Welcome to Antony Gormley’s secret laboratory, a vast studio in the badlands
beyond King’s Cross, London. Behind steel security gates, Britain’s
favourite sculptor has become bored casting his own body and is plotting to
experiment with your body and mind instead. This is either an exercise in
democracy or irony. You be the judge.
Gormley’s dastardly plans for The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square are now
well known, to the extent of becoming a plot line in The Archers on
Radio 4. Starting on July 6, Gormley hopes to create an astonishing living
monument for 100 days and nights, allowing a mixed bag of Britons to
perform, or merely exist, for 60 minutes on the 7m-high plinth. “One Person.
One Hour. One & Other” goes the blurb.
The 2,400 artists, or “Plinthers”, in One & Other are
drawn by computer lottery from more than 14,000 applicants, according to the
population of each region. On a platform built to support the statues of
kings and generals, plebeians will recite poetry, eat cake, dance naked,
berate the crowd, remain perfectly still, wear unfortunate costumes and
possibly just take a kip, knowing that there is a safety net below. All will
be filmed live on a Sky webcam.
You may consider this a cheery circus sideshow, a fun departure for the
creator of The Angel of the North, but you would be quite wrong, as
Gormley explains: “The subject is the celebration of the uniqueness of every
individual. That they have accepted to be part of this living monument means
they are memorialising the past to affect the future, in the same way any
traditional statue does.” The record of each Plinther’s moment in the four
spotlights and his or her diary will remain on the website.
Like some obsessive doctor ministering to his project, Gormley is dressed all
in white but for his work boots. He appears in the pure white rooms above
his sculpture workshops, which clank with great machines and welding sparks
like an underworld Metropolis. Gormley takes two white chairs on to
the polished concrete terrace overlooking the concrete yard, and notes
resignedly that he had the plinth idea about six years ago — when Britain’s
Got Talent was but a twinkle in Simon Cowell’s chequebook. Gormley is
anxious to make clear the differences between the two masterworks.
“There is a profound distinction from the exploitation of individuals in Britain’s
Got Talent. With the plinth there is no judgment involved, it is not
competitive. It’s a random choice, arbitrary, a slice through life and
time.” On the other hand, Gormley expects serious commitment. When he says
an hour, he means it. “An hour is a long, long time,” he says, eyes
twinkling behind rimless glasses. “During that time what you think you are,
and what you actually are, may unpeel.” Susan Boyle would second that.
An adapted forklift truck platform will take the Plinthers up — and then
disappear. “It’s a real commitment to stay on the plinth. There’s no good
saying you’re sick after five minutes and want to come down. They’re a
living monument, so they need to make a sacrifice.” Gormley is getting into
his stride now, full of enthusiasm. “Plus there are the elements! Wind,
rain, heat, cold. People’s exposure will be very real. Public exposure in
every sense.”
He thinks that the television producers, and the punters, will not necessarily
get what they expected from his experiment. “Performers are obsessed with
what they’re going to do, but from a long way below they will look very
small and isolated figures, and I’m not sure if they realise that. They will
be isolated not just by height and distance, but by the net fence around the
plinth.” This mirrors the anti-suicide netting beneath the gantries of
Victorian prisons — and keeps Health and Safety happy. “The net exacerbates
the removal of common ground.” The Plinthers will be high, bright and wired
in both senses. “All that’s what I’m most interested in.” It’s just a touch
Svengali.
As with any Gormley project there is intense attention to detail, although the
plinth event will be produced daily by Artichoke, the company that brought
the spectacular Sultan’s Elephant through the streets of
London. As we talk, Gormley is attending to details closer to home by
calling Rupert — one of 17 staff — on his BlackBerry, telling him to buy a
wire brush. Rain has caused drip marks on a rusting metal chestnut the size
of a small car that sits in the studio compound. Rupert, when he returns,
must rub the drips off. “I like this particular patina,” Gormley says,
pointing to a rusty patch that looks to the untrained eye like all the rest.
Gormley, a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, where he studied
anthropology, archaeology and history of art, as well as Goldsmiths, Central
and Slade Schools of Art, likes intellectual justification of his every
move. He is worried that “the existential side of the plinth project will be
overtaken by the spectacle”.
The Other of the title, in the Sartrean philosophical sense, refers to the
fact that “we are Other to others; there is the issue of accepting your own
difference in a new idea of belonging that has nothing to do with ethnicity
and in which we share resources. We should be able to travel freely. It’s
unrealistic to prevent that in this day when everything is mobile. You can’t
go believing in the theatre and make-believe of national politics when we
are defined by the global economy.” He wants to reflect the UK “in all its
diversity”, though who knows how a plinth lecture from the BNP would go down
with the arty crowd.
Of course, the Other business could be a huge in-joke, hands-off puppetry on
those trapped on the plinth. You can be sure Gormley knows that the most
famous line from Sartre’s No Exit is “Hell is other people”.
Yet while the 59-year-old Gormley plays with big themes, the literal body of
his work brings out a visceral, positive response in most people. By placing
sculpture in the landscape rather than galleries he has bypassed the art
world for the real one, a popularity he finds slightly embarrassing. The 33
million motorists who have driven beneath The Angel of the North on
the A1, the families and lone walkers passing the 100 metal men installed
over miles of Crosby Beach in Merseyside, and tourists in Trafalgar Square
this summer — all experience a random, unexpected hit of art.
Gormley has a low opinion of most public sculpture: municipal monstrosities on
roundabouts and the bronze statue of a couple at St Pancras station, which
he describes as “gunge”.
His critics complain of the narcissistic “same old song” as Gormley endlessly
reproduces himself as a statue of Everyman (in fact on the reproduction
front the artist has three children with his wife, Vicken, a painter in
North London). Surrounded by the figures in the studio, it’s hard not to be
distracted by his amply proportioned bronze bits (he has in the past been
accused of exaggerating the size of his genitals). The waspish critic Brian
Sewell disdains Gormley for the androgynous anonymity of his figures, his
“vulgarity”, and adds that the sculptor “has absolutely no artistic merit”.
This is belied by Gormley’s worldwide exhibitions and sales, engineered by
the dealer Jay Jopling.
The iron men, the “Gorms” as they are nicknamed, are perhaps on their last
legs, as Gormley’s fascination moves on to fields and energy around the body
and mind. But a final series of statues will be erected this summer along
the Water of Leith, and on the walls of the studio are a dozen photographs
of mountains, with little figures photoshopped on to rocky outcrops. This is
the Alberg range in Austria, which will be conquered by 100 scattered
statues “all at exactly 2,039m high”. I fail to ask “why
2,039m?” because I’m imagining Alpine hikers in lederhosen and walking boots
singing “I love to go a-wandering . . .” and then screaming as they come
across a monster in the mist, a man darkly looming. It’s a Gorm!
If you went to Gormley’s solo exhibition at the Hayward two summers ago, you
had the same disorienting sensation as you staggered around a fog-filled
room, unable to see your hand in front of your face, crashing into other
visitors to Blind Light.
Increasingly, Gormley is interested in this human involvement in his “fields”,
where “the body of the viewer is in some way implicated within the work in
the relation to space and time”. As he says this, you realise there is also
a powerful force about Gormley himself, perhaps a force field. His intensity
is such that he invades everyone else’s space with his 6ft 4in frame. He is
— not unpleasantly — in your face, making it impossible to get a word in
edgeways.
People are mesmerised by this energy, from the folk of St Helen’s on
Merseyside who made Field for the British Isles, a roomful of 40,000
little terracotta Gormley figures in 1994, to those in Gateshead who had
their bodies cast in metal for Domain Field. Gormley describes this
as a “rite of passage”, though others have more negative terms for being
naked, covered in clingfilm, Vaseline and plaster, with two straws up your
nose.
Earlier this year Gormley set up a giant white dome tent in Helsinki, left a
tonne of wet clay in the middle, and sent visitors in to sculpt whatever
they wanted on the floor. Again, his attention to detail took this from
being a childlike Play-Doh moment to something grander. The tent was kept
tropically hot in the Finnish winter, and visitors had to agree to sculpt
for four hours, with their mobile phones off. The results were endless
concentric circles, huge Nordic penises and lumpen manikins. Gormley seems
delighted with all this, as he points to the photos on the wall.
He wanders downstairs, where young men in engine oil-stained T-shirts engage
in heavy metalwork, and others sit on Macs, working out the specific tension
on 800 silver silk wires, polyhedral connectors and other elements in Another
Singularity, a reference to the Big Bang. The installation (which
appears to me to be a 12ft-long pylon-man suspended in a crazy web) will go
into a traditional house in Japan. All the floors and walls have been
removed, leaving the wire man “in a domestic enclosure of a house made of
hair, mud and rice straw”, Gormley says. “But where’s the head?” he puzzles,
looking at the mock-up.
“Ah, we can’t get the head together,” says his assistant. “Maybe by tomorrow
morning.” But Gormley is off to send a text message to Moscow.
No corner of the planet goes Gorm-less now. He scrolls through this summer on
his BlackBerry: four floors of installations in a gallery in Bregenz,
Austria, including the rusty giant horsechestnut that hovers above the
floor, the grim concrete bulk of Allotment and, as the master himself
puts it, “12km of wire in a scribble”. Meanwhile, there’s an opening in
Mexico, works in China and Alaska, a 25m crouching figure in the
Netherlands, and more at The Garage, Dasha Zhukova’s Roman
Abramovich-financed centre in Moscow. From the secret HQ behind King’s
Cross, world domination is within Gormley’s grasp.
The only gap is this year’s Venice Biennale, you’ll be glad to hear, for
several reasons. With Gormley’s increasingly strange tastes for people as
artistic playground, he considered submitting Lightning Room and Rain
Room to the selection committee. Rain Room would do what it says
on the tin — leave everyone damp. But Lightning Room was more
in the vein of Dr Evil. “The idea was to electrify the floor and the ceiling
with 30,000 volts, so the people walking in would themselves become
conductors,” says Gormley, wistfully.
“What about deaths and heart attacks?” I ask.
“Oh, it’s fine if the ampage is low,” one of the technical assistants
explains.
Gormley has greater hopes for the little people on his big plinth. He grins.
“But it could all end in bathos . . .”
Antony Gormley's One & Other Fourth Plinth project is
commissioned by the Mayor of London and produced in partnership with Sky
Arts. Sky Arts will go live from the plinth on July 6 at 8.30am,
broadcasting a 24- hour feed on www.oneandother.co.uk.
A weekly programme will also go out on Fridays at 7pm from July 10 on Sky
Arts 1 and Sky Arts 1 HD.
For full details go to www.oneandother.co.uk
