The human body is the most highly charged place in our experience. It is at once an inescapable prison and the portal to every conceivable flight of fantasy. Like sculpture itself, it is ancient, intractable, and conservative, yet capable of being refashioned, altered and sculpted.
What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 250
My own view is that his [Anthony Gormley] work is thoroughly mimetic and representational, but not of the human body as a narrative agent or actor; instead, the body is portrayed as a purely contemplative figure of witnessing and enduring in poses of suspended animation. Gormley subjects the processes of sculptural representation to a critical reshaping, so that the apparently familiar, recognizable results (and phobia about) sculpture. Gormleys figurative statues are “uncanny” in Freud’s sense of the word. That is, they are not visibly weird or grotesque but “strangely familiar”, both masculine and feminine, heimlich and unheimlich, homely and homeless.
What Gormley shows us, then, is that the body is a place, and that sculpture reveals the shape of that place, the invisible interior space where someone lives or has lived. That place is represented as a positive form, a “statue” that has to be seen as embodied darkness. The place of the body is also indicated as an absence, a negative impression or void, as in bed, or the implied interior of an architectural or biomorphic “case”, the sculptural object may remind us of a tomb or a womb, a casket or a seed pod in which the body is gestating. In either case, there is a sense of an impassive, almost featureless exterior hiding an explosive interior, much like the structure of a bomb.
Gormley is quite aware that his work is no mere communication of messages he might want to send. He stresses, in fact, that the process involves a necessary descent into blindness and unknowing. Unlike a sculptor who steps back and looks at his work from outside as carves it from stone, Gormley immerses himself in the material, encases himself, and buries himself alive.
The eloquence and power of the figure seems, moreover, inversely proportional to its dramatic or gestural insistence. It is as if the more passive, noncommittal, and self-absorbed the figure, the more “dominion” it exerts over the space around it.
What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P259
The photographs of interactions of passersby with these [Gormley’s Street] figures are most telling; they suggest a kind of intimacy and familiarity coupled with strangeness and dislocation. They assert their status as statues, affirming the muteness and stillness of sculpture. If his figures “simulate” anything like life, it is a transitional zone of sentience between consciousness and unconsciousness.
What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P 263
Of all Gormley’s works, it [Angel of the North] is the one that has sparked the most violent controversy. Vilified for its size, its monumentality, it expense, its danger as a distraction to the 90,000 motorists who pass it every day on the M1 , its propensity for attracting lightning, and even a pornographic image, Angel has nonetheless rapidly achieved and a landmark status of sorts. Already it seems that the question about Angel is not, what does it mean? But, how did it become a totem of this place? Beyond the obvious resonance with the spread-eagled figure of the thunderbird often found on Native American totem poles, the Angel resonates somehow with its abandoned, postindustrial, wasteland site, thereby helping to institute and resurrect it as place.
What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P269
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