More on Sir Antony

I've managed to read more than 160 pages of Antony Gormley's book.

I say "managed" because I've found it a really tough read so far (and there's only a 52-page "Update" to go).  From my point of view, quite a lot of it is written in riddles - I read bits of it over and over again and still can't figure out what he and the other writers are trying to say.   They have their own sort of language, peppered with words I have to look up in a dictionary (when I can be bothered).

Part of me thinks these folk are deliberately using riddles and strange words to preserve the exclusivity of their art world.  They've certainly got me excluded.   I can't see me ever wanting to use their language.

Having said that, I still like a lot of Gormley's work and have even started to understand some of it thanks to this book.

On Gormley himself, he's clearly highly intelligent.  He studied archeology, anthropology and art history at Trinity College, Cambridge (which I would have hated).

And Gormley is really into faith, religion (in its widest sense) and meditation (all of which drive me bonkers).  He was brought up as a strict Catholic and after Cambridge he spent three years traveling through the Middle East to India and Sri Lanka, where he studied meditation in monasteries.

A lot of Gormley's work is about meditation - about looking within himself at his soul, for want of a better word, and trying to express this through "body cases".    The body cases represent the skin - the interface between inside and outside the body.

In most of his sculptures, Gormley uses his own body as the starting point.  He gets folk (including his painter wife) to encase him in plaster.   I think this has become a semi-religious ritual - something that tests him in terms of pain and control and in which he meditates.

Early on, he used the resulting mould to create a fibre-glass version of himself which he then lined with lead sheet, soldered together on highly defined vertical and horizontal lines.

He's careful to say that the sculptures are made from air as well as fibre-glass and lead because his focus is on what's inside the body cases.  The use of lead is deliberate - its neutrality draws attention away from the skin and into the interior.

Most of the body cases look as though they are deep into meditation, which I'm sure was Gormley's aim.   I'm not sure whether this comes from the poses or simply from the way the body cases are made (or both).  

Quite a lot of Gormley's body cases make a big thing of the orifices - mouth, genitals, anus etc - as the only exit and entry points between the inside and outside.

Later on, Gormley makes body cases from cast iron.  He also makes some out of concrete, notably a set of 300 boxes where the inside dimensions match those of people, so they would fit inside exactly. I get the idea but they don't do anything for me.

And then of course, there's his "Field" installations, which I really like.   Gormley sees these as almost the opposite of his body cases.   Tens of thousands of terracotta figures, with their very deep-set eyes,  are staring at you, making you self-conscious - the opposite of inviting the viewer to think about what's going on beyond the lead-lined skin of a Gormley look-alike.

Another interesting aspect of Field is that Gormley gets lots of people to make them.  Each person is assigned a row at a time and, apparently, they get engrossed with the process of using their hands to mould the clay into figures.  In some respects this reflects Gormley's use of his own body in other sculptures - he's not making something from scratch, he's using an existing resource.

Being a former engineer, the logistics of Field interest me.  In some versions, as many as 190,000 figures have been installed.  If everybody made 100 you'd still need almost 2,000 people to make that number!  I suppose the figures aren't fired because firing that number would take forever!   And what happens to Field when it's dismantled?  Or is it?