My Cultural Life - London

Kwok Wan


Gormley's best known works, Angel of the North and Another Place (an array of metal mannequins displayed on Crosby Beach) focuses on the human form as art.  It is peculiar then, that his title installation, Blind Light, should make us feel like we have no body at all.   Some have compared it to walking in a cloud, but this description does not do justice to the complete and absolute disorientation you have when walking into a massive sensory deprivating box.  It's like going falling into an instant sleep and dreaming of shadows and voices as other visitor ghost past you.  Another effect it has is the slowing down of time.  Because you can't see anything, your limbs become very conscious of your movements.  Every action has to be considered closely, focused and monitored.  

Up the stairs you can see Event Horizon from a three different balconies.  In it, Gormley uses similar figures to Another Place and transfers them to the skyline of London.  In a 1.5km radius, solitary black figures stand on top of buildings and stare at you from all directions.  Again, like Blind Light, being watched makes you conscious of yourself and how you interact with things around you.   

On the way to the viewing platforms to see Event Horizon is Matrices and Expansions.  This also deals with human forms, but this time creating them out of the space between complex frameworks of wire and mesh.  Wire polygon patterns trap the bodies as well as defining them.  When he's dealing with realistic human forms, Gormley's work is provocative and original.  When he deviates, the work seems flat and dull.  Space Station looks like a collection of beer crates at best, and boring at worst.  Allotment II, a collection of 300 blocky humanoid figures, feels like an army of Lego terracotta warriors.  But despite this, as a whole, the exhibition has a certain harmony of blacks, greys and silvers.  The installations suit the heavy concrete of the Hayward, melding in with the perpendicular blocks and solid heavy stairs.  

Gormley's work is certainly fresh and engaging.  It isn't aggressive nor forceful but visual without being sensual.  He doesn't just deal with the form of the body, but how the body affects you.  Blind Light strips you of your physicality, and makes you feel mostly human.  

Sebastian Perry


Bodies and buildings are the inspiration behind sculptor Antony Gormley’s first major London exhibition, showing at the Hayward until August 19th. It’s an interactive affair, the centrepiece being a large glass room filled with luminous vapour, in which visitors become invisible to all but themselves. Your own human form disappearing into the mist becomes part of the exhibit for those looking in from the outside. It’s an arresting gimmick but also, to my suspicious mind, a lawsuit waiting to happen – there’s never been a better place to grope or murder someone and slip away undetected.

Equally disconcerting is Event Horizon, which you have to step out onto the Hayward’s terraces to appreciate. 31 life-size sculptural casts of Gormley’s body have been erected upon rooftops and walkways in every direction across a 1.5 sq km area. As you take stock of London’s iconic skyline, you catch sight of impassive, imposing figures staring back at you. The effect is astonishingly eerie, not unlike suddenly finding yourself in a schlock ’60s sci-fi film.

The exhibition’s other genuine highlight is the awkwardly named Matrices and Expansions, a room with intricate fractal lattices suspended from the ceiling, in the gaps of which you can make out floating human shapes. The body in all its clunking vulnerability is Gormley’s foremost obsession, and there are fibreglass facsimiles of himself scattered throughout the gallery – trussed and dangling in poses of torture by the stairs or, in another room, spread-eagled across every corner of the wall, genitals self-consciously exposed.

Some of Gormley’s efforts misfire. Allotment II is a monumentally pointless installation of 300 grubby concrete blocks, which it avails us little to learn are exactly proportioned to match the vital statistics of 300 inhabitants of Malmö, Sweden. Nor did I glean much from Mother’s Pride III, a wall display made out of toast. But the programme guide did yield one chortle-inducing gem when describing Gormley’s leaden Chair: “Resting on the seat are two alabaster forms, which could be eggs, but might be testicles, or even eyes.” You’ve been warned: it may well be a load of balls.