The Financial Times ran a review of Antony Gormley in their weekend edition, a curtain-raiser on an important installation at the Hayward. It's well worth reading, and I was struck in particular by the depth of Gormley's ambition and idealism around public art.

His metal human figures are to him "corpographs", characterless, far from idealised. He uses them "because the body is the basis of everything. It is how we bond with matter and it is the instrument through which all our impressions of being alive arrive, and all our expressions of being alive flow." It is a particularly non-materialist way of describing the importance of the body isn't it? The body as instrument, as vehicle. But the kicker comes at the end, when he's talking about how he'd like to campaign to have some important public art around King's Cross, soon to be the terminus for the Eurostar. He says it should be "a place that says something profound about Britain".

From I quote from the FT in full:

«I ask ... if thinks it is even possible to say something profound artistically about Britain.

"That was the question that 'Angel' asked. And I think that it is. It showed that art can be a force for hope, and the re-establishment of pride, and identity and all those elusive things that have taken a hell of a bashing."

He gives a final damning verdict on the state of the nation. "The way that Britain has become a place that aspires to be, and is, manipulated by financial instrument creators and managers, and has lost its ability to be a nation of makers, is an absolute tragedy".»

Is the belief in the ability of public art to be a force for hope tied to the nostalgia for a manufacturing economy? Or is that the particular nostalgia we allow an artist who works in rusted steel?

Labels: Gormley, UK

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