Why we must watch this space

By Nicola Davison (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-12 09:16

One of the UK's best-known contemporary artists worries about how Beijing will take to his new exhibition. Antony Gormley thinks it's a bit odd. But then again, the sculptor, who has had thousands of Londoners stand on a windy plinth in Trafalgar Square for the last three months like living statues, is used to breaking convention.

Antony Gormley poses in front of his work, Another Singularity, at the Galleria Continua in 798 Arts Zone in Beijing. [Galleria Continua]

"The whole point is to test work in different countries and see what people get from it in a different cultural context," Gormley told METRO. "But we will see whether this work makes any sense at all. It's almost not there, it's a very odd installation."

Another Singularity opened in the bustling Galleria Continua in the 798 arts district on Saturday. Like One & Other (the Trafalgar Square work), it asks for the viewer's participation by stepping into a matrix of bungee cord. A suspended "body" is the bulk of the piece and cords radiate out to attach itself to the wall, ceiling and floor. Think geometric spider web.

As in much of Gormley's work, Another Singularity has the body at its core.

"This has been what my life project has been about - how do we bring the body back into art," said Gormley in full command at a lecture packed with Beijing's art crowd on Saturday. Half are listening via translator at the theater.

Over the last 25 years Gormley's sculptures have examined the human body. His most famous work is mammoth: The Angel of the North stands 20 m over the A1 motorway in northern England. In Another Place, 100 cast iron figures look out to sea on Crosby beach, near Liverpool. He uses his own body as a cast because he couldn't "ask people to do what I do", which put another way means "full-frontal".

If this sounds a bit narcissistic, it isn't: "I'm not interested in expressing myself," said Gormley. Though the audience is charmed by his bumbling Brit manner, he's unassuming. Halfway through the lecture he offers to stop in case people wanted to fetch their lunch. Likewise, his sculpture isn't about self-glorification, but looking at "where human beings fit" in the world.

Later, he admits he's tired of seeing himself in his work, part of the motivation of One & Other. In this project the public becomes living art. Each person stands on the plinth for an hour, in a continuous 24-hour cycle, in front of a web cam. Unsurprisingly, the Big Brother generation loves it - so far 34,500 people have applied.

Some plinthers have been more memorable than others. Ollie Campbell disgorged a live chicken and two blow-up dolls before hurtling naked across the square pursued by police. Liz Crow sat in a wheelchair in a Nazi uniform. Gyrating lapdancer Naomi McDonald took her work up with her.

"It's celebratory, not pessimistic," says Gormley in defense to a critic's claim that One & Other was a "ludicrous failure".

Last week Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian: "If One & Other is an image of British democratic life in our time, it is a pessimistic one. It is a portrait of a society in which people will try anything to get their voices heard but where no one can hear what they're saying."

"The basic precept of One & Other is to look at what a human being is," said Gormley. "Keira, who was up on last Monday at 6 pm, just stood there in her wedding dress. This woman who had got married 10 days earlier just decided to stand on the plinth in her dress and she looked absolutely incredible.

"[Jones] said people looked small and insignificant - well of course they do, that's the whole point." If the people on the plinth look silly then Gormley sees it as success. Failure is human and through it you see the person behind the spectacle.

Be it a windy plinth, a cloud-filled box (his 2007 work Blind Light) or a bungee-cord matrix, using art to look afresh at what human beings are is the genius of Gormley. Ducking, and occasionally tripping, through the matrix of Another Singularity you are asked to contemplate your own experience of space and time.

Bringing his work East resonates with Gormley. As a graduate he traveled to India for three years where he read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the I Ching, (though he found the latter "too powerful" to read more than twice).

"I think there's a sense in which the void or emptiness which is at the core of my work is absolutely understandable by Chinese Taoist philosophy," says Gormley. "You could say the showing of this work here is like coming home."