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The John Tusa Interviews |
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Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with the sculptor Anthony Gormley Everyone surely knows Anthony Gormley, he's a sculptor, you know the Angel of the North, surely the best known and certainly the largest public sculpture in the country. That's big, very big. But he's also interested in those small clay figures, forty thousand of them at a time, which he gets communities around the world to make and which he then displays in small public spaces. Tiny 'gorms' some people call them, and for years he had himself wrapped in protective material and turned into life size lead figures, sometimes dozens at a time, because for years his body was his subject. Latterly he's used an army of volunteers to be wrapped and turned into plaster casts, and in between times he turned a sizeable chunk of the Western Australian desert into a sculpture park with his isolated metal figures appearing out of the blistering heat. You get the idea. Anthony Gormley does not think small and he works in and with the public, for as he proclaimed recently, 'I want to democratise the space of art. I'm trying to put art back where it belongs in a world it should never have left'. ____________________________________________________ Now you've nailed your artistic colours to the mast of public art, given there are so many instances of public art failing, just being dumped in public spaces, how do you avoid falling into that trap? That's the lipstick on the gorilla syndrome. I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen. All art needs completion by what Gombrich used to call the beholder's share. And the idea that somehow something has a special dispensation because it happens to be in collective space seems to me to be very dangerous. With the Angel for example, I said to them up in Gateshead very firmly that I don't make motorway art, in a rather snooty way, but then they sent me this photograph of this mound. It looked just like a megalithic mound and I like megalithic mounds. And then they told me that the mound was actually what was left of the old pithead baths of the St. Anne Colliery, one of the two collieries in the Lower Team Valley . Anyway I was intrigued then and I had to go and see this mound. And there was something really wonderful about in a way that determined place that was identified by this very, very insignificant but raised enough hill to have a kind of prospect over this landscape that was very, very varied. You had fields but you also had an industrial estate. You had railway sidings but you also had tower blocks. There were pubs and houses and the neurotic highway of the A1 constantly, constantly going. That was a challenge to... It was such a complex site, surely therefore with all those influences around it that it meant you couldn't be constrained, you weren't constrained by any one of those influences, you could draw on the complexity of the references. Because of that multiplicity of land use around that site I think it needed something that was very clear. And I think that the main challenge there was to make a work that could be read and read again and again and again by people travelling an average speed of probably fifty or sixty miles an hour on that stretch of the A1. Something that was going to in some way get through the privatised space bubble of a car travelling at speed. But I don't really want to talk about the Angel I must say, I think it's been over-talked, but I, to anyone who still thinks of it or, or thinks of it, somebody said to me the other day, oh well just like any other large rhetorical monumental object, you know that's, people don't see it anymore, you know it's become a cipher, it's become a logo, it's become a kind of branding, and I just say to them if you think that, get out of your car and go and experience it, because I think if you're out there on a good day and that means a good North Easterly, you know blowing force five to six, the experience of actually feeling your own body in that environment, through the agency of this very, very strange reinvented anatomy, makes you experience it again and it's nothing like a logo. When you were working much more recently out in Western Australia , in the desert, how did you begin to conceive how you would relate to that location. I mean a desert is also something, it is huge and, and so on, how did you begin to choose how you reacted to that and how you might place sculptures in it? Western Australia is covered by granite, the largest single piece of Achaean rock that still lies on the surface of the, of, of the Earth, that's 2.5 to 2.9 billion years old. It's one of the most ancient and in tact bits of the Earth's crust. In it are found uranium, gold, molybdenum, iridium, vanadium, titanium and a whole number of very, very late found elements, and I, I'm, I'm pretty interested in that. So I went and from the moment we arrived I knew this was the place, it was remarkable, remarkable landscape. It felt like we were at the edge, the edge of the world. And there you are making works in environments as old as the world makes available to us. Do you ever in your coming up to more mature years long to make a small physical intimate piece of sculpture? Yeah I think that I'm always playing with scale, and I'm glad you used the word scale because I think scale is very different from size. I think scale is about in a way the apprehension of proportion, and all the proportions that mean things to us as human beings are related to the body. Today I was, I, I was encased in plaster until about lunchtime and then this afternoon I've just been putting the mould back together and, and on Monday I will, I will cast it yes. Well I suppose after all you having spent twelve, fourteen years or so using your body as the template for sculpture, you couldn't get a much closer involvement in and with your material than that. I mean this is your shape getting turned into sculptural shapes. You can't get a closer material than that can you? The fact is that the human body has been in art as long almost as the human body has been conscious, and somehow its reflection in art is a reflection on our own nature, and something about exploring the human condition in another form, and I'm not interested in, in a way continuing Rodin's job, because I think he more or less is the point that says you're a point in the development of Western figurative sculpture, but I am interested in witnessing human existence by using my own as in a way the, the laboratory, I use it as the, the tool and the material but also the subject in a sense, but I use it as an example, I use my life and the vehicle of that life, my body, as an example of the common human condition of embodiment. I don't think of it as being anything special and I don't spend time in the gym, I don't, I don't work out, but I use it because it's the only bit of the material world that I happen to be inside, and I, in a way I'm interested in that, I'm interested in the fact that we spend our lives the other side of our appearances. I want to make work that evokes what it feels like to be alive and to be, as it were, the other side of appearance. Your first work, your first lead sculpture, was 1981. Can you remember at all what the process was that made you think I will cast my body and my body will be the actual physical model for my sculptures? Well it was weird because I never imagined that I was going, you know that was in 1980, 1981. I remember we were living in a squat just by Kings Cross. I just made two works, I'd made Bed, where I ate my own volume out of about six hundred loaves of Mother's Pride bread, and I'd made another work called Room, which was an expansion of an entire set of my clothes to an enclosure about twenty foot square. You, you shredded them all into narrow strips and then... Yeah I, I cut them in, yeah I cut them into, well I cut them like you would cut a, unpeel an orange, I, I cut them into spirals. And in a way those two works identified the place of the human body. One by I guess talking about internal processes, biological processes, the maintenance of the body as a biological organism. And the other of its shelter, its containment, its comforting clothing, and I thought well maybe, maybe what I should do is make a mould of myself because that'll be the most precise way of indicating the space that a body occupies. I started off just making that in a, in a, I, I, I was interested to see whether I could occupy the smallest possible space. I literally kind of gathered myself up into a ball. That was the first time and I didn't use clingfilm and I know I regretted it deeply because it was, I had to be shaved everywhere and there was masses of Vaseline but it still didn't help. It was a fairly scary and horrible business. Did you ever think this is a bad idea and I'm, I'm, I'm not going to do it again? Well I had, certainly I had second thoughts. I didn't make another one for about three months, but that was called Mould. You described them as figures and I don't think of them as figures. In a way they are cases. They are moulds. I call them body cases. Those early lead works are all hollow. They are lead covered I suppose boxes that happen to be in human form. Why lead, I mean nasty, poisonous, earthy material, why did you choose lead? Lead is fantastic for slowing things down. It's an insulator. I grew up in the fifties, I was very convinced I think in the early eighties and certainly in the seventies that the world was going to end by nuclear holocaust basically. I think that there's a sense of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation that sort of hovers over all of those works. The very first lead work that I made is called Land Sea and Air, and is the enclosure of primal elements within that kind of carapace of lead. Except that's life affirming rather than life threatened with distinction, those three elements are what keep us alive... Exactly... ...that seems to me about the piece. Absolutely and they're about a testament in a way, a testament of continuity and they were, like these three elements, removed from as it were the cycle of time, that should the world end through human agency that these three elements would be preserved uncontaminated. It was a, a very in a way completely silent and unremarkable work, these sort of football sized lumps. They were all derived from a stone that I brought from the West Coast of Ireland. One of those wonderful granite stones that had been formed by the Atlantic rollers over many, many years. But that was a kind of testament to me. I can remember making that at the Slade and not being able to sleep because I was so excited because it was like the foundation of my work. It seemed to deal with all the things that I wanted to deal with, imagination, the agency of art that could be realist, in other words stem from real things, and be about presenting again real materials but in a way that called upon the imagination of the viewer to give them meaning. I want to just go back to the process of your being turned into a cast, because I think it took over an hour when you were wrapped up and turned into plaster and so on and the thing had to, had to dry. Did you ever feel frightened and claustrophobic by the whole process? I did suffer very badly from claustrophobia as a child, but I used to get claustrophobia just closing my eyes, that was a scary thing as a child sent off to sleep in the afternoon at three O'clock, couldn't sleep but was supposed to have our eyes closed, and I would feel completely and utterly kind of buried in that small, tiny space behind the eyes, but I would have to stay there and I would stay there. And how did you get out of it? Well I stayed in it until it got bigger and it got bigger and it got bigger until the temperature lowered and suddenly I was in infinite space, and that was an extraordinary experience for me, this transition from in a way the imprisonment of the darkness of the body through in a way time and endurance in a way to somewhere completely liberating. Do you have any idea how or why that happened? You didn't will it to happen it just happened spontaneously? Yeah. Do you think it was a kind of vision of infinity, a vision of eternity? Yeah it was something like that, it was one of those... And that was age three? No it was aged, I guess it happened from the age of seven to about the age of eleven. And then it stopped? Yeah I didn't have it again, but it's interesting because people have talked about the total lack of ecstasy in the work, and in fact I think it comes from a very profound sense of the ecstatic. I hope that the spaces that I make are deeply paradoxical. In one sense they are entirely about the human condition as a condition, but on another they're also about freedom. I think they are about the fact that if the body is completely still the mind is able to extend itself in ways that can only happen if the body is completely still, and that's what leads me to sculpture, because sculpture of all the art forms is the most still and the most silent... And you don't indulge in theatrical gestures do you, conventional theatrical gestures that sculptors have used over the centuries? No I'm not interested in narrative and I'm not interested in drama. I'm interested in a way in unearthing the things that are already there. Within the body there is a kind of lexicon, an alphabet of basic positions, from crouching to sitting to kneeling to standing, and I think each of those very, very fundamental forms in terms of the way that we hold ourselves in space have something to tell us. They are the language before language. They evoke feeling, and I'm very interested in investigating that for its own sake. I think that that's where I part company with as it were the grand tradition of Western sculpture, which in many senses from the moment that the first Kuroi moves one leg forward half a pace it seems that the imperative in the great tradition has been towards the dramatic gesture. And you're restoring it to a point of rest? I think that is where sculpture works best. Do you like your own body? Not particularly, it's nothing very special, got rather sort of wide hips and narrow shoulders. It's not a pretty thing to look at I don't think. But you're not embarrassed by it? No I'm not embarrassed by it. I, it was wonderful one of the collaborators for the Western Australian project said to me, well I've never done this before, they weren't moulded, they had to stand for fifteen seconds naked in a body scanner while their bodies were transformed into about half a million digital coordinates, and she said I was really frightened about this but now I realise this is my body, this is where I am. I've had a lot of pleasure from being in this place that I call my body and I'm proud of it. In a way that's the attitude that, that I now take, for better or for worse this is where I am. We've got onto the spiritual and quite rightly and I think we should deal with your Catholicism and Buddhism. Now your name Anthony Mark David Gormley, AMDG, initials plastered over the churches of Europe - Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam - To the greater glory of God. That's a lot to live up to. Where you furious with your parents? I was talking about R D Laing last night and the Double Bind and I think I was given a very serious and problematic double bind. I was told AMDG, but I was also told that I had a devil in me, and in a way that dialectic occupied probably forty or fifty years of my life. I think I've resolved it. There isn't a devil in you? Well I recognise that if there is something that is passionate in me it's certainly not a devil. But is a sinner? No it's not a sinner either. I totally reject the dialectics of heaven and hell that have been used by the Catholic Church to underpin its support for hierarchical organisation, whether it be the divine right of kings or any other. But there is a lot of Catholicism in every Catholic, Catholic imagery, there are Catholic habits and rituals in, inside you and in your mental terms of reference. Yes I don't, I think I've worked through it and I'm, and I'm, I'm very, very grateful for having been brought up in that tradition. I think if you are born into a tradition that in some senses answers all questions either by moral absolutes or by saying this is a mystery and we shouldn't enquire further. In some senses it gives you an angle on the world and the acts of man within it that is going to, yeah, be a template for the rest of your life and I think that everybody knows that Catholics don't escape that template, but I think it gives them a very good measuring stick for alternative. Because when you say that you explore the darkness inside of the human body, it's really the same process as exploring the Catholic mystery isn't it, you know it's, it's accepting that there are things that demand to be investigated, understood and perceived. You may not do it through the Catholic road but the, the process seems to me to be very similar. Yeah I think that what it is is less about law and about in a way received truth from others' revelation than the, the path towards a position where you say I accept my own unknowing and I accept that that void that exists inside all of us is not something to be escaped from but something to be lived with, and I, I wouldn't say that it was about knowledge. I think it is a profound experience of in a way unknowing, which has enormous value and is absolutely in opposition to, to Western rationalism. Is this where the Buddhism comes into it, the exploration of darkness, the concentration on stillness and realisation through, through stillness, is this where it took over and where this...? Yes I think that, that Buddhism for me, I mean I was, I was very fortunate to meet S N Goenka in India when I did, and to learn you know a form of meditation that, that was completely direct. There was no, there were no mantras. There was no mysticism. It was simply about learning how to sit still and watch what happens, very similar to Zen Buddhists... And do you still do that? Can you still do those disciplines? Yes I, I still do, I, I think that the majority of my work comes out of exactly that discipline. The process of being moulded for me has become a meditative process. It's a time in which you use your will actually to defeat your will, and that, that in a way is evoked in the moulding process where you have to maintain your stillness but then up to a certain point, and then after that point your freedom of choice is determined by that act of will that preceded it, so you can't move because you're actually completely imprisoned in this mould. Butyou're imprisoned as a result of an act of your own will? Yes an act of freedom, so there's a, there, there's a, there's the paradox that is at the heart of the work. So was each one of the those, the times that you were turned into a cast, was that actually like a piece of therapy? I find it very therapeutic. I think that they're, that it's an extraordinary process of becoming an object if you like, becoming inert, but also being highly conscious at the same time. And each time it is like diving into the darkest bit of the sea, far away from the constraints and callings of if you like every day, and you return to the surface different to the state that you left it in. I think you found when you were working just recently in Gateshead with a lot of volunteers who were being turned into casts, that a lot of them found this process very moving, some very troubling and some as, as you have found it very spiritually extending. Yes, I think it was extraordinary that so many people volunteered to come. Well I mean it was just a call that we put out. Would people be interested in being involved in a piece of contemporary sculpture. And we, we only needed two hundred or so and one, one thousand four hundred or so applied, and ninety per cent of them had yeah rather extraordinary experiences, which I mean I've been very, very reluctant to make this transition between working with myself to working with others, but in fact having done it I think that there is a sense that I'm not simply making an image of a community but I'm, I'm constituting one because this becomes a rite of passage, into a zone that isn't simply the zone that the sculpture occupies but is a zone that is internal to every one of the participants, and that's an extraordinary sort of bonding that has taken place, and it was, yeah it was, it was amazingly powerful when I walked into the room on level four of, of the Baltic and they were all there, all two hundred and eighty seven of them, and they just burst into applause and I almost burst into tears, because it was so much, you know it was so, but there was an extraordinary energy in the room. Before you started it though were you in part apprehensive given what you knew the experience of being turned into a cast was, where you apprehensive about exposing other people to it because of the intensity of the experience? Yes I was very, I, I was worried which is why I made sure that there were medical staff and certainly many of our collaborators did faint and had to be revived. We're always asked the question are you sure you want to go on with this, and they replied yes every time even the, the woman who fainted three times, which is I think the, the record so far. Now the extraordinary thing is there you are you've been working with yourself in this way, you've been working with individuals as well. The work that you've done in your famous pieces called Field, which is up to what forty thousand small clay figures and I think there have been five of those in different parts of the, the world. That couldn't be more different could it, I mean because there you are saying to a group of people please make forty thousand of these figures and then you stand back. Is that at the other extreme of how you work with the human body? It's fascinating to watch people when they're working on Field, because they're using the space between, between the hands, usually with their elbows bent and sitting on the floor and they're working this, this space between the hands is absolutely opposite the heart, and it's as if they were making an internal organ because they're, I've told them just, just form this thing, just allow the repeated action of taking a ball of clay, forming it between the hands to give rise to a form each of you will naturally through this rhythmical repetition find a form that is uniquely yours, just like your walk and talk is uniquely yours, so you will find your form. And this is a cast, but it's a cast from the internal intimate zone of the body, and it is quite incredible. If you, if you push your hands together like that you come up with a form that looks exactly like a heart, admittedly it's got... This is cupping your hands? Cupping your hands. Yes. And, and in a way that's what I think of these strange formless works that make up Field as. They are an externalisation of an internal condition that has been made through ingesting this bit of clay, bringing it into the intimate zone of the body and then putting it out again, so it's another form of transitional object. And is it also important that they were making them at quite a rate, I mean it's... I think it's very important to bypass the rational mind, so you're not illustrating, I just keep saying I'm not interested in mimosis but I'm also not, I, I don't want you, I don't want you to think, I want you simply to, so it is very meditational, so we're sitting on the ground, we're all facing the same direction, we're, we're, we're, we're given clay by these runners that bring the clay all the time. I've just come back from China where we made a field of a hundred and ninety two thousand... And you always sit there and make them with the community?... Oh yes, yes, yeah absolutely, I'm sitting down there and, and it's just, it's again it's very, it's very similar to annapurna, awareness of, of breathing, but you're, you're in a way instead of breathing in you're taking a lump of clay and forming it, pressing it in the hands and then releasing it and it's very like an intake of breath and then expelling them. So how many seconds roughly does it take for this little clay figure to be made?... Well for me it takes about one minute and fifteen seconds, but some people take longer and some people take even shorter, and it's, it's, it's very, very concentrated and it is a fantastic, when, when we were really in the project in Guang-Dong Province it was, it was fantastic the atmosphere because you could hear, there was a bit of a murmur of background voices, but on the whole all you could hear was breathing and the slapping of, of clay as these forms arose that had never been seen before, that's what I kept saying to people, I kept saying you know we are liberating this clay from, from being a brick, look this is a lump of clay, this is what it would have become, now a brick if only of any use because it is like all other bricks and their, you know their value comes from their uniformity. What you're doing only has value because it is unique. Every single one is unique, and it has value because its yours. And it was fantastic in a place like China that has in a way this background of collective labour, oppressive collective labour from, in a way from on high, the liberation. It was an incredibly exciting and moving and wonderful experience and... How different have your various Fields been? Five from different countries, one from Britain , one from China , one from Mexico and, and, and so on, how, how different are they? Well I think if you made one, you know, in Hampstead and you made one in Notting Hill Gate or you made one in Crystal Palace I think they'd be quite different, but I mean the basic idea is that you take the clay from underneath people's feet and we certainly did that in Guang-Dong and we did that in the Amazon, and you ask the people that stand on that bit of land to touch it in this particular way. And it's very dangerous I think to then start, you know, ascribing racial stereotypes or any kind of known idea of difference on to those Fields, but they are absolutely different. So the European Field they all look psychotic and they do look very like Munchs and they all look, they're, they're, I mean they, they look like an Edvard Munch kind of scream except they're screaming with their eyes rather than their mouths. The, the Field for the British Isles they all look a bit like root vegetables, they're quite, they're quite slow and, and if they talked they would talk with a very low voice like this. They're quite sort of quiet. The Amazonian ones are very sexual. You know penises and vaginas on the whole, but with eyes. The Chinese ones are remarkable in their variation but also in their composure. What might we learn if we could ever see the five Fields in adjacent spaces, is this something that you have ever contemplated doing?... Yeah no I did, I thought that I, I would like to do that in the Pantheon in Rome . Is it big enough? Yeah I think it, I think it would be big enough. Join them all together and just look at it through Hadrian's portico interests me, I mean that interests me a lot. I hope somebody's listening. That's interesting that you would joint them up rather than having them as separate... No I would mix them up... You would mix them up... I would mix them up, yeah I would mix them up, because I think you would be, it would be very, it would be very easy to unmix them again if you wanted to so do. Because they're so distinct. Yeah. Now when you're planning things, when you're thinking about things, how do ideas come to you? Ideas are organic and very cheap. They come and they go. They're like you know butterflies. They pop out of their pupae, fly to, fly about a bit. You have to catch, you have to catch them and then you know dig them in. This is a very mixed metaphor isn't it? Examine them, scrutinise them, test them? Yeah, yeah, and then, and then the ones that survive survive. I think ideas, but anyway I, basically work grows and so long as you keep in touch with it it'll keep telling you things and in many ways the work that continues in the studio, which is the core of the work, the spine of the work, that tells me the whole time what needs to be done, so we, we, we've evolved now from the domain works, these random matrices that make up the domain field which is the, the, one of the floors of the Baltic show, to making these works that are, that are rings of steel, and I'm so excited about this and I couldn't have imagined making this, you know, a year ago but we just, it was like it wanted to be made and eureka suddenly I'm managing to make a work that leaves the space of the body void, which is what all the earlier work did but was misconstrued as being sort of rather bad statuary, and then surrounds it with these orbits, these high speed rotational drawings that are a bit like Leonardo's Deluge drawings except they're, they're four millimetre black stainless steel going round at high speed, and anyway I've, I've called it Feeling Material, because I like that, I like the pun in that and the fact that it is about material that is feeling the space of a body, but they're like springs that have gone completely haywire and yet they identify this, this human space, and that, you know, that's just a thing that popped out and it, it's like it popped out of the field of the work, it couldn't, I didn't invite it, it wasn't the result of preplanning. You weren't, yes you didn't think I must start thinking about this sort of project? No, no no it just came out, I mean I started working with rings, with, with, I started, I started with tubes of steel which I was chopping, and we got bigger and bigger, we got more and more ambitious until we were, until we were trying to chop three hundred millimetre diameter rings, which is actually quite tricky, and we thought this is really silly I'd better buy a, buy a ring-making machine, so we bought a ring-making machine and then the ring-making machine, you know, we weren't making rings we were making these you know whippy pieces of metal that, that we didn't have to make the actual ring. Anyway one thing followed another and it looks perfectly inevitable in the end, but you know it was just the way that things turn out. But you had no idea at the beginning, I mean you didn't know what you were looking for when you began this process. Were you almost playing with the metal rings, because you, you thought something would emerge?... I was playing, I, I think playing is the core of the whole thing. You, you try things out, you play. It's exactly like sitting, sitting in your playpen with your you know different coloured plastic rings and like jiggling them about and seeing what sort of shapes they make and then thinking well I'll try throwing them out and try throwing them over there. That's the sort of thing that we do all the time and, and in fact the beginning of the Feeling Material work the rings were inside the body. Anyway it's just, it's just brilliant the way that often you find that the thing that you thought was going to be the, the, the in a way the structure of the work is nothing but the bridge whereby the possibility of a work arises and then you throw it away, you leave it behind, you've crossed over to the other side. And that's what I feel we've done with these Feeling Materials. They're, they're, they, they kind of the, the works just you know taken a new direction and it's... Do you sketch things out on paper or is it the actual business of handling whatever the material you're working with, that becomes the instrument which gets you thinking creatively. I mean do you use paper and drawing? I know you've said that you love drawing. I love drawing, I draw, I draw all the time, but I don't, I do, I do you know drawings like this, this one that was in my pocket, but this is just trying to work out an idea for something else, but... It's an extremely small piece of paper, it's a post it with a scrawl on it... Don't look at it, it's actually... No I won't look at it. It's just actually the fence of the new studio which is underway now, but I do draw to work things out. I did a couple of drawings for the Feeling Material thing this morning and took them down to the, to the, to the workshop to, to refer to, but they're not the drawings that I enjoy. The draw, because going into drawing is going into a whole other realm of activity, and for me the great joy about drawing is that you're not constrained by structural issues, by, by in a way having to confront and tussle with material. It's like going on a, a, an adventure. You start with, you know, with this white piece of paper but you have all these fluids and, and different densities of carbon and graphite and powder and whatever, and you can yeah make a whole, I mean I used to do this at school and I still do it, I want to make, in a way I want to begin with chaos and I want to make as it were the churning of the milk, the ocean, that's the Rig Veda as opposed to, to Genesis in our Bible, and I want to see worlds arise out of simply the mixing of oil and water say on this paper surface and then read it like you might, like, like you might read tea leaves. What I'm describing is what, what I, what I see as the zone of, of absolute liberation that is drawing, because it's about experimenting with real substances. And things emerge? And things emerge, and things emerge, and it's not unlike the sculpture but it's, but it's completely free, you can go into the un, you know you can go into the underworld, you can go into outer space with no effort. You're a popular artist, certainly well known artist, are you a populist artist? I never ever, ever thought that I would be popular. It's a weird, weird thing. This has only happened to me recently, I mean it's since I suppose making Field and, and the Angel. I think that it's just very, for me art is the way that life expresses itself. If people through the agency of my work can feel more alive I think that's the, the best kind of compliment that I can have. I don't think you quite answered the question. Are you a populist artist or even popular? You said you've become popular by accident, but would you accept the description populist? I don't know what that means. If it means that I'm you, you know, I'm, I'm interested in my ratings, no I'm not. Not interested in your ratings? No I don't think... But you might be adopted by, by popular taste, that is that you're so effective at summing certain things up in a way that a lot of people like, that you might be tempted to make gestures which are popular, which only achieve a sort of big public response. Yeah I don't think that's where things are really tested for me. I think something's got to work. I mean like this last piece Domain Field in, in Gateshead . I don't know it well enough to really know whether I've done the best I can, or in this instance use the work that everybody's helped me make in the best way. I think that I will find that out through, in a way, returning to hoeing my own row, to getting back in touch with those individual works, and in the end it is the studio I'm afraid, not, not the public arena that I go to to find balance and authenticity and in the end you know truth in the work. If you had no big public commissions, no big public projects, if suddenly nobody wanted you to do another Field somewhere, what kind of work would you do, what sort of sculptor do you think you'd be? I'd do the work that I've always done, just trying to, to, to deal with what is there, what it feels like to be, and this is so new to me that I don't really feel very comfortable about this designation of me as the populist, popular public artist, and the idea that I am anything like Henry Moore fills me with such total dread. I don't want to be the proprietor of a factory. I don't want to spread my work all over the globe as a sort of humanist paste. I hope that the experiments that I make in my work are relevant, not just to me but to others, but in the end you know I have to return, I just have to return to the 'me, the work in a room', that's the, that's the point where things happen and that's the point where things are judged. When you had your conversation with Ernst Gombrich there was one remark he made which I want to raise with you now, he said, "art is a game with only one rule, and the rule is that so long as you think that you can do better you must do it even if it means starting again". Do you accept that and do you live up to that challenge yourself? It's absolutely the only way of living I think. If there is any way in which something can be improved and you don't follow that way, you've failed yourself. So are you good at throwing things away. Do you have a lot of dead ends? Yeah one went in the skip yesterday. It was one that had been on the go for quite a long time. No there, there, the studio is littered with carcasses and they're quite, I mean they're literally carcasses but they're also, they're also, we pick at them, you see we're vultures on our own carcasses. It's quite a good thing to have a few dead bodies around because flies gather, and it's quite good you see because the putrefying carcasses of bad work you know provide the, often the buzz and the energy of new ones. Can you ever feel yourself getting tired of, I was going to say just exploring the body if exploring the body is a just activity? I am not interested in just the body, I'm interested in, in, in the world that the body inhabits, and I think I go in and out of it. The fact is it's always going to be the central ..... I don't like the word theme very much. If you want to face existence and if you want to convey feeling, there is no other vehicle that does the job that the body does. There are two principle subjects of art and that is structure, i.e. architecture, or the body, and I think all art is you know shades between those two points or them themselves. So we've got a lot of, there are a lot of architects that are now trying to make bodies out of architecture. We've got a lot of sculptors that are trying to make boxes that are in a way aspiring to architecture. I think that I've tried to make yeah bodies into architecture and architecture into bodies. This is the second great work at the Baltic is called Allotment. I say great, not because it's, it's a great work but because it's a big work. Three hundred rooms I call them. They are bunkers made to the precise proportions of three hundred inhabitants of Malmo , a town in the South of Sweden, and I think that works very much in contradistinction to Domain Field. This is, this is the second body, the body of architecture, used to identify the human condition as one of, if you like, compliance to the urban grid and the fact, I mean I think it refers to the fact that so many of us now, ninety per cent apparently in the Western world lives within the urban grid, and I think that if we are the only animal that chooses to live in this geometrically organised environment then it's a good idea to make a work that in some way mirrors that so that we can think about it. Are you an optimist or a pessimist about humanity as you explore it within the human body? I'm a realist and I think that as the hard line Darwinians have made very clear to us, you know violence is endemic to the human condition. I think that we may well be a fairly strong agent in the final destruction of this planet, but maybe there are other life forms to come along that will improve on this one. Anthony Gormley, thank you very much. Thank you. |
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Listen to the interview with Anthony Gormley
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