The National CollegeArt and Society: Inside and Out
Antony Gormley: Method and Motivation
Sonia Leonard
'The best art for me always makes you turn your back on the work and face existence with the ability to see what you didn't before' (Antony Gormley in Schmidt, 1999, p. 37).
Antony Gormley's lead body casts brought him public acclaim in the 1980s and ambitious projects such as The Angel of the North have provided him with international recognition. Gormley, born in 1950, received the Turner Prize in 1994 and an OBE for services to sculpture in 1997.
Throughout his career as a sculptor, Antony Gormley's intention has been to create work with a meditative quality, to provide a catalyst for the viewers' contemplation. He has employed various methods in his quest to provide through his work a vehicle with which a meditative state of mind may be attained. Gormley's interest in meditation became focused whilst in India, where he travelled after studying art history and anthropology at Cambridge University. He practised Vipassana yoga, a Buddhist discipline fundamental to the understanding of the religion, which necessitates a stillness of body and mind to bring about a heightened consciousness: '[…] me and mine disintegrate and you are able to experience energy rather than objects: that is freedom' (Nesbitt, 1994, p. 45), explains Gormley. However, his function as a sculptor is not dependent on any maintenance of a particular state of mind. It is his hope, instead, that the sculptures prompt an instinctual reification in individuals, initially through visual communication.
On his return to England in the mid 1970s, Gormley enrolled at the London School of Art, moving to Goldsmiths School of Art in 1975, then post graduate work at the Slade School of Art, leaving in 1979 at the mature age of twenty nine. Its silence and inertia prompted his choice of sculpture as his artistic medium. 'Action can be confused with life. Much of human life is hidden. Sculpture, in stillness, can transmit what may not be seen'. (Gombrich, 2000, p. 118)
In the early 1980s, Antony Gormley found himself grouped by the media under the banner of 'New British Sculptors' with several of his contemporaries. They included Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Bill Woodrow and Anish Kapoor. They were of similar ages and all had attended art colleges in London. However, the work of these sculptors was not part of an artistic movement of the period and shared no obvious common themes. Anish Kapoor is perhaps the only artist amongst the group whose work has paralleled some of Gormley's themes and this may be due to their shared Eastern inspiration that promotes the exploration of the duality of mind and matter.
In 1981, Gormley started to make his signature lead figures based on casts of his own body. He thus introduced an index, thereby reducing the narrative content and allowing for a more immediate and directly intuitive response. From this starting point, Gormley could use his body to make the work from the inside. The process is lengthy and demanding and it can take up to six months to make one complete piece. The first step is the plaster cast. He starts with his naked body wrapped in industrial cling-film and experiments with various positions that will convey the spirit of the sculpture. He seeks a quiet internal pressure through muscular tension that will translate to the stillness of sculpture and capture that momentary essence of his 'being', rather than a theatrical pose illustrating human emotion directly.
Gormley requires only the vague form of the body rather than any detail, as he wishes to avoid autobiography and convey only an isomorphic type. Features are generally ignored unless required for a specific purpose, and the eyes, nose, mouth, ears and their corresponding senses become individually more significant by their absence. Hands and feet are smoothed over in the lead process and appear almost like mittens and socks, lending them an air of child-like vulnerability. If too specific in their physical characteristics, they would become mere copies of a specific human, invested with a personality that would interfere with their indexical role.
For over two decades, Gormley has employed lead in many of his figurative works, almost to the exclusion of all else in the 1980s. Lead's inherent characteristic of both reflecting and absorbing light lends it a strange, almost otherworldly, bluish-grey tinge. Its malleability eases the body-moulding process, while its use as a symbolic material provides artistic strength to Gormley's body casts. The role of lead as protection against radioactivity lends the material a sober and distancing quality and provides the figures with an air of self-sufficiency and independence. Yet, conversely, their nakedness contributes to a sense of defencelessness. The associative alchemical role of the material brings to mind ancient metamorphic processes, which tie in with Gormley's interest in the 'potential', a coming into being through a journey from matter to mind, exterior to interior.
Almost all of the figurative works are undoubtedly male, for the sole reason that the artist is a man and he is using his own body to make intensely direct and personal work. He has remarked on his wish for the work to transcend race, gender and language and to represent a global body. Antony Gormley is a tall, thin man, and he is aware that the life-size scale of his figures could be conceived of being an imposition of a supposed male order but he often counteracts this by making crouched or supine figures or by mounting the work on the gallery wall, perhaps at right angles, or suspended from the ceiling, thereby introducing an unusual dynamic into a gallery space by virtue of its placement. Some of these works such as Edge (1985), Pore (1988) and Earth Above Ground (1989) introduce the issue of space versus gravity into the gallery, which in turn becomes activated by the superhuman parameters of the sculptures and sets up an interesting visual disorientation, deliberately meant to unbalance the viewer and provoke curiosity.
It is the process of internalisation that interests Gormley: 'I am not so concerned with recognition of the functions of the body. I am much more interested in the space that the body is. What is that space that you inhabit when you close your eyes?'. (Gombrich, 2000, p. 135) His sculptures take us from outside the bodies, from our shared immediate environment and ask us to travel inwards, to follow the sensory passages into the darkness of their corporeal cases. We thus become aware of the composition of our bodies as both mind and matter. Gormley invites the viewer to mirror this process through an external visual assessment of each figure, which leads to an intuitive response. Hence, the physical can become the spiritual through the process of internalisation.
Learning to See 111 (1993) is a fine example of the process described. It is a lead figure, standing upright as if to attention, purposefully inert. It has closed eyes and raised, tense shoulders as if withholding breath, and appears to be totally focused inwards, self-contained. These closed eyes are the crux of the work, as the title suggests, and the viewer is led to ponder on the type of introspection that the figure is undertaking. If eyes are for seeing, then it follows that closed eyes are concentrated on the space within, the imagination. The title suggests an education in progress as though introspection needs a degree of practice or training and, standing in front of this figure, the viewer feels a curiosity to explore the space of their own interior worlds, their own consciousness. In this way, the figure can be seen to offer a role of teacher, or perhaps guru.
'For a while we are earth above ground, eyes on the horizon, brain in the sky, then the earth takes us back'. (Antony Gormley, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1993, p. 28). In the early 1980s, Gormley gently introduced terracotta into his sculpture, which often acted as a foil to the lead body casts nearby. The material provided Gormley with a metaphor for spiritual release. If the lead body cases represent man, a coalescence of mind and body, then the earth pieces represent the emancipation of the soul and the completion of the alchemical process. Nowhere is this sense of spirit more apparent in Antony Gormley's work than in his hugely successful and ambitious collaborative installation project Field (1991), which fulfilled his desire to include a sense of ritualistic creativity in a group production.
Field was made up of thirty-five thousand small terracotta figures, made by Gormley in collaboration with a family of brickmakers in Mexico. The gallery walls frame this receding carpet of tiny orange clay figures, ranging from three to ten inches high, and their masses obstruct entry. Had they been made of a different material, the effect might well have been threatening but the warm-coloured earth lends them an innocence. Their ill-defined shapes, moulded by many different hands, give them the appearance of maquettes. Their lack of arms, legs and mouths renders them immobile and mute and without defence.
It is their sheer number and their dark eye sockets that command our attention and provide both a visual feast and an emotional pull, an almost magnetic physiognomy that provokes an empathetic response in the viewer and in this way seduced audiences all over the world. The fact that their eyes are their only features emphasises their presence and provides the energy in the work by mirroring the viewer's gaze a thousand fold. As we loom over this little race as though we were gods, casting our shadows over hundreds of little figures at a time, our response is somehow to provide reassurance. Their inquisitive gazes, repeated en masse, ask questions of their immediate future and, in that moment, the viewer is prompted to share their concern and reflect on the fate of man.
Throughout his career, Antony Gormley has sought to 'inscribe the transitory experience of life in the permanency of durable material' (Gormley, Sligo, December 2000). Increasingly, his sculpture has become a reflection on modern culture, mirroring his own fear and anxieties as a man living in the Western world. In today's climate of economic growth, rapid urban expansion and media emphasis, society seems to be rushing to secure the 'upward mobility' promised. Our preoccupation with material goals has gone hand in hand with a spiritual decline in the West, and Gormley has tried to temper this loss with works that promote reflection and a reconnection with the spirit. His sense of responsibility as an artist is deeply felt and reflected in his lectures and in his writings.
I see Gormley's role as a holistic mediator, building spaces where man and his potential may meet and where the viewer may recover a sense of 'being' through direct experience with the work. Gormley's work offers a type of collective consciousness, simultaneously a focus and a reflection on modern day anxieties. It could be said that Gormley's role is that of a eudemonist, providing us with reflective works that promote an unexpected train of thought, a touchstone for philosophical and spiritual enlightenment through contemplation which may provide us with a richer sense of ourselves.
Bibliography
COOKE, Lynne, Antony Gormley, Salvatore Ala Gallery, New York, London: Coracle Press, 1984.
GOMBRICH, E.H., John Hutchinson, Lela Njatin, W.J.T. Mitchell, Antony Gormley, London: Phaidon Press, Revised Edition, 2000.
MONTREAL MUSEUM of Fine Arts, Field. Antony Gormley, Stuttgart: Oktagon, 1993.
NESBITT, Judith, Lewis Briggs, Declan McGonigal, Stephen Bann, Antony Gormley, Liverpool: Tate Gallery Publications, 1994.
PEAT, David, 'An Interview with Antony Gormley', http://www.fdavidpeat.com, 26th December 2000.
ROUSTAYI, Mina, 'An Interview with Antony Gormley', Arts Magazine, September 1987, pp. 21-25.
SCHMIDT, Hans-Werner (ed.), Gormley. Theweleit, Hamburg: Kerber, 1999.
TURNBULL, Clive, 'Antony Gormley: The Impossible Self ', The Green Book, Vol. III, No. 1, 1989, pp. 20-28.
Interview/Symposium
INTERVIEW with Anthony Gormley during the International Colloquium, 'Placing Art', Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, 7th December 2000.
