reviews Antony gormley
Antony Gormley: Blind liGht
HAywArd gAllery, london
17 m Ay – 19 August
Walking into Antony Gormley’s ‘monumental’ show at the Hayward be an exceptionally boring one if self-obsessives were excluded from it.
Gallery is like entering a cinema and watching a film in which everything has Gormley’s work, as presented here, invites the sort of existential
been edited out except the special effects. The first thing you encounter, speculation about the material and immaterial aspects of one’s presence
Space Station (2007) – an enormous clump of perforated, skyscraper-like in the world that most people wallow in at some point in their lives. How he
Corten-steel cuboids perched precariously on its corner – looks as though adds to or enhances this kind of thinking – the oscillation between being
it has just tumbled out of an episode of Star Trek. The work is dramatically and nothingness, if you like – through his art is perhaps where the real fog
lit up by Blind Light (2007), a glowing box of white mist, which might almost of confusion lies. While earlier works, like Mother’s Pride III (1982/2007),
be an accumulation of all the excess dry ice from a 1980s pop promo. And his tapestry of sliced white bread with the shape of a body nibbled out of
the fact that this second work relates to the first in the way that dramatic the centre, suggest an intimate and personal confrontation with the fears
lighting relates to the set of a Hammer horror film doesn’t do anything but and concerns that confront people trying to live in the world, Gormley’s
add to the sense that something a little gimmicky is going on here. latest productions seem hell-bent on adding something more awesome to
In its own right, Blind Light offers an environment in which, thanks to the theme. Which seems a fairly big task. As part of his mission to achieve
the fact that you can see little more than a foot ahead of you, you’re conscious it, though, Gormley seems increasingly to be engaging with architecture
only of your own body and its uncomfortable relations to the mysterious – Space Station is a cityscape of sorts, as is the show’s concluding work,
world around you, and also reduces other people (whether you’re inside Allotment II (1996), a series of 300 concrete people-bunkers (each an
the box looking at your fellow travellers on this joyride, or outside looking expression of the minimum space required to house its variously shaped
in at the revellers fumbling along its sides of the box) to ghosts. In many but very absent occupant). But while Allotment II presents an engaging
ways it functions as a grand entrance to Gormleyland: a glorified peephole conceit, it has all the visual interest of a warehouse full of boxes. Of course,
into the kind of self-obsession that would cause someone to repeatedly one of the show’s biggest draws, Event Horizon (2007) – 31 cast figures
cast and sculpt his own body (or the space around it). For as much as this scattered along the roofs and walkways that surround the Hayward – is
exhibition privileges the kind of interactive experience that one normally presumably supposed to be a most literal expression of Gormley’s ‘outside
expects from a theme park, what it really seems to reveal is that Gormley’s the box’ thinking: he is working on a scale that no museum walls can contain.
obsession is not so much with his audience as with himself. Not that there’s But what all these identikit sarcophagi leave you thinking is that there’s
anything wrong with that, though. We all know that the history of art would nothing much really going on inside. Mark Rappolt
Blind Light, 2007. Photo: stephen white. Courtesy the artist and Jay Jopling / white Cube, london
119 Artreview
Sept_REVIEWS Outstanding.indd 3 7/8/07 17:23:50
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