Interview: Anthony Gormley

As his beguiling new work comes to Beijing, Anthony Gormley tells Stacey Duff about Chinese culture, the human body and quantum physics.

Antony Gormley’s interest in China dates back to an era of paisley, rebellion and free love – the incomparable late 1960s.

‘Being good hippies,’ he says, ‘we all used The Book of Changes. I read the Golden Flower and Confucian texts, and the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao.’ Did red revolution and rock ’n’ roll ever actually go hand in hand, the way it is portrayed in, say, Bertolucci’s The Dreamers?

The Little Red Book, at least, says Gormley, was par for the course. ‘Yeah, it was very big. We all had it at university in Cambridge in 1968. When I went up, it was one of the things that we had to get.’ Today Gormley no longer owns a copy. ‘I haven’t got very much from those days. I lost my record collection, which was an absolute disaster.’

Whether or not Gormley ever wore tie-dye, he was not about to fall for certain bourgeois traps such as, heaven forbid, a career. After university, he decided to sell everything and head for Asia, where he lived for three years.

‘I just decided that it was the right thing to do,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to get a job. Getting jobs wasn’t really what you did in those days.’

In the process, he discovered ‘the extraordinary breadth’ of Chinese culture: ‘We’ve just recovered austenitic iron casting which the Chinese were doing in 800 BC,’ he says. ‘I mean, that’s just unbelievable.’

But career-focused or not, the London-born Gormley has become one of the UK’s finest artists since getting his break in 1981 when Nicholas Serota, now the director of London’s famous Tate gallery, gave him a show at the Whitechapel gallery.

He went on to win the infamous Turner Prize in 1994, and created a string of iconic works that have entered the British consciousness, including 1995’s ‘Angel of the North’, a 20-metre tall steel angel near Newcastle, and ‘Another Place’, an installationof 100 life-sized cast iron figures staring out to sea on Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool.

His last piece before Beijing was his work on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, a human sculpture which saw 2,400 ordinary people stand on the famous plinth for an hour each for 100 days. As with much of Gormley’s work, it became a phenomenon.

His main piece here at Galleria Continua, ‘Another Singularity’, follows the artist’s preoccupation with the human body, often his own. The work is a hollow steel sculpture based on the dimensions of his body, but five times its size and suspended in the air by bungee cords.

The show marks his first effort in China since ‘Asian Fields’ in 2003 and 2004, which featured 180,000 small clay figurines crafted from 100 tonnes of red clay by 350 Chinese villagers. His sculptures are modelled on his own shape, what he calls a ‘lived moment’.

‘I’m just treating my own body as a test site,’ he says. ‘I’m a guinea pig in this situation. I use my own body because I can ask myself to do things that I can’t ask others to do – like stand for several hours covered in plaster.’

To fully understand his latest work, one might do well to have a degree from Oxbridge. Or spend the afternoon re-reading A Brief History of Time. Explaining the work, Gormley uses terms from quantum physics and cosmology.

He speaks of ‘background radiation’, ‘black holes’, Albert Einstein and Roger Penrose. Gormley – the perpetual guineapig – has essentially placed himself in this work in an ‘a-dimensional’ universe that may either exist in our consciousness or might have been possible at the moment of the Big Bang.

The work plays with the notion that – if the universe expands and contracts perpetually – the eons that transpire between each Big Bang is ‘another singularity’. Deep stuff, indeed. Then again, Gormley causes you to face things that seem ridiculously abstruse.

‘I don’t want to be subject to wishful thinking,’ he says. That’s a sane enough wish. But when he follows that with, ‘at the same time, I am very aware that death might be the biggest adventure,’ all this interviewer could respond with is: ‘It’s certainly no trip to the supermarket.’

Looking up at the gigantic hollow man, suspended by bungee cords, you realise the extraordinary breadth of Gormley’s mind, even if you’re never quite sure what it’s anchored to. The sculpture is beautiful and daunting. The artist, it seems, has suspended himself in a crystal-clear moment of cosmic consciousness.

‘Better him than me,’ I think, scuttling out the door, about as clear of my own position in the universe as an amoeba with a hangover.

Few travellers come to China to meditate on cosmic radiation but Antony Gormley is one of those travellers. See it if you dare.

Another Singularity shows at Galleria Continua until February 28.