Public Art and Gormley’s "Another Place"

Its difficult to know what captures different people….or even what captures me. But you know when it does.

"Quantum Cloud I"

"Insider VIII"

Those do.

I try to be observant. But I could definitely do it better. And a lot of the time, I’m really just buzzing around….until something freezes me. Like a little metal man. Antony Gormley has done this for me a few times….near where I work, there’s a Gormley figure on a corner on Euston Road in a really out of the way place…very easy to miss. And he’s just staring in a window. Looking somewhat surprised. And confused. Leaning slightly back as if a bit startled.

"Reflection"

And, as you can see, he does it elsewhere:

On rooftops:

In a wheatfield........

"Standing Ground"

Staring in a window............

"Total Strangers"

......standing by the road....and slightly in it.

"Total Strangers"

Perhaps, most famously, in the flooded crypt of Winchester cathedral:

"Sound II"

….or, many figures just staring out at the water at Crosby beach near Liverpool…..

….100 of them…2.5 kilometers along the beach, 500 meters apart…one kilometer into the estuary so the tide at various times fully engulfs some of them.

Anyway, it makes me laugh. And it disturbs me a little….and I sometimes feel like the Gormley figure. All of which I love.

So what is it then about these little lead and metal men that move me? They seem quite peaceful and serene. But troubled at the same time…or at least confused. Little frozen passive watchers of the world as it changes. Wondering what’s happening…who are all these people running around? And what are they doing? Or on the beach, watching the container ships and the urban decay of Liverpool’s port district. We checked out Gormley's Another Place exhibit in 2008 on a typically grey and drizzly English day and spent about an hour just wandering the beach and staring out at the water with the figures....relating to them. And wondering with them about all sorts of stuff.

Gormley himself described it like this:

"The idea was to test time and tide, stillness and movement, and somehow engage with the daily life of the beach. This was no exercise in romantic escapism. The estuary of the Elbe can take up to 500 ships a day and the horizon was often busy with large container ships."

So much of it has to do with the relationship between the sculpture and the environment…whether it’s urban or more natural. The way in which a piece is placed within the surroundings and the effect of the weather, the light, people, cars, ships, noise, etc. And the interplay with the environment. It can create (or maybe capture) a mood or a thought perfectly. Gormley always makes me want to stop and think about what has happened and how the place became the way it is…it reminds me a little bit of the R Crumb cartoon Short History of America:



So Tolstoy said in what I think is a good attempt to define the undefinable – “art”:

"Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."

"Baby"
Gormley sure does that for me.


………….And so does Andy Goldsworthy, but more on that some other time!








Dead hazel sticksbent overstuck into bottom of shallow pondwaited for froth and mud to clearhad to go back into water several times to bend a stick that had sprung upthen had to wait all over again for water to clearvery calmtook a long time for froth to float awayovercast and humid
Bentham, Yorkshire
September 1980