Anthony Gormley at the Royal Academy, London: the constriction of four walls
A major retrospective of British artist Anthony Gormley opened in September at the Royal Academy, being the first in the season of large-scale art exhibitions in London. Gormley, a mature artist with a career spanning over four decades, is best known for his outdoor installations, where man-made pieces work in harmony with the natural environment hosting them. They include Another Place (1997), a multiplication of human iron body casts standing on a beach and looking towards the sea, or more famously in Britain, Angel of the North (1998), a tall figure with open wings somewhat reminiscent of Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machine drawings, which looks over the A1 motorway at Gateshead.
Returning to the confinement of an established academy after having tasted the unlimited freedom of the open space must feel somewhat alienating for the artist. Or maybe not, that is for the artist to tell us. As a viewer, my initial perception was one of constriction. The work felt too big or out of space for the various rooms enclosing it. It was particularly the case in the first room, Slabworks, where fourteen shapes made of steel slabs, stacked upon each other, laid across the floor. At closer look, these shapes revealed themselves as human bodies in diverse positions. I personnally remained unmoved by the work, despite its technical mastery and surprise effect, and found that the human presence claimed in the exhibition booklet was rather tenuous. It was only later, when glancing through some of the artist’s catalogues and seeing the same human body shapes scattered around an archeological site in Greece, that I suddenly grasped the emotion conveyed by the work in situ. Stuck inside four walls, it loses some of its power to reach us. I had a similar feeling when walking through the next door room, Clearing VII, where some eight kilometres of aluminium tube were coiled as if to recreate a 3D scribbling on paper. The tube was expanded until it touched the walls and could grow no more. The feeling of constriction was particularly strong in that room, and unlike other visitors, I had no temptation to walk through the circles formed by the recoiling tube. If anything, I found it annoying to be stuck in between and just wanted to get out.
Lost Horizon, the room inside which iron bodies are standing on the floor and hanging from the ceiling and to the side walls (as featured on the advertising poster), was particularly appealing because of the unexpected positioning of the sculptures, however, they triggered a sentiment of crowding in that room. Again, seeing pictures of the same bodies standing on an open beach and looking at the endless horizon, made me want to join them. I too am uplifted by the sight of a vast expanse ahead of me. His work raises questions about our contemporary urban lives, where like in that room, our horizon is limited to other similar bodies who share the same space and the many walls encircling us. We are the ones with lost horizons. I didn’t go through Cave, a monumental hollow structure that fills up the next room to a greater scale. Visitors are invited to use it as a passageway to the following room. There was a long queue when I was there, and being a rather impatient person, I walked around it.
I then discovered Gormley’s earth drawings, which struck a cord with me. They are more intimate drawings made using blood, clay and charcoal, bound together with water and rabbit skin glue. In other words only organic material. The effect is almost primitive with a dominant of burnt Sienna and anthracite colours that recall our ancestors’ cave paintings. Through the Sienna pigment in particular, his drawings also link up with Ancient Roman as well as Renaissance paintings in an uninterrupted chain of art expression throughout history. As human beings, we are faced with the same questions in their own contemporary manifestation about our own body, its position and relation in space, its inherent degradation process, as previous generations. Gormley’s mode of expression is representative of our contemporary times and is aesthetically pleasing but beyond that, its essence is timeless and that’s what makes him an artist.
