Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon – Reconnect to our Souls and the City we call Home

City View (Day)

Overlooking the Mid-Levels of Victoria Peak (Source: Antony Gormley’s Official Website)

Let’s imagine a city as a human body and sculptures erected in different spots of the city as acupuncture needles stimulating the body’s reflective responses.  This is probably an imaginative picture British artist Antony Gormley would like to bring to the city dwellers through his controversial installation project Event Horizon in Hong Kong over the six months from November 2015 after touring London, Rotterdam, New York, São Paulo and Rio di Janeiro.

An Experiment of Cultural Acupuncture

Gormey with his statue

Antony Gormley with one of his life-size iron cast body sculptures (Source: © K11 Art Foundation)

31 life-size body sculptures cast from the body of the artist himself stand on top of prominent buildings and on busy pavements in Central and Western districts of Hong Kong.  While some people relate the project to suicide attempts and many make funny poses next to those anatomically correct male bodies at the street level, the artist has a bigger message for us – What am I doing in this world and what is this world anyway?  For those of us who have been living in the city for long, we should have witnessed that concrete and glass seem to have replaced a common space in which people lived all aspects of their lives face to face.  The physical and psychological isolation and boundaries in the urban environment, together with the abstract corporate and capital values it contains, have taken away our ability to communicate to others our intense and individual experiences towards our inner selves and surroundings.  Gormley attempts to reignite our senses through this visionary project.  He uses the body sculptures, placed at unusual spots of the Hong Kong skyline, to invite us to observe our own experience, a sense of connection with the horizon and with space at large, within the reality of daily routines.  Gormley refers the installations as cultural acupuncture – the sculptures act like 31 needles going into various parts of the collective body.  It is an experiment to see what kind of responses and energies each one elicits.  It is about a celebration of life and an attempt to consider what the identity and subjective voice of Hong Kong is.

On Hong Kong City Hall (Source: © Event Horizon Hong Kong Facebook Page)
Between International Finance Centre and Four Seasons Hotel (Source: © Antony Gormley’s Official Website)
Outside City Hall Memorial Garden (Source: © Antony Gormley’s Official Website)
On Queen’s Road Central (Source: © Antony Gormley’s Official Website)
On Queen’s Road Central
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Sculpture Location Map (Source: © Event Horizon Hong Kong Website)

Sculpture as a Tool for Mindfulness

“We exist in space, but space also exists in us.”  Gormley uses sculpture as a tool for mindfulness.  The weighty figures are human spaces that displace space at large by their mass.  He projects them as “black holes in human form, dark silhouettes against the sky, which the built environment that surrounds them is the thing that becomes the foreground”.  City is not the only field that Gormley’s investigation of the relationship of the human body to space takes place.  In Horizon Field (2010-12) the artist placed 100 figures of his body spreading across an area of 150 km2 in the snowy Alps in Austria.  He created a horizon located at 2,039 m above sea level to provide us with a new perspective on bodies in space.  The works form a field in which living bodies and active minds (skiers and hikers alike) are involved in measuring the space and distance through the field of these static iron bodies.  For Gormley, the dark masses against the white snow are indications of absence; places where a man once stood and anyone could stand.  He reverses the usual conditions of sculptures: stillness, silence and inertia and, instead, attempts to highlight free movement, creating new relationships between its context and the internal conditions of the viewer.

Skier

Horizon Field (2010-12), High Alps of Vorarlberg, Austria (Source: © Antony Gormley’s Official Website)

The Test of Time and Space

romanforum

Time Horizon (2006), Parco Archeologico di Scolacium, Catanzaro, Italy (Source: © Antony Gormley’s Official Website)

Time and space are other elements Gormley is keen to explore in his landscape installation projects.  Archaeological sites and open seas are some of the interesting locations Gormley chose to experiment the relationship between time and space.  The Roman Forum in southern Italy dating from about 130 AD was the field for Time Horizon (2006) where 100 life-size body figures were distributed all over the 40-hectare site.  Some were buried up to their necks while others were on plinths in the deepest part of the site and every level in between.  The arrangement offered a way in which the trajectory of time could be felt physically.

In Another Place (1997) the body figures were immersed in the Wattenmeer (Wadden Sea) in Germany.  As with Time Horizon the viewer is implicated in a field effect, but here the rising tide replaces the earth level.  With every tide the bodies were obscured, they disappeared under the surface.  It is the disappearance and reappearance of the bodies between the tides that tests human time against planetary time.

Sea

Another Place (1997), Cuxhaven, Germany (Source: © Antony Gormley’s Official Website)

Liberating Art to Serve a Social Role

“My faith is that art becomes an increasingly important testing ground, free of control and ideology, in which we can examine ourselves and our needs, desires and dreams.”  Gormley believes art has to be released from both the institutionalizing effects of the museum and from the commodifying effects of the market.  He demonstrates to us art is a basic human activity that makes us human and offers us the tools to become ourselves.  By bringing art to our daily life with his life-size “needles”, this philosophical artist heals human vulnerability and raises collective consciousness in a city.  Not only does he activate our connection to our souls lost in the lure of false desires and the promise of objects of consumption and power, but also reminds us of the intrinsic sense of being and our intimate relationship with the city we call home.

Event Horizon Hong Kong Website
Antony Gormley’s Official Website
CNN’s Video Interview with Antony Gormley on Event Horizon Hong Kong

Event Horizon

Hong Kong

19th November 2015 to 18th May 2016

Christine Kan

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Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012

Antony Gormley

Vessel, 2012

Cor-Ten steel, M16, countersunk steel screws

370 x 2200 x 480 cm

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Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012

Displayed right at the center of the hall of CENTQUATRE-PARIS in the 19th arrondissement, Vessel has caught the sight of every viewer who visits the exhibition “Follia Continua! 25 years of Galleria Continua”.  Designed by the famous British sculptor Antony Gormley, Vessel is made out of 39 interconnecting rectangular steel boxes.  The material Cor-Ten steel, trademarked weathering steel, is a group of steel alloys which were developed to eliminate the need for painting.  The use of this material allows the sculpture to form a stable rust-like appearance after exposed to the weather for several years.

Vessel takes on the form of a gigantic recumbent man, which at first glance, may appear to viewers as a non-aligned work by Donald Judd.  The series of box containers is an architectural structure of parts – the vessels that form a body.  Yet it is in turn presented in a seemingly haphazard way inside the architecture that is made for the scale of man.  Here the spatial definitions and purposes are blurred and unstable.  The idea mediates on the renaissance trope of the city in the form of a man by making a man made in the form of a city.  It provokes questions about the social and inspirational role of sculpture and its potential to provide direct bodily experience.

Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012 (detail)
Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012 (detail)
Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012 (detail)
Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012 (detail)
Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012 (detail)
Antony Gormley, Vessel, 2012 (detail)

This falls into the usual practice of the artist who is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space.  Born in London in 1950, Gormley has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos.  The artist continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviors, thoughts and feelings can arise.

For the exhibition at Le CENTQUATRE-PARIS, 2015, Antony Gormley has written, “Take this work as the model of a building that invites you to look into its inner spaces.  I am excited to see Vessel exhibited in Paris, especially in the spaces of a former coffin factory where today, intelligent, lively bodies interact with each other.  Vessel will be the biggest body in there.  It has never been seen in a major city, so I hope that here in Paris, its mirroring of the cells of a dense urban environment will make sense.  Buildings in a city connect with and separate from one another.  You cannot inhabit this work but you can peer into it and see these connections and dead-ends modeled.”

The works of Antony Gormley naturally bring us to ponder on the anti-monumentalism (or Counter-monumentalism), a philosophy in art that denies the presence of any imposing, authoritative social force in public spaces.  It rejects the notion of a monument developed from an elitist point of view as an emblem of power, an opposition to monumentalism whereby authorities establish monuments in public spaces to symbolize themselves or their ideology, and influence the historical narrative of the place.  Artists explore the contemporary drive for creating memorials not of men on horses or mermaids in fountains, but for everyday people and tragedies.

By the same token, we could see that Antony Gormley explores the relation of the human body to space and moments in time through his sculptures, installations, and public artworks.  Over the last 25 years, Antony Gormley has revitalized the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material.  He used a cast of his own body as their starting point and for his large-scale, outdoor installations such as Angel of the North (1998) and Another Place (1997).  In Event Horizon (2007), which has been shown in London, Rotterdam, and New York, Gormley sited 31 body forms atop rooftops, riverbanks, and sidewalks within the dense urban environment.  In One & Other (2009), a project for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, he invited members of the public to create their own artwork on top of the plinth for one hour time slots over a period of 100 days.

Other sculptures in Paris at the moment

At the moment, his other two works the Big Spin (2014) and the Big Look (2014) are presented by the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Paris under the Hors les Murs programme of the FIAC 2015.  These works from his BIG series pursue his study of the body and space, whereby the artist questions the body as a site, and space and scale as the principle factors which condition our understanding of our environment. These sculptures disorient the spectator, provoking a process of self-observation.  Their presentation in the Tuileries gardens is a continuity of Antony Gormley’s practice in which each exhibition is considered a site of physical and psychological experimentation.

We would perceive the artist’s works as not in the normal sense of being a representation of the subject.  Rather he is trying to arouse the interest about what the nature of the space a human being inhabits is.  What he tried to show is the space where the body is, instead of what the body itself represents.

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Antony Gormley, Big Spin, 2014 under the Hors les Murs programme of the FIAC 2015

Event Horizon in Hong Kong

The project, Event Horizon, is scheduled to be unveiled in Hong Kong on November 19 and will last until May 18, 2016.  Nevertheless, it has already proved provocative during the two years it’s taken to bring the statues to the city.  The statues were meant to have been displayed last year, but Hongkong Land pulled out as main sponsor after a J.P. Morgan employee jumped to his death from the roof of a Hongkong Land property in February 2014.  Some news reports quoted unnamed sources saying that J.P. Morgan was of the view that having Gormley’s life-size statues placed on rooftops would be too much of a reminder of that particular tragedy.

The idea of Event Horizon is to prompt Hong Kong people to pause amid their daily rush and to take a good look at the details of what’s around them.  It aims at actualising the art’s value – its ability to stimulate thoughts that were lost or thoughts that would otherwise not exist at all.  It is true that in a smartphone-obsessed city, the population in Hong Kong rarely takes a look at the details around themselves anymore.  In another sense, the project is also about how human will overcome extreme adversity.  It is very much about the place of individuals against forces that are faceless determiners of our lives.  The decision to display the statues in the central business district may not be to everyone’s taste, since the area smacks of exclusivity and may reinforce the link between art and the market.  That said, it is certainly a sound demonstration of the challenge of stereotypical views and unexamined values.

Official website of Event Horizon Hong Kong : http://www.eventhorizon.hk/en

 

Follia Continua! 25 years of Galleria Continua

CENTQUATRE-PARIS

26th September to 22nd November 2015

Cindy

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