Antony Gormley
"Antony Gormley" by Emily Vey Duke, Winter 2007, p. 97
Antony Gormley is best known for cast-metal figurative sculptures whose forms are based on his own body, and this show didn’t stray too far from that territory. The eponymous piece, Blind Light, is a brightly lit glass room so thick with water vapour that while inside, one can’t see one’s feet.
This exhibition, the first major London show for the Turner Prize–winning sculptor, also included many of Gormley’s dark cast-metal pieces, but by the time I was through the gallery, they felt redundant. I recognize these works as a gesture with some art-historical significance, but I find them boring. They seemed like self-indulgent diagrams of the artist’s experimentation with materials.
Speaking of boring and self-indulgent, one of the walls of The Hayward (a large one) was dedicated to what Gormley unfortunately calls his Quads. The works comprise a series of snapshots taken over the course of Gormley’s career, reproduced in groups of four as “a representation, if you like, of the sites of experience out of which the works in this exhibition come.” The artist’s own view is that “Like my workbooks, they are both a source and notation.” I don’t like. It’s not that one doesn’t understand the impulse to include them, it’s just that it is an impulse that should have been curated away.
My favourite of Gormley’s works, Event Horizon, was presented outside the gallery. Once again, it involved multiple casts of his body (yoga-toned, the didactic materials pointed out), here poised on rooftops, sidewalks and bridges. They were stunning, grand and creepy.
I think that what Gormley is attempting in his work is the creation of an experience of the sublime—not that this is substantiated in the statements he makes about his work. He seems to prefer the broad, vague, almost religious language so familiar to us in art writing in the wake of modernism. He speaks about his work as if it has some sort of spiritual efficacy without ever clearly describing its goals.
Both Event Horizon and Blind Light trigger sensations associated with the sublime. I was awed and a little freaked out. But it was impossible for me to engage with the show without considering the money and labour involved in mounting it and preparing its gift-shop accoutrements—postcards, T-shirts, pencils, badges and notebooks—all in the service of fleeting feelings of the sublime or, more irritatingly, in the service of contemporary art discourse itself.
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