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  • Antony Gormley

  • Until Aug 19 2007
    • New
  • This event has finished
  • The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London, SE1 8XZ
  • The Hayward

  • By Ossian Ward

    Posted: Mon May 21 2007

  • There is a charming series of children’s books called ‘Where’s Wally?’ in which the aim is to spot the tall, gangly-framed cartoon fellow, smiling behind round glasses amid a crowd of people on a beach, at a fairground or in a bustling museum. Many passers-by and commuters on Waterloo Bridge have already been playing ‘Where’s Gormley?’ by picking out some of the 31 body-casts of Antony Gormley dotted around the busy skyline surrounding the Southbank Centre that form his newest public piece ‘Event Horizon’, but the game of hide-and-seek continues apace inside the artist’s most significant London show to-date.

    Immediately above the Hayward’s entrance is the first of many more metallic figures cast in their master’s image, this one lying face-first on a vertical wall like a suckerfish cleaning the inside of his tank. Another, on the ramp, is a mummified Gormley, wrapped in lead but abandoned in the corner like a lower-caste Tutankhamen. At the bottom of the stairs is a carefully hidden, computer-pixellated Gormley; in the stairwell three tortured Guantanamo Gormleys are strung up by their legs. There he is again, this time in negative, the void left by the artist crouching inside a box – a ‘Gormley perdu’ as he has jokingly referred to this hollowing-out technique that mimics the traditional sculptural ‘lost-wax’ process. Elsewhere you have to strain your eyes to divest the man’s image from an array of converging wires, DNA helices and spiralling coils in his room of ‘Matrices and Expansions’.

    Even when you can’t see him, he is still there (which is arguable of all truly modern artists once self-referentiality crept into paintings by the likes of Goya and Manet), especially in an unfamiliar and entirely new work that greets you in the first gallery, ‘Space Station’. What appears to be an enormous carbuncle of perforated steel boxes is actually  a giant, hunched Gormley in foetal crouch. The small windows in the massive object make it shimmer interestingly at the periphery of your vision. It only becomes monumental when viewed up close, becoming a tilting, shifting structure of mechanised tower blocks straight out of Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ – an image of our industrial and urban world turned upside down and inside out.

    Then comes the chance to leave Gormley’s body and step into another state of being, as the centrepiece of the exhibition, ‘Blind Light’, blankets you in a cloud of vapour. The glass-walled work is on the one hand very British, in that it fluctuates like the weather (depending on the temperature of the gallery the humidifiers kick out more or less fine spray) and can be socially uncomfortable when you are suddenly thrust into close proximity with another person appearing unexpectedly from the mist. It is also very unlike Gormley. His body is nowhere to be seen, while the physical effects of snow blindness, dampening lungs and treading through puddled water brings the experience closer to the kind of atmospheric ‘event’ art that is becoming increasingly popular nowadays, than to any traditional notions of sculpture, figurative or otherwise. ‘This must be what heaven is like’, said one disembodied voice, ‘it was like a labyrinth without walls’ remarked another. I also heard it referred to as the ‘fog box’. It really is a wonderful piece.

    Apart from this recent toying with the environment, Gormley has long been addressing our corporeal relationship to architecture, summed up here in his ‘Allotment II’ of 1996. Men, women and children from Mälmo in Sweden were measured up and then simplified down to blank concrete shells with cuboid heads and square orifices for breathing, hearing and peeing. They are recognisable only by their height and girth. Viewed in this crowded room these spooky sentinels recall Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Le Corbusier’s Modular man and Tony Smith’s six-foot black steel box ‘DIE’ from 1962, among other near-perfect distillations of human form.

    Gormley’s vision of our place within the built environment is, however, unremittingly grim. All the harsh, grey, robotic avatars of ‘Event Horizon’ look despondent and hunched, as if being layered and cast in plaster repeatedly was a gruelling performance for Gormley himself. He suffers for his art and to some extent so do we – the feeling of being alone in our bodies and in space is one we can all empathise with. Gormley’s everyman is also as familiar to us as the immovable red man at the traffic lights (rather than the go-getting green). He’s the heartless tin man, not the lion. To grasp this fully, you must stand on the Hayward’s balconies where you are confronted by the pleading gaze of Gormley’s receding nude multitude.

    Perhaps the ‘Where’s Gormley?’ game alleviates some of this coldness. Certainly one Londoner had already softened ‘Event Horizon’, by slinging a white t-shirt over a figure on an adjacent yellow office block, much as Newcastle’s football supporters pledged the Angel of the North’s allegiance with a number nine strip.

    In person, Gormley bears a striking resemblance to the tall, bespectacled Wally from the books. However, unlike Wally, in this exhibition he is hard to avoid, and consequently, not much fun to rediscover over and over. Thankfully, Gormley now seems to have finally found himself among all these lifeless husks and is showing signs of one day escaping his own image altogether, perhaps leaving it behind in a cloud of vapour.
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2 comments

  1. Posted by Laura G on 17 Aug 2007 19:08

    Can you take pictures inside??

    Report this comment as inappropriate
  2. Posted by Michael on 16 Aug 2007 20:41

    this looks cool! wanna do?

    Report this comment as inappropriate

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  • Details

  • The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London, SE1 8XZ
    , UK
    Geo: 51.506877, -0.117532
  • 0871 663 2519
  • Category: Museums & Major Spaces
  • Times: Daily 10am-6pm, Fri until 10pm
  • Tube: Waterloo

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happyman1980

I'm interested in photography, music and film. I go to a lot of gigs around London. I love travelling and am planning my next big trip away. C'mon,...

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