Antony Gormley @ Royal Academy, London

Antony Gormley, Iron Baby, 2019

What I love most about Antony Gormley’s works is the material from which they are made:  steel. Even though little is written about the significance of his use of steel as a medium, it must be no coincidence that Gormley chooses a material that has enabled every form of modern transport, industrial and economic power, wealth, world wars and eventually the Holocaust. Gormley doesn’t make overt reference to any of the uses of steel in the twentieth century. In fact, as we see in this current exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, he turns the material against itself, throwing it into a whole new playing arena. He uses steel to create a playground in which museum visitors get to experience art, their bodies and their selves in ways at odds with its more conventional experience within modernity and the museum.

Antony Gormley, Clearing VII, 2019
Installation View

Inside the courtyard, we can be forgiven for stumbling over the cast Iron Baby. Those who do stop to examine the piece are asked to begin questioning all that they know about art, about the Royal Academy, about courtyards and babies. My first response was to bend down and look at Iron Baby, its face to the ground, legs and arms tucked under its tiny body. My impulse was to bend down and see if it needed help, to rescue it. This call to our emotive response as a way to connect with his sculptures is typical of Gormley’s art. I had so much fun watching people engage with the casts of Gormley’s naked body, scattered around the floor, walls and ceiling of the room titled, Lost Horizon. The works draw visitors because they are human in scale, form and posture, only to disappoint because they are inhuman in their material of cast iron and their ability to defy gravity. It’s the human in them and the human in us that come together as Gormley transgresses the structural imperatives of the museum. But it is the vulnerability of the baby, and even more so of the Slabworks that I makes them intellectually challenging, throwing us back on our desire to come close. The Slabworks are not even given human form. They are slabs of weathering steel, put together to give the impression of a human form. One piece lies on its side, apparently in agony – or perhaps it is dreaming – another leans against the wall, as if waiting for a light, one is perfectly supine, perhaps about to be delivered inside a full body scan because it is sick. We attribute human characteristics and emotions to steel, this most intransigent and unrelenting of materials. And then, having stepped back as we recognize their inhumanness, the figures arouse our emotions, as though they are reaching out to touch us.

Antony Gormley, Slabworks, 2019

The quality for which Gormley’s work is perhaps best known, is its transformation of spaces – making the gallery into a fun park if nothing else. The piece in this exhibition that most brilliantly does this is Clearing VII (2019) in which something like 8km of aluminum tube becomes a knotted mess, filling the entire volume of one room. The radicality of the work is again in the way that it transforms the gallery space. It fills the negative space of the room, pushing visitors to the edges, challenging us to navigate our way to the door on the other side of the space. We duck and bend, contort our bodies as we try to avoid stepping on the aluminum – because as good museum visitors we have been trained not touch the art work. Of course, the getting lost inside the maze of steel is just the point. There is nothing to see here, nothing to look at because it is just one big steel mess. Instead we have an experience, like that of an obstacle course to navigate. We meet sculpture that pushes us out of the way. The steel is uniform, unyielding, though it can be very beautiful in the light. Other of Gormley’s works are anything but beautiful.

Antony Gormley, Matrix III, 2019
Installation View

I hesitate to say that in this exhibition there is nothing to look at. Particularly because even though the works are about us, about our physical and emotional experience in the art gallery, together with art, they are often challenging our vision. Whether it is the interconnected lattice of squares and frames in Matrix III (2019), or the dark cavernous space of Cave (2019), we are called to see the world differently, to be deceived and to have our illusions removed from before our eyes. And Gormley is contributing to the new world in which we are living by rendering steel as human, steel as our shining light through the mass of what we thought we knew, but by turning all that inside out, we discover we didn’t know. According to Gormley, knowing nothing, is at the heart of our deception.