by F. David Peat, PhD
Antony Gormley is an internationally known sculptor and winner of the
Turner prize. On many occasions over the past few years I have met and
talked with Anthony. This particular conversation took place in his
studio in south London on June 4, 1996.
We began discussing the way in which creative work begins within the
physical body, frequently in the form of muscular tensions. During the
gestation of the work this tensions have to be contained within the
body.
Antony Gormley:
I believe this. It's like giving birth. This thing is held and given
form though being registered in the body. There is an accommodation in
the body of the thing we have to do.
F. David Peat:
The body plays a big role in your work. When you are making a cast what
exactly do you do in preparation?
Gormley:
I try not to get too.... This morning we made the case for Angel. The
period of preparation was very important. I knew it had to be with the
chest fully inflated. I had to concentrate very, very hard on keeping
the vertical that goes into the ground, and on the idea of the
extension. The idea of the front of the body being extended. And for
the first time I used mirrors as a register. As a matter of fact I put
my back out!
Peat:
Part of this space is not external. It's an internal space that the
body occupies and we don't see from the outside.
Gormley:
It's the other side of appearance. I was reading a paper by Stephen
Levension, director of a school of anthropology. He wrote a paper on
Kant, turning up to a tribe of Navahos.
There are two theories about space - Newtonian absolute and
independent. Then Leibnitz who said it is relationship. Kant said both
may be true but its only experienced subjectively and our whole way of
thinking about left right, front etc is in relation to our bodies and
we project that onto space.
I started thinking that all of that can be inverted. Our bodies are
created by the potential of three dimensions. We become registers of an
idea about space that is only experienced by the body. The space I'm
interested in, and try to enter, is adimensional. It doesn't have this
quality of dimension and it makes no sense to say "in front, behind,
left, right" You loose all sense of those kinds of coordinates.
That enlightenment idea of understanding the principles by which life
is sustained has little to do with the space I'm interested in. Its a
kind of ...a darkness without fear. It may contain the possibility of
evil but in some curious way, because you have entered voluntarily, the
experience of it is about potential and power. Just as the spatial
coordinates we use to make sense of the outside have to be left behind
so too do moral coordinates.
I was once talking about the darkness of the body and someone said,
"oh, you mean evil." But no, I mean that darkness we carry with us
always that is neither evil or good but is the space of consciousness
within the body.
Peat:
Jung spoke about the shadow
Gormley:
For him its the other side of animus , the negative side of the
projected personality. I don't think I read the darkness of the body in
psychological terms either but in phenomenological terms. It is a place
that has no dimensions.
I was very, very lucky as a child to have these powerful experiences of
the space of the body because I was always sent off to go to sleep in
these light-filled rooms, with a balcony. I did not need to sleep but
would lie there and explore this space which was both incredibly
claustrophobic and tiny but then began to expand and expand.
Peat:
Hmm. So what of Anish Kapoor's voids?
Gormley:
When I saw them first I thought, "I don't need to work anymore". He's
made a phenomenal demonstration the thing I wanted everyone to intuit
without wanting to show it. I was as affected as everyone else. I
thought they were breathtaking - the unlimited within the limited. I
felt he has materialized the thing implicit in all my work.
Since then I realized that the thing I have to offer is this
reflexivity that is not about ....The problem about Anish's work and
James Turrel is that is becomes the demonstration of something like a
mystical experience produced by tricks of light or absence of light. I
would rather the hidden remained hidden. The work makes an absolute
division. It undermines the dominance of appearance, not puncturing it.
The degree to which my work is unsatisfactory as a representation is
the degree to which it is asking you to look for something in yourself
that can empathize with the inner space of the work which is not an
object. I.e. the degree as a representation because we look..., well,
"the body in Western Art". We look for beauty and a certain kind of
likeness. My work doesn't give likeness, or beauty in any understood
way. It really presents the body as a condition, not as a given
identity. It should become a catalyst.
I want the circulatory of involvement. Look at the work ask, "what is
it doing here"? "How is it in space?" "What is its dialogue with
space?" "Is there an interior/exterior tension? " Then reflectively you
ask yourself the same thing, "What is the relationship of my interior?"
The impossible thing I'm trying to do is accept that we live in the
world of the visible but make it unsatisfactory enough that behind the
visible is some other kind of potential that does not exist in the
sculpture but exists in you the viewer.
But maybe all this is a bit too airyfairy.
Peat:
With some sculpture you walk around and explore. Some push you into a
position in space. Your work does put me into a position
Gormley:
I would like it to do both. But all of the work is relatively axially.
The space so is confrontational, and then you circle and navigate and
then come back to one to one a kind of registration.
Peat:
Last time I visited your studio you had several pieces around the
walls. It was like an energy field. The internal space creates an
external space of relationship.
Gormley:
In the past I tried to deal with this by replacing the surface
structure of skin and hair etc. By a structure oriented to vertical and
horizontal axes, a sort of matrix. Implied into this is the body of the
planet.
Peat:
That response to mass, I feel it in the solar plexus. It is
kinesthetic.
Gormley:
The way in which the work affects you somatically is strongest when
things are off balance or standing on the wall. I.e. levers the room
out of its repose, gives the idea is everything moving and nothing is
fixed.
Peat:
Does this also subvert the natural reaction to look for likeness?
Gormley:
Anything that makes the viewer more conscious of his own weight,
movement in space, his center of gravity while in constant motion. You
are always falling when walking. That idea of human motion being
precarious I like the work top be still, silent and fixed but often
tipped very close to be off its center of gravity. You think twice
about taking for granted your own relationship to it. It is to
encourage a reflexivity that is not about looking.
Peat:
A clown with big boots is very disturbing.
Gormley:
That's a very, very good image. Its funny because its absurd. The
proportions are not as they should be. Yet in some curious way we all
do those things mentally - in dreams or states of yearning. That's what
made me make works like - the extended arms. It's a very, very common
experience.
I remember the last time I had serious dentistry. I was on my bike and
had the sensation I was rising until I was 20 ft. It was a clear
sensation. I was in an extended body. I've had that feeling in other
places as well. I wanted to give those natural sensations... the life
of the imagination.
The sensate information from the matrix of the body is not always in
sync with the .... for example, Leonardo's inscribed body is an
expression of Plantonic absolutes. But our experience is not like
that. Inside us there is always something else being born. We have
bodies that are very good, provisional habitations for the spirit. We
use them and through our time in the mind and the body we are making
room or creating another kind of being. Those experiences of extension
from the body are signs of the potentiality of that process.
Then there's that idea of who we are and what we look like. Your
physiognomy belongs to me more than to you because I'm looking. The
world of appearances is a shared communication. Where we derive energy
in order to take part in the shared world of appearances is from the
other side of them. I want to turn things round, or make you feel maybe
there is somewhere outside the outside, or there are areas of
experience that are independent of the functional side of the personal.
I don't know whether this darkness is really collective.
Part of me would like to believe in the Teravada Buddhist tradition -
that you can transmit love as a vibration which is independent of any
object. It radiates out. It is registered in that space of the darkness
of the body, rather than in the other world, the world of daily life,
external appearances. I think that makes me feel there is a kind of
collective experience of the inner space of the body. It's dangerous to
think that kind of universal...everyone has a different relationship
with the internal body.
Peat:
Do you see that realization in the art of other cultures
Gormley:
It's in the wonderful Kymer heads. All of those south east Asian
Buddhist sculptures have it. You find it occasionally in Western art.
Rodin's "Age of Bronze" has it. He had it for one moment then lost it.
He pushed. He was accused of casting it from life. He had a Belgian
soldier who posed for a year and a half and nearly went mad. He is
looking up and is sort of holding a spear but isn't. His eyes are
closed and it becomes this internal moment of realization. All the
attributes have been taken away that identified it with the 19th
allegorical school and it was replaced by an idea about internal space.
Peat:
The idea of history has gone.
Gormley:
That is important to me. It's why the darkness of the body is
important. It's completely non conditional. People in the West are
extremely frightened about this. It is only accessible through direct
physical relationship and it's not put there or contextualized. It
seems to many to be a denial of the whole positivistic and progressive
idea about Western civilization. There has been an enormous resistance
to my work because it is ahistorical.
In a way I'm accused of all things I'm not doing - i.e. looking for an
ideal body. But I say look again. It's far from ideal. It's the body I
am born with. Then they say, "why is it generic?" And I say, "that's a
function of making a case for something". It's inside that carries the
index of the particular, the outside is just the brick.
Peat:
Do you see other artists trying to do the same thing?
Gormley:
In terms of painting Bryce Modern does it beautifully. His idea about a
surface that beams out. You are invited to register yourself against
this field of color.
(Then off tape he refers to Rothko.
Side B
Gormley feels that Rothko is refined.)
Gormley:
....I'm here for a while. How can I make an account for the world?
Rothko is at the tail end of the sublime and is very refined. He feels
he's started from first principles and there is nothing to be refined
about. Trying to make distance to count for something.
I'm aware of history of art but the thing is to be as direct as
possible. I love Brancusi but it's the opposite, someone honing away,
an abstraction that comes from purification of form which ends up being
about reflected light and surfaces. I'm going the other way. If
Brancusi and Cezanne used light to supercede distance, my ambition is
to deal with darkness and the distance is...I don't know if I'm
interested in distance at all. I want people to feel they're inside the
work.
Peat:
Brancusi and Cezanne draw a great deal on vision. Their work demands
the eye but in your work these seems to be a great deal for a blind
person.
Gormley:
I think I'm part of a critique of the visual per set - that idea that
you may use the visual sense as a basis. But it has to be verified by
other forms that are to do with feeling - awareness of density. The
stimulus, the way you may feel the density comes from the vision and
you respond physically.
Peat:
I think there is also a synesthesia involved in the way I respond to
your work - to the lead or the iron. I have a certain taste in my mouth
when I look at lead, I can fell its malleability.
Gormley:
Yes, and when I use iron I'm aware it is an earth material. It has a
strong gravity. It has a relationship with the liquid core of the
earth. I think humans do this well, this recognition. We can't get away
from it. But I don't want to deny vision. It is a primary sense. But
what do you use it for? For part of a wider spectrum? I'd like to feel
that I'm setting up a landscape, not just to look at but to walk
through and become aware of the different fields.
Peat:
I was listening to a talk by the film director, Ken Russel, who has
recently been making radio plays. He says that says vision can be
shielded, that we can protect ourselves from shock, but that sound is
more immediate and direct. So maybe some of these sensations you are
talking about are internal and experienced in a more direct way while
vision remains external and projected.
Gormley:
Yes, I like that a lot. Sound being in some way something you are
immersed it. It need not have an identifiable source. The sound of
water in an underground cave, you are in that sound and the sound is in
you. I'd like to feel the sculpture does that. It's being within being.
It's a small and inert catalyst, a bit of matter used to catalyze your
sense of being immersed in light and matter. Through the work you may
become aware of the breath passing though the channels of your nose, or
the weight running though your knees. Aware of the world that you
inhabit and your aliveness within.
Its odd that I feel certain sculpture can do this so well, because its
the most difficult medium of all. It's so dumb, such a stumbling block
for most people. Its a bit of the material world that causes you to
look at it and where it is and how it is, in a way that also causes you
to look at yourself.
I don't know. I think art in many ways is being hijacked by a limited
idea. You see in those societies that don't want to be literate, they
transfer their shared experiences in other ways. It's perfectly natural
to paint the body and not so much decorate the shared world but make it
responsive to thought. In "Field" and in "Angel of the North" it's
about trying, in way, to liberate art from this very, very limited
world of the art gallery where things are so clinically and
specifically contexturalized.
[Note: Field consists of a very large number of small terracotta
figures that totally fill the room of a gallery to confront the viewer.
Gormley has made a number of versions of Field, in each case using
ordinary people from the local community to mould the clay figures.]
Peat:
Satish Kumar, from Schumacher College has a story about his mother
weaving a shawl for his sister. The sister found it so beautiful that
she told her mother it was too beautiful to wear and she would hang it
on the wall. The mother said, "when you put beautiful things on a wall,
you put ugly things on your body". Kumar feels that our society is
behaving the same way, the more we collect things in galleries the more
ugly our daily world becomes.
Gormley:
Is so weird. It's the trophy thing. Somehow having an animal's head on
the wall or a souvenir is more important than having gone, or having
seen an animal alive. Things should be quite natural.
Peat:
There is a similar issue with much Native American art. Iroquois grave
markers are supposed to remain outside until they rot and disappear.
This is a big problem for museums who want to conserve such objects.
Gormley:
I like the idea that I'm temporary borrowing, like I do with my body,
from the planet's matter/energy and chain of being. I borrow a few bits
of material that I try to shape. In the same way I try to shape my
life, or my life ties to shape me. Then what happens to the art does
not really matter. I really like the idea that Field belongs back in
the earth It is to be buried or to melt back into the earth. The iron
is strong but it is not protected from oxidation. I'd like one to be in
a tank of water that would disappear. It's a temporary record of a
moment in life. It may extent the image of that life but it has to go
back into the cycle of things.
Peat:
But there is also an element of accident involved. Some things are
projected by nature, like Cave paintings. Maybe you could put it under
the sea so coral grows round it.
Gormley:
And it becomes somebody else's raw material. I like that very much.
Analysis of Gormely's Angel of the North
Reproduced with permission from Dr. F David Peat. Dr. David Peat is a distinguished Canadian physicist and author. For more information, visit his website.
