Antony Gormley on Sculpture

Antony Gormley, Mark Holborn

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773048
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Antony Gormley occupies an unusual position as a highly populist sculptor known chiefly for his Angel of the North (1998), a national landmark in the UK who is also widely regarded as one of the most intellectually challenging artists working internationally. He is grounded in archaeology and anthropology, and looks to Asian and Buddhist traditions as much as to Western sculptural history, which he believes reached a punctuation point with Rodin. This is the first book to focus on Gormley's thoughts on sculpture, positioning his career and artistic philosophy in relation to its history.

The book is structured thematically over four chapters: the first explores Gormley's thoughts on the body, time and space in relation to major works including European Field (1993) and 'Still Standing' (2011), Gormley's rehang of the classical rooms at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The second chapter, 'Sculptors', was first delivered as a series of five lectures for the BBC; in each, Gormley discusses a sculpture he considers to be of huge creative importance: Epstein's The Rock Drill (191315), Brancusi's The Endless Column (193538), Giacometti's La Place (194849), Joseph Beuys's Plight (1985) and Richard Serra's The Matter of Time (2005). In the third chapter, Gormley outlines the influence of Buddhist and Jain sculpture on his work and ideas, and the fourth showcases the artist's most recent sculptures.

1

BODY SPACE AND BODY TIME:
LIVING IN SCULPTURE

In 1979 I went back to the place where Walter De Maria made his parallel chalk line drawings in Arizona. The work of De Maria, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, and their place in American art, was critical for me, as was the engagement of body with material and place, irrespective of image-making. Here, I simply threw a hand-sized stone as far as I could, cleared all the stones within that radius, made a pile that I stood on, and then I threw them out again.

You can see from the photographs that I made a huge difference to the topography! You can just see, in the middle of this picture, where the pile was. There’s a kind of absent body there. All of these stones are radiating outwards only as far as I was able to throw. This is the action of a living, willing, feeling body on other bodies, which has made a displacement in space. I offer it to you as an image but for me it was an experience. The question of how the action of a human body, potentially, gives affordance to other bodies interests me. What kind of space mentally, physically, imaginatively does it transmit to others?

Re-arranged Desert, 1979
Temporary installation
Arizona, USA

This is called Replaced Rock (1979). It was part of my degree show on leaving art school. The rock is 1.2 metres high and buried to half its height by a negative carving in the floor. Every 20 millimetres I registered this horizontal on the rock itself. I hoped that through the agency of this rupture, this activation of the floor and its emphasis on the horizontal, that we might feel our lives and our being in time.

Replaced Rock, 1979
Sarsen stone, 122 cm (48 in) height, embedded in floor 61 cm (24 in)

We have to test our environment, both built and elemental. We are the only animals that choose to live in an environment that is entirely articulated through Euclidean geometry, but at what cost?

This is Learning to Think (1991), sited in an old prison in South Carolina. The idea of breaking or rupturing the assumption about the permanence, or indeed the use value, of the architectural conditions in which we live, is a function of sculpture. Sculpture can no longer simply reinforce the known, it has to be a bridge to the unknown. It can no longer give us a sense of identity; by celebrating the past it has to be open to possible futures. You could say this is bilateral work. On one hand it recalls the lynchings that were so much a part of the life of this prison and the history of early America, but it is also about the potential of shared imagination: the realm of the mind that is free of the condition of a body in space. We exist in space, but space also exists in us.

Learning to Think, 1991
Lead, fibreglass and air (total of 5 ‘bodyforms’), 173 × 56 × 31 cm (68 × 22 × 12⅛ in), each Installation view, Old Jail, Charleston, USA

This is an early work, Full Bowl (1977–78). It sits in your hand. The space that is inside the tiny little bowl at the centre of the work has a resonance with the space that surrounds the bowl; it is a continuum. The work is an examination of the arbitrary nature of skins and edges. If art has been so obsessed with the way light falls on objects and rendering a cogent approximation of the way that this is conveyed to the retina (and lastly celebrated in Impressionism), then is there a way that art can go behind the skin of things? This examination of form and content, of regarding or managing to make an ‘objective correlative’ account of the indeterminacy of edges, of limits, is very important to me throughout the work. I think we limit ourselves by being obsessed by the way things look.

Full Bowl 1977–78
Lead, 6 × 17 × 17 cm (2¼ × 6¾ × 6¾ in)

This three-piece work is Land, Sea and Air II (1982). It is an early attempt to try to make this memory of a real body connect, not to the white cube of a gallery or the context of an exhibition, but to the elemental world: to land, to sea, to air, and to link each of those elements with a physical posture and to link that physical posture to a perception. The work Land is a carapace pierced with holes at the ears, listening to the ground. Sea is the first work I made that opens the possibility of a sculpture as a body relating to the horizon. It has its eyes open, looking out to sea. Air is an empty plaster mould covered with lead, a body case with nostrils open. Lead is a wonderful insulator – against liquid or sound leakage, against radioactivity. Each of these works shares a prominent repeated horizontal every 7½ inches: there is a horizontal line (think of Replaced Rock), a repeated contour line that unites each of these pieces in a common spatial matrix. These two ideas – not taking the skin of things as a limit, and the power of immersing a culturally made object in the elements – I have put to work again and again.

Land, Sea and Air II, 1982
Lead, fibreglass, Land (crouching): 45 × 103 × 50 cm (17¾ × 40½ × 19¾ in)

Land, Sea and Air II, 1982
Lead, fibreglass, Sea (standing): 191 × 50 × 32 cm (75¼ × 19¾ × 12½ in)

Land, Sea and Air II, 1982
Lead, fibreglass, Air (kneeling): 118 × 69 × 52 cm (46½ × 27¼ × 20½ in)

This is Lorraine Williams, a fifty-five-year-old Wangatha woman from Menzies in Western Australia, scanned by a digital body scanner and her body then reduced laterally by 66.66 per cent recurring. The breasts have been re-attached to the body by a bridge and, equally, the arms to the torso, but otherwise everything is the result of analytic process. Here is Lorraine in the scanner with her feet more or less parallel. I asked all the participants to do this so that they could concentrate on something and allow the set of their physical bodies to be transferred into a digital record. A physical rendering of the work was then placed in the middle of a chemical landscape, Lake Ballard in Western Australia, in 2003. This is another horizontal field, another abstract body field.

Inside Australia, 2003
Digital render

Interestingly, soon after placing the sculpture of Lorraine within this site she was decorated with red ochre from the lake; a clear sign of some kind of energy field around her. She was just one of fifty-one sculptures placed on this lake and in a sea of salt. When I talk about a relational field and a translation from the representational to the reflexive, I am talking about the connectivity principle that allows your own trajectory to make connections between these inert masses. With this work, for the first time, this was illustrated: the participation of the viewer was registered by the traces left on this receptive surface.

I want to share with you the experience of being on the lake in a temperature of 42 degrees Celsius with zero degrees humidity. You have to drink 2 litres of water an hour. You move across a surface as taut as a drum, crunching through the crystallized sodium into the red mud. Because of its absolute flatness and whiteness this place allows you to be proprioceptive, to be aware of your own place in space and in time. It is your memory of the last sculpture you saw that makes the connection with the next as you make the 200 or so metre journey between them. At the same time you contribute to the work by leaving this trace: an emergent drawing that makes a matrix of connections across the site. These sculptures are so far apart you can hardly see them. They hang like hairs on the horizon, and as you walk towards them they realize themselves to you.

Inside Australia, 2003
Cast alloy of iron, molybdenum, iridium, vanadium and titanium
51 elements based on 51 inhabitants of Menzies, Western Australia, installed in Lake Ballard

I like to exploit the uncertainty principle at the very edge of perception. The sculptures hover like a mirage on the horizon. Here this concentrated material memory of a particular human body in space becomes a fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Other titles of Interest
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Body Space and Body Time: Living in Sculpture
• Chapter 2: Sculptors
• Chapter 3: Mindfulness
• Chapter 4: Expansion
• Biography
• Text Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Picture Credits
• Index
• Copyright