Antony Gormley The Witness
By Dominic Eichler
British sculptor Antony Gormley has spent five decades exploring the human form. From the first plaster work, Sleeping Place (1974), inspired by people observed sheltering under cloth in the streets of India, to the lead and iron casts taken from his own body, to his most recent multifarious abstract constructions, his sculpture returns repeatedly to the question of what it means to be present. An expansive thinker, Gormley was inspired equally by his early archaeology and anthropology studies, but also by Vipassana meditation. Ideas of impermanence, balance, and attention quietly underpin a practice that has moved from the studio to large-scale public works across the globe, such as his epic landmark Angel of the North (1998). Our discussion about embodiment and environment felt less like an interview and more like being invited to enter one of his drawings or sculptural fields — a space in which thought and sensation are held in careful tension.
DOMINIC EICHLER How have you kept your faith in art?
ANTONY GORMLEY I keep asking myself: what is sculpture good for? I keep asking because there is no single answer, and it is constantly changing. In our time, art has been commodified and institutionalised. We live in a global culture in which everything is instantly consumed and then rendered obsolete: visualised, made, shared, and forgotten. But I hope art is still a place of refuge and resistance against becoming instant consumers of our own thinking and feeling. For a work of art to be situated and have some claim on truth, it must be alive to this state of affairs. It is important to distinguish what I do from a merely reactive position in relation to the political condition of the human world. I hope my work is an act of grounding – of saying something about what I can really know: being. Boldly put, life is the thing to which one has to attend with as much love and focus as possible, despite all the noise, confusion and distraction that surrounds us.
DE Your upcoming solo exhibition “Geestgrond” at KMSKA, Antwerp, takes its title from the evocative Flemish word for the fertile sandy soil that the last Ice Age left in its wake. I understand that the exhibition will address our position in the natural world.
AG It would be good if we felt more like plants – if we recognised the distributed intelligence of plants as a model of being that might help us to be less cause-and-effect obsessed, less goal-driven. The exhibition’s curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, sees her own evolution in art as linked to the story of the Italian Arte Povera movement and artists such as Giuseppe Penone. We share a mutual interest in how, in the wake of the puritanism of American minimalism, to work again with the potential of sculpture and organic materials and structures. The show will include, for example, the sculpture Attend (2025), a human space in space described as an organic matrix yet built on an orthogonal principle – a filigree work that has very little to do with anatomy or the relationship between bone, muscle and skin, and much more to do with a rooting system. What I am proposing is a way of being that does not privilege the cranium over the rest. I am constantly trying to look at the human animal, but not solely on our own animal terms. Even inanimate substances, such as calcium carbonate, express intelligence in their self-organisation. The whole body is a sensing place, a sensing instrument. Let us nourish the idea that the human project is still part of a larger creative project. All life is intelligent, and that intelligence is distributed through an endless system. The whole of the biosphere is an interlinked, entangled lifeform, and we have been fooled into thinking of technology as the sole carrier of progress. Genuine progress might lie in accepting our place within this distributed matrix of thoughtful being.
