Critical Mass, 1995. Cast iron, life-size figures. View of installation.
Antony Gormley is one of Britain’s most important contemporary sculptors, and installations of his work have taken place all over the world. In the 1980s, he pioneered the concept of casting the body in a variety of poses to evoke universal ideas relating to the human condition—a subject that remains a major theme in his work today.
Gormley’s sculptures range from the diminutive to the monumental. In Field, 40,000 miniature terra-cotta figures face the viewer, and this myriad of watching eyes is a haunting and emotional experience. In contrast, Angel stands majestically near the A1 highway in Gateshead, North East England. Poised as though preparing for imminent flight, it is one of the largest human images made since ancient times.
This is a particularly significant time for Gormley. Planets, originally commissioned 15 years ago, has recently been unveiled at the British Library. Domain Field, an installation for Gateshead in May, will use body casts of 200 volunteers from the local community. Much of Gormley’s work fuses the primeval with the futuristic, and Inside Australia is an epic installation, in which 50 gaunt, blackened figures infiltrate an area of seven square kilometers like an alien invasion.
Ina Cole: In the 1990s, you produced a number of iconic works, which have become imprinted in society’s consciousness. Angel of the North and Field, in particular, spring to mind. How do pieces such as these inform your future projects?
Antony Gormley: It’s great to make works that have a popular impact, but it’s not the only criterion. Of course all artists want to be loved, or certainly seen, but I don’t think just because something is seen by many people that it’s any better than something that’s seen by very few. I think what one’s looking for is the depth of the contact over time. What I learned with Angel, which is viewed by about 90,000 people every day repeatedly passing at speed, is that every time it’s seen it has to communicate something: it can’t be a one-shot job, a slow bleed is important. Field also works in that way. It has an immediate visual impact, but then you need to quietly spend time getting to know your own reactions to it, and your understanding of what you’re looking at changes over time. So, these two works are benchmarks, two different ideas about extendibility in time.
IC: A new work of yours, Planets, has recently been installed at the British Library. Central to this commission are ideas of geology and time. Can you expand on this?
AG: Planets is an evocation of the relationship between thought and matter. That might be what sculpture is about, an attempt to leave on the face of an indifferent universe some trace of human presence—a sign of thought and feeling. I think that a standing stone is a very early example of someone taking a naturally made object and putting it in a place where it becomes a marker in time and space, against which human life can be registered. I’ve taken that idea and made it more polemical. On the surface of eight ancient rocks (one of them is Cambrian, so it’s about a thousand million years old, the rest are probably Devonian, about 350 million years old), which have themselves been formed by the action of several ice ages, I have carved the trace of the touch of eight different people, one to each rock. Each work is a testimony to a moment of lived time in which a living body and an individual rock were brought together.
Planets, 2002. Rocks, dimensions variable.
View of commission at the British Library.
In Planets, the bodies conform to the shape of the rock, as in Michelangelo’s Slaves, rather than the other way around. That’s very important; these are traces of people hanging on for dear life. It’s an indication of the mind’s dependency on the body and the body’s dependency on the planet, and I think that has particular poignancy at the British Library, a depository of the fruits of human mental activity over millennia. Below these rocks lie shelf upon shelf of books—a sedimentation of the mind stacked like strata—and these rocks remind readers of our vulnerability and dependency on the physical world. There is a sense of time present contained in time future, time past contained in time present, that Elliott syllogism that sculpture can peculiarly engage people in.
Sculpture is silent, still, and in its best examples it uses that quality to great effect in a world where everything is mobile. I think we need sculpture more now than at any other time, simply because it is a still moment in a moving world that asks the question, “What are you doing here?” You might also ask that question of the sculpture, but a good sculpture will always return the question to the viewer. The extraordinary thing about sculpture is the way it can communicate over vast periods of time, and I think art has always been an attempt to make a bridge with what lie