The Thing Itself: Antony Gormley at the Royal Academy

The Thing Itself: Antony Gormley at the Royal  Academy

There’s a drawing in the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy that stood apart from plenty of others that did not detain me. It was larger than many; but what arrested my, by then, slightly bewildered gaze was the seeming familiarity of the subject: a shadowy, indistinct figure shuffling (fleeing?) away from the viewer, along a faintly sketched tunnel or crevice. Apart from the contours of the tunnel and the dark figure, the white paper is blank, suggesting a hostile frozen landscape.

It reminded me at once of the cover illustration to a strange novel by Adam Roberts – The Thing Itself. This is a philosophical horror story (but not in the sense of some utterly botched academic essay). It takes as a starting point Kant’s belief that we only know a “world” of appearances, through our senses, and what lies behind the appearances, the Thing-in-Itself, is unknown to us.

In Roberts’s novel, with more than a nod to HP Lovecraft and the John Carpenter film The Thing, one of a pair of polar scientists penetrates beyond appearances and encounters The Thing Itself. This turns out to be the stuff of incredible horror… and so the story is up and running.

My first somewhat banal thought about the eerie Gormley drawing was that it would serve as a far better cover illustration for the Roberts novel than the one it actually sports.

My second, more considered, thought was that Kant’s phrase, or Roberts’s adaptation, is not a bad one to have in mind when looking at Gormley’s art, although Gormley’s take on reality ultimately differs from Kant’s.

After a conventional education at a Roman Catholic boarding school and Cambridge University, Gormley took himself off to the East and studied Buddhism. The world as appearances, flux, and transience became the chief subject of his work. It is also the reason why the human body (actually mainly his own body) is of such significance to him, and what he is best known for depicting. Of which more below.

I am a bit resistant to art where you need to read the guide to tell you what to think about it and how to react to it. Too much of the Gormley show falls into this category, especially his four big pieces, each taking up a whole gallery space.

One is a vast steel nest, spreading from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. It challenges the boundaries of sculpture: the space occupied by the piece and the viewer [is] one.

At first, it was an essential attribute of the work that visitors were encouraged to clamber through the steel coils (sculpture and viewer intermingle, appearances dissolve). Later, such intimacy has been forbidden (falls and lacerations perhaps?) – viewers must creep around the walls, rather undercutting the original concept.

(But on a subsequent visit the tangles do seem to have obtruded more on the visitors' peripheral space - so that care of both head and foot is required, restoring the concept somewhat. Perhaps the work has sagged a bit, adding a metaphor for ageing.)

Next, a colossal metal cage or series of cages, suspended just above head height, is, we are told, a structure that, when one tries to look into or through it, [undermines] the certainty and solidity of the three dimensional world. Appearances wobble again.

But there is a direct, non-conceptual experience. If one stands underneath and looks up, one experiences a disorienting combination claustrophobia (from the whole pressing down, inches away) and upward vertigo (striving to make sense of the endless cages within cages above).

Then there is an enormous cuboid structure, hollow inside.

The visitor is invited to enter through a narrow, angular, pitch black passage, feeling the way along to a dim central space- representing the interiorised darkness.. of the body. Aha.

Finally, in this list, a whole gallery has ben flooded with seawater- the invasion of the inside by the outside. The guide invites us to ask the question: is it an image of destruction – or of potential creation? Or is it a somewhat hackneyed idea seen in various manifestations in the outer reaches of many a Venice Biennale?

To me, the effectiveness of this expanse of water does not lie in the stated concept, but in its combination  with the far, closed gallery door. An air of mystery, if not menace, is conveyed. A big door beyond water: Nobel Adventure or Fatal Folly if you attempt the Crossing? what lies beyond - Enchantment or Doom?

What mainly redeems the exhibition from the risk of very overblown pretentiousness are the famous Bodies – a wonderful 360 degree room of them.

They are indeed the Thing Itself. Here is where Gormley purports to get beyond the world of appearances into the only space- ourselves- which we experience unmediated by appearances. 

The bodies are very Thingy in material – cast iron, and very Gormley, being cast from his own body; but also very solitary. This latter effect is strangely increased as the statues multiply – the more of the same, the more alone each individual figure seems.

For us, these figures appear as almost sarcophagi, as being beyond life, solid husks clinging to their traces of humanity.

But for Gormley the experience is different. The act of their creation, of being covered in plaster to make the cast, enhances his experience of his body. It is another kind of space without coordinates. The casting, for the artist, registers a lived moment of time.

It is The Gormley  Itself.

November 2019