Yes but I
also want to destabilise the museum itself. The Hayward show, for example, was
a laboratory of experimentation about how you use the social space of a museum
in ways that are physically engaging. This was not about the validation of my
work, neither was it about giving objects a precious and special position
within aesthetical intellectual framework. It was much more about experimenting
with how people might or might not be engaged in experience per se.
Pierre Tillet
is an art critic based in France.
You may reach
Antony Gormley’s exhibitions news at , Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Paris, Zentrum Paul Klee, Gallery Andersson Stockholm, White Cube Gallery Hong
Kong, Xavier Hufkens Gallery and Middelheim Museum to click below links.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2015/03/antony-gormley-second-body-at-galerie.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/11/antony-gormley-expansion-field-at.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/09/antony-gormley-meet-at-gallery.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/12/british-artist-antony-gormley.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/04/antony-gormley-states-conditions-at.html
CRITICAL MASS KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ, AUSTRIA, 2009
CRITICAL MASS KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ, AUSTRIA, 2009
BODY 2009 – 2011
BODY 2009 – 2011
ALLOTMENT 11 - KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ, AUSTRIA, 2009
FLARE II ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL LONDON 2010
XAVIER HUFKENS GALLERY 2013
XAVIER HUFKENS GALLERY 2013
PROJECTS OF FIELD
PROJECTS OF FIELD
ANTONY GORMLEY’ S STUDIO
ANTONY GORMLEY’ S STUDIO
ANTONY GORMLEY – BY ROD MENGHAM - VISIBLE ENTROPY
RELATED EXHIBITION FROM ATAXIA II,
Galerie Thaddeus Ropac Gallery Paris/Salzburg,
2009 Antony Gormley’s works in this exhibition are
clustered around the implications of the Greek word ‘ataxia’, which refers to
an absence of order. It is a term used most frequently to identify a medical
condition in which a loss of coordination is progressive and attributed to a
dysfunction of the nervous system. Of all the major bodily systems, the nervous
system is the most modern, the most recent to come to light, and the most
difficult to control; in many respects it remains mysterious, beyond even imaginative
reach.
From the beginning of his practice as a sculptor
Gormley has maintained a curiosity about the power and limitations of
scientific knowledge and a determination to synchronize and fuse innovation in
the field of sculpture with cutting-edge research in several scientific fields,
such as molecular biology, quantum mechanics and computer imaging. But the
distinction of his work resides in the imaginative excess of its configuration
of elements, its response to installation contexts, its juxtaposition of
sculpture and the environment. It is partly his dependence on the advances of
the scientific imagination that enables him to project his work beyond it.
Gormley’s earliest deployments of the human figure
preserved the barrier of the skin as the basis of its integrity, but has in the
last years begun a consideration of consideration of other subcutaneous forms
of organization that are less precisely symmetrical and even somewhat rhizomic.
But even in these works that go literally under the skin, that seem to run the
gamut of biological and chemical networks within the body, the resulting
complex structures have mostly been contained within postures that allude
unmistakeably to the architecture of the classical body.
Vitruvius is cited as the origin of conceptions of the
body that relate its structure to geometrical forms and the classical orders of
architecture. His treatise is the only surviving work of architectural theory
from antiquity and is therefore the earliest possible source for correlative
statements about the body and stereotypical form:
Therefore, since nature has designed the human body so
that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, it appears that
the ancients had good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the
different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general
scheme. However, while transmitting to us the proper arrangements for buildings
of all kinds, they were particularly careful to do so in the case of temples of
the gods, buildings in which merits and faults usually last forever[1].
Vitruvius not only attributes his principles of design
to ‘nature’, he also gives them a temporal scope reaching into the distant past
of the ‘ancients’ and the distant future of temples that must last forever.
Sacred buildings must transcend human history (even if, in the Rome of
Vitruvius, they are badly in need of repairs). The tradition that descends from
Vitruvius through Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci—whose sketch of the human body
contained within the forms of square and circle is perhaps the most widely
disseminated of all images of humanity—has established the power over our
imaginations of representations of the body that emphasise the desirability of
conforming to standard. The geometrical aspirations of the classical tradition
in sculpture have been secured by depictions of the body that illustrate the
mathematical ratios governing its equilibrium, its assimilation to the
fundamental imperatives of balance and symmetry. And yet this fixing of an
ideal form as the basis of the way the body is imagined has erected principles
of uniformity that do not exist outside of the classical tradition. There is no
uniformity of body type even within the species of homo sapiens, let alone
among related species whose extinction was guaranteed by the relationship
between the proportions of the human body and questions of power and
efficiency, not of aesthetics. Gormley’s ongoing research into our constantly
mutating understanding of the body has reached the point of both tactical and
strategic resistance to the fetishizing of order that has universalized a body
type produced by the chances of history.
Even the Vitruvian moment that generated what became
known ultimately as the universal body type was not the summation of a long
tradition of thought but the immediate response to specific historical
pressures. Recent scholarship has explored the extent of its debt to the
requirements of power and efficiency in eliciting ideological conformity to the
goals of Roman imperialism.
Vitruvian theory did not crystallize the relationship
between architecture and the body in general, but between architecture and the
specific body of the Emperor Augustus himself. In this reading, architecture
becomes the medium for rendering coherent the Roman presence throughout the
known world; a policy of building everywhere according to the same principles
is what persuades a variety of peoples with different cultures of the
orderliness and rationality of the changes wrought in their lives; the fact
that the uniformity imposed on their lives from without matches a uniformity
found or imagined within, in the proportions of the human body, reinforces the
seeming inevitability of their assimilation to the empire; the knowledge that
every building is intended to relate to the proportions of the emperor’s body
not only confirms the emperor’s strength and dignity but encloses his subjects
within the security of imperial space.[2]
This insertion of the Vitruvian body in its historical
moment offers a prime example of the body’s intimate relationship with
macrostructural forms of power, and of the ways in which the body has always
been used as a medium for ideological seduction. As Foucault has observed,
power succeeds less by brute force than by smoothing the path of acceptance, by
the ‘simple fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but
that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of
knowledge.’[3] It is precisely because art and architectonic form have
converted the systematic demands of power into pleasurable forms of knowledge
that they have acquired their own power to subvert those demands and produce
irregularities in the system. Gormley’s installations of groups of human
figures, both within and beyond the gallery space, have comprised a spectrum of
such irregularities.
They have disturbed the proportions of architectural
space, often through supplementation, through the displacement of individual
figures onto the roofs and walls of the building nominally the site of the
installation. In the EVENT HORIZON installations, the movement of the viewer
through the built environment becomes a passage through irregularity, as
sculptural figures emerge into view or disappear, creating an infinite variety
of forms of imbalance. Within these contexts, the repetition of the human form
is not experienced as the duplication of stereotypes but as a phantasmal
doubling, as individual figures advance and recede; uncanny presences and
absences, embodied shadows, hesitations between identity and difference.
Within the rooms of the Villa Kast in Salzburg,
Gormley’s new sculptures represent a subtle but far-reaching interference in
the force-field of neoclassical space, in a building that both renews the
relationship between classical design and imperial ambition and that
contradicts it, since by an historical accident it is also the site of a failed
assassination attempt on the Emperor Franz Josef I. Both imperial and
anti-imperial at once, this is a space that admits the historical nature of its
relationship to time, and which renders its relationship to classical
proportions uniquely vulnerable and circumscribed. With this building as their
conceptual plinth, Gormley’s sculptures are disproportioning presences, not
merely in the way they reorganize its spatial relations, but also in relation to
themselves and each other, since each figure captures a moment in the life of
the body, a gesture or displacement activity that is precisely an expression of
the human variable; the reverse of an ideal, the undoing of a stereotype.
Gestures and symptomatic movements are minutely expressive of non-standard
practice in the symbolic language of the body. Any given posture means
different things at different times in different places, despite the powerful
contra-indication manufactured by the classical tradition.
The first ethnographical study of gesture was in fact
an attempt to relate the bodily postures of ancient statuary, vase painting,
mosaics and frescoes to the language of gesture employed in the Neapolitan
streets of the early nineteenth century. But the real value of Andrea de
Jorio’s ‘La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano’ (1832) was
its comprehensive inventory of the meanings of a repertoire of gestures
employed by a single community in a specific place and time[4]. It provided compelling
evidence not of the stability and continuity of meaning through history, but of
its transformation; of the constant change in conventions of meaning that
affect the symbolic behaviour of the body as much as the forms of spoken and
written language.
Gormley’s figures are sculptural equivalents of this
capture of meaning in flight. Disengaging from the classical endorsement of art
that functions as a medium for permanence in a mutable world, he is now
focussing on the creation of static figures that represent the fluid and
unstable condition of all matter. The relationship between self-consciousness
and body-consciousness can no longer be projected in terms of memory, coherence
and regulation, but is forced to acknowledge a lack of coordination, an ataxia,
between inherited ideas of the self as dependent on composure and consolidation
and scientific observation of the perpetual transformation of the tissue to
which self is attached.
In one respect, these anomalous abstractions of
organic process resemble individual case-studies, reminding us perhaps of the
freeze-frame moments of instability recorded by Eadweard Muybridge, or the
taxonomy of expressions derived from the clinical records of Charcot. Muybridge
has been shown to have engineered the fluidity of movement disclosed in his
sequences of stills by editing individual images, while Charcot appears to have
elicited the postures required to render more persuasive his theory of
hysteria.[5] Both recruited an artistic medium in the name of scientific research,
subordinating the interests of both to personal obsession with a conceptual
scheme. But Gormley’s practice offers neither diagnosis nor illustration of a
pet theory, but a series of propositions about the unknown, about possible ways
of feeling in an environment where the communication between the body and the
world is no longer based on the classical premise that art and science are
commensurable in terms of mathematical proportions.
Among Gormley’s latest works there are corporeal
figures assembled from blocks of varying shapes and sizes that recall
architectural elements, and block-works of an architectural character that
correspond to the scale of the human body. They relate to one another unevenly
and approximately in a way that might have been intended as a response to
Robert Smithson’s call for an architecture that aligns planning with chance:
‘Architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. I propose a dialectics
of entropic change.’[6]
The idealizing classical project based around forms of
order that transcend history could only be maintained in a world of limitless
territorial expansion. We are now inhabiting a world of territorial
contraction, with more than half the global population living within an urban
grid. The body- consciousness of the classical world cannot survive the
abandonment of Vitruvian space, even though its twilit afterlife has shadowed
our passage through the towns and cities of twentieth century and early twenty
first century Europe. The massive disequilibrium of urban growth in the Second
and Third worlds is in commensurable with our civic imaginings and with the
individualizing scope of most First world art. Sculpture presents a unique
opportunity to place the viewer within zones of contact as well as within spaces
for reflection, to move around representations of the body animated by entropic
processes and contagious energies that affect, however inaccessibly, our own
body-consciousness. Gormley’s series of figures, encountered in sequence in
separate rooms, creates a narrative of variables that requires its viewers to
engage dialectically with their shifting sense patterns, tackling in the form
of a constant improvisation, and in the space of a kind of architectural
laboratory, a model of that entropic process in which our bodies, if not our
minds, are already caught up.
Bodies are of course ensembles of different materials
with more or less conductivity and subject to fluctuations of temperature.
Sculpture cannot provide a match for the body’s range of processes without
turning itself into illustration, advancing anatomical knowledge at the expense
of aesthetic experience. But in its use of material, a sculpture such as STAND
can magnify on its surface the principles of transformation that pervade the
body, the chemical reactions that produce rust functioning like bandages around
the Invisible Man, converting into visibility a truth about corporeal existence
that we could not otherwise access without translating it into the wrong terms,
exchanging knowledge that we sense for knowledge that we merely hear or read
about.
And the visual gymnastics of a work like FEELING
MATERIAL, although controlled by its erratic circuiting around an absent body,
is more eloquent about the thermally induced pressure that sent the lines of
this three dimensional drawing hurtling through space, than it is about the
contours of the body that launched it. The turbulence of the casting process
does not stop short of our awareness of these works. The process of annealment,
which reforms the structure of metal by heating and cooling it in order to give
the same material a different temper, parallels the conceptual work of
Gormley’s sculpture which reforms the received image of the body in a way that
prevents us from ever seeing it, or thinking about it, in quite the same way
again.
1. Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture,
translated by Morris Hickey Morgan (Oxford Univeristy Press, 1914) p.74
2. See Indra Kagis McEwan, Vitruvius: Writing the Body
of Architecture (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2003)
3. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: 1980) p.119
3. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: 1980) p.119
4. Andrea de Jorio, Gesture in Naples and in Classical
Antiquity, translated by Adam Kendon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991)
5. Georges Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria:
Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere, translated by
Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004)
6. Robert Smithson, ‘Entropy Made Visible’, in The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1996)
You may visit to see this essay's related exhibition Ataxia II at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac Gallery Paris Salzburg to click below link.
https://ropac.net/exhibition_work/ataxia-ii
DOMAIN FIELD THE GREAT HALL
WINCHESTER - ENGLAND 2004
DOMAIN FIELD THE GREAT HALL
WINCHESTER - ENGLAND 2004
APERTURE 2009 – 2012
FEELING MATERIAL KUNST – RAUM DES DEUTCHHEN
BUNDESTAGES BERLIN 2007
FEELING MATERIAL KUNST – RAUM DES DEUTCHHEN
BUNDESTAGES BERLIN 2007
MATRIX DRAWINGS 2005 – 2011
MATRIX DRAWINGS 2005 – 2011
2000.jpg)
QUANTUM CLOUD XXVI (SLEEPING FIGURE) 2000
BREATHING ROOM 2006 – 2012
BREATHING ROOM 2006 – 2012
BODIES AT REST II – 2000
NUIT BLANCHE PALAIS D’ IENA PARIS 2012
PARAFFIN 1997
EXPANSION WORKS 1990 – 1994
EARLY SINGLE LEAD BODYCASE WORKS 1983 -1988
TRANSPORT 2010
CLOUD CHAIN 2012
STANDING MATTER GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC AUSTRIA 2013
POLYHEDRA WORKS 2008 – 2012
ANILINE DYE 1996 – 2003
SUSPENDED AND GRAVITY WORKS 1984 – 2012
ANILINE DYE 1996 – 2003
THREE PART LEAD BODYCASE WORKS 1981 – 1984
TERRACOTTA AND LEAD WORKS 1983 – 1988
SUSPENDED AND GRAVITY WORKS 1984 – 2012
STILL STANDING STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM
ST. PETERSBURG 2011 – 2012
THREE PART LEAD BODYCASE WORKS 1981 – 1984
ANTONY GORMLEY
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures,
installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the
human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by
sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body
and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where
human being stands in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually
tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new
behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. Gormley's work has been widely
exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at Centro
Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio di Janeiro and Brasilia (2012);
Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
(2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007);
Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk,
Denmark (1989). He has also participated in major group shows such as the
Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986) and Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany (1987).
Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England),
Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western
Australia) and Exposure (Lelystad, The
Netherlands). Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the
South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and the Bernhard Heiliger Award for
Sculpture in 2007. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE).
He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an
Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and
Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003 and
a British Museum Trustee since 2007. Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.
http://www.antonygormley.com/biography
