Little Wonder: Seeing Our Selves in Gormley’s World

From Antony Gormley: Body Field, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 2022

I. Homo mensura: it is hard to think of an artist whose work is better attuned to articulating the ambiguities and ambivalences of what has become known as the ‘Anthropocene’ than that of Antony Gormley. Although this talismanic term was first brought into circulation in the late 1970s (Gormley’s first use of a full-scale human figure dates back to the early eighties), its official adoption as a bonafide scientific notion – though currently still awaiting proper certification, it should be noted, as a distinct geological epoch – dates back to 2000, when it was claimed by the august meteorologist Paul J. Crutzen during a conference in Cuernavaca about the Holocene (‘Stop saying the Holocene! We’re not in the Holocene any more!’). The term has long since entered the mainstream, where it has become inextricably linked with the broadening acceptance of the notion of anthropogenic climate change, investing Homo sapiens with the dubious honour of the demiurgic power to alter the balance of the world’s ecosystems beyond both recognition and repair. The question of the Anthropocene, in other words, revolves around man’s proper place in the great chain of being – or, formulated differently still, how much space man should be allowed to occupy in the greater scheme of things: what the size of our proverbial (‘carbon’) footprint should be.

All these considerations of scaling, siting and spacing obviously resonate in Gormley’s oft-repeated statement that his work is not so much concerned with the figure as it is ‘with treating the body as a place rather than an object’, with ‘thinking about a human space in space’.¹ Given the cataclysmic consequences of merely being human on Planet Earth today, it should come as no surprise that many of Gormley’s works in this mould seek to depict the human body at its most compacted and compressed. Two recent artworks tellingly titled ‘Retreat’ (one is made of concrete, the other consists of a tangle of interlocking cast iron cubes) speak to the underlying feeling of shame, if you will, of such ‘mere being’: they resemble human figures recoiling from the sight of the Anthropocene’s disastrous legacy, anxious to hide from the world’s innumerable pointing fingers. (In Retreat (Frame) (2021), the spectral figure appears to look downwards, i.e., away. If the lying figure in Relief (Frame) (2021) appears uncharacteristically relaxed, its titular relief presumably derives from the bliss of sleeping through it all. Gormley himself has referred to the crammed-up figure in Retreat (2022) as ‘someone with bad agoraphobia’.² Little wonder!) This may be one of the reasons why the artist has long felt compelled by the position known in Islamic prayer as sujüd or sajdah: the act of kneeling and bowing before the almighty until you touch the ground with forehead, nose, palms, knees and toes ) which is literally the ‘smallest space a human body can occupy’. As the artist explained in an exchange with the author: ‘I’m not that interested in the religious attitude of supplication, but I like the idea of having to put your forehead – your higher faculties – to the ground’ – an expression of dependency as well as humility: ‘however high our faculties may be, we are also “just” animals who depend on the planet, on the earth.’ To know thyself, these days, is exactly that: to know our place on earth – and see to it that it is drastically reduced, to the ‘smallest space a human body can occupy’.

II. In a conversation with Diana Campbell included in this publication, Gormley notes how he has ‘never done “couples” before’³ – a reference to the arresting intimacy implied in the entwined figures at the heart of Bridge (2021), Nest (2021) and Shelter (2021) (all of which, it should be noted, are verbs as much as nouns – titles matter as much to the artist as material). The two figures that make up Bridge appear joined at the head – the seat of their ‘higher faculties’ – cautiously leaning over for what looks like a kiss. (This is not the only Brancusian moment in the exhibition.) Their hesitant cowering and crouching is a far cry from the exuberant phallic confidence of early works such as Peer (1984) or Matter (1985), in which a body’s erect penis defiantly rises up against both the general mood and the elements. (As I am writing all of this down, Gormley’s work is making headlines around the World Wide Web: a sculpture planned for installation on the grounds of Imperial College London entitled Alert (2022) has fallen foul of the student body – what’s in a name – because of its ‘ambiguous anatomy’. That is to say, because it invites ‘obvious’ interpretation as ‘a person baring their erect penis’, and because its evident masculinity could therefore be seen as ‘exclusionary’.)

Returning to the aforementioned matter of spatial compression – of the ecological injunction to limit our ‘footprint’ to its absolute minimum – I am reminded here of the evolutionary riddle of bipedalism as a milestone in the story of anthropogenesis, as well as a founding motif in Gormley’s oeuvre. (The majority of Gormley’s sculptures ‘depict’ human figures, or the ghostly outlines of human presences, standing on their two feet, always tightly aligned. Statuesque these might therefore often be, but they are anything but statues: to ‘continually question the right of the statue to stand, or to stand for something’⁴ is one of the driving passions of Gormley’s practice.) Among the possible reasons given for the evolution of human bipedalism, the following hypotheses are currently in play: 1) changes in climate, and consequently also in early humans’ African habitat, that lured us out of the trees and into the grasslands, where an upright posture enabled us to spot both predators and prey from afar; 2) greater regulatory control over our body temperature by drastically reducing the areas of our bodies directly exposed to the tropics’ unrelenting sun (another climatological consideration, in other words); 3) freeing our hands for the use and transportation of tools as well as the collecting of food; and 4) sexual display – the social consequences of which have proven to be particularly immense. (‘By consistently exhibiting alluring sexual signs (the breasts) and hiding ovulation, females attracted the constant attention of males, who could help them with the costs of rearing offspring by carrying food to them using their newly freed hands.’⁵ Ian Tattersall does not consider male genital display a factor of note.)

Again, it is interesting to consider the roots of bipedalism in climatological and environmental circumstances, given our earlier discussion of the ecological charge of Gormley’s minimalist ‘poetics of space’ – but the artist’s aforementioned tentative first forays into the sculptural semantics of coupling lead us back to bipedalism’s social (sexual, romantic) ramifications. Humans’ erect posture projects the primal image of the surveying, controlling ape – but it also signals a singularly human sense of availability, openness and, hence, vulnerability. (Once again: the ambiguities and ambivalences of what has become known as the ‘Anthropocene’.) The naked ape, letting down his or her guard as he or she rises up to face the ‘others’ (the true crux, one might venture, of becoming human): this, too, is Gormley’s subject. In works such as Bridge, Nest and Shelter, the other body becomes part of the context of subjectification: ‘I’ and ‘other’ occupying space together.

III. In August 1951, the troubled sage of German sylvan philosophy Martin Heidegger was invited to speak at a conference in Darmstadt devoted to the subject of ‘Man and Space’. (Heidegger’s only sustained engagement with the work of a single artist, the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, was published in 1969 under the title ‘Die Kunst und der Raum’.) The ensuing text, ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’ (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’), is one of the founding documents of modern architectural theory, shaped in no small part by his experience of the Second World War (the Allied bombing campaign resulted in the destruction of close to a quarter of Germany’s industrial capital and housing stock) and the rush to rebuild on the precipice of the Wirtschaftswunder. In his characteristically gnomic lecture, Heidegger warned that a thoughtless building (bauen) would leave us homeless in the cold of the modern world; a truly thoughtful building ethos must attend to the deeper value of dwelling (wohnen). Heidegger made much of the happy linguistic coincidence that the habitual (that which we inhabit) in German translates as das Gewohnte: that in which we have lived. In thus defining dwelling as ‘the manner in which mortals are on the earth’, and in asserting that ‘the fundamental character of dwelling is … sparing and preserving’,⁶ Heidegger helped to lay the groundwork for an environmental conception of architecture as both the art and business of building. ‘The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling’⁷ – and such dwelling must, in essence, always be an act of care (twenty years earlier, in his magnum opus Being and Time, Heidegger had singled out care, or Sorge, as the defining trait of Dasein, or ‘being human’). Indeed, ‘only if we are capable of dwelling’ – only if we manage to figure out how to properly be ‘in space’ (i.e., the world) – ‘only then can we build’.⁸ Antony Gormley’s syntax of poses and postures, situations and stances, reads as a gloss on the challenge of such exact ‘dwelling’ – an art of making oneself at home in the world that offers a radical departure from the curse of anthropocentrism (that of mere ‘building’). Da capo: to know thyself, these days, is to know our place on earth.

(An aside, if I am allowed to dwell on this matter some more: Antony Gormley’s art is the subject of countless books, and literally hundreds of critics, curators, theorists and literati of all stripes have written about his work before me. Gormley has also written about sculpture at length himself, and very eloquently indeed. He is an artist, in short, who should feel at home in Heidegger’s revered saying, uttered at a slightly earlier date in the philosopher’s eventful career, that ‘language is the house of Being’.⁹ All that said, his sculptural world is by and large one of deliberate, often deafening quiet – and its silence feels ethical indeed.)

IV. Of all the artworks on view in Antony Gormley’s ninth exhibition with Xavier Hufkens, it is the least ostensibly representational one, oddly enough (though should this really come as a surprise still? Probably not), that speaks most deeply to my sense of being human, to my sense of being embodied – and the reasons for this ‘connection’ are, of course, inevitably deeply personal ones. The artwork in question is titled Run III (2022) and consists of a single 40 × 40 millimeters square tube that describes an angular trajectory in space – a three-dimensional map of the exhibition space, in effect, that ends in a single black square. (An echo, perhaps, of Malevich’s theatrically hung Black Square in his epochal ‘0,10’ exhibition from 1915 – though the more direct connection in the context of this exhibition is to the gaping mouth of the box-like sculpture titled Corner (2022).) Although the frame of reference here is primarily an architectural and self-referentially spatial one – a picture of the body of architecture, a silhouette of the muscle memory of space, the outlines of a home that we are either in- or outside of – through its very title Run III inevitably conjures an array of more ‘existential’ associations ranging from the flow of traffic to electrical circuitry or gas supply (an evidently politically charged reading in today’s Europe), from the course of currency or supply chains to our cardiovascular system. Indeed, it is this latter metaphor in particular that I can’t quite get out of my head now that I have received the daunting, distressing news, very recently, that I will be requiring heart surgery – the real reason why I can’t help but find the least outwardly anthropomorphic sculpture in Gormley’s exhibition to be the most heartfelt (pun intended) impression of the terrifying precarity of our shared human condition. (Full disclosure: it will be a fairly routine operation. But boy will I be seeing cables, conduits, ducts, pipes, tubes and the like! Running on for miles I’m sure.) If Run III invokes the image of a particular path followed in our navigating the space of art, it also summons the brittle, deeply contingent balance of all the infrastructures that make our inhabiting these spaces possible, including the circulatory infrastructures inside our very bodies and selves. (The politicised matter of Europe’s fateful dependency on Russian gas has helped to remind us of the lethality of this life-giving substance.) Ominously, however, Run III does have a beginning and an end – much like both our bodies and the lives that we live with and within them. (Thresholds are of great organisational importance in Gormley’s work.) I, personally, look forward to seeing a Run IV, V or VI – and they too will be pictures of ‘being in space’ – somewhere down the line.