Antony Gormley has always been preoccupied with the body. His cast-iron forms are not representational, but more like anonymous body cases that are arranged at uncomfortable angles, rise out of the floor, are suspended from the ceiling or stand as silent witnesses on Crosby sands looking out to the river Mersey.
When we stand before Gormley figures, we begin to reorientate ourselves; we find ourselves becoming aware of our own inner space—the space of the body. While Gormley works in a tradition of sculpture that stretches from the Khmer heads through Rodin's Age of Bronze, he also has the eye of an anthropologist (his first degree) and a deep interest in the contemplative practices of Teravada Buddhism. In this sense his body casts act as a catalyst for us, a route by which we can enter the space within, that space which Gormley says is without dimension, beyond direction and that transcends good and evil. Thus the human viewer and his or her response is required to complete the work. In this we have an echo of Anish Kapoor's question, "Where is the Art?" and a resonance with one of the deepest insights of quantum theory—that the observer and observed are one; they form an unanalysable whole.
In this sense the Hayward exhibition represents an important leap forward, for it is concerned not only with this inner space, the personal space of the body and its outer defining skin, but with the space of the gallery itself and its characteristic surface of cast concrete. The task Gormley has set himself is to create works that explore this dual relationship, a series of matrices in which gallery space and object intersect and play off each other. Indeed, the experience begins before we even enter the Hayward's doors, for Gormley has positioned a series of body casts on the roofs of buildings located on either side of the Thames.
As to the works inside the gallery, I can pick out only a few. Space Station provides an ideal confrontation with the space of the gallery and its inner skin. This massive 27-ton structure is composed of pieced boxes in quarter-inch steel plate that stretches up to the ceiling and rests on just three balancing points. Steel plate itself rusts and so begins to develop its own skin to complement that of the gallery walls.
While Space Station defines its space within the room, its very scale challenges us to see it, or rather to see beyond the surface to what it may represent. It is only when we glimpse it from a stairwell above that we catch the suggestion of a human figure; from other angles it appears to be some cold and alienating machine better fitted for the depths of space.
Probably the most striking work is Blind Light—a perspex room that contains nothing more than a cloud, but a cloud lit so brightly that when we enter we lose all sense of place and direction. In addition, the dense water vapour muffles sound so we begin to question that sense most vital to us—proprioception, that ability to know exactly where our body is positioned in space. As we move cautiously though this blinding density in search of the security of another living figure, we become aware of our own visual apparatus—the "floaters" that are always present in the vitreous humour of the eyeball but rarely acknowledged. Walking through Blind Light, I was reminded of the composer John Cage's experience in an anechoic room of becoming aware of two sounds—one was the blood pulsing through his body and the other, high pitched, of the sound of his own nervous system. Blind Light, is I think, one of the most direct ways that Gormley has made us aware of the space our bodies inhabit but constantly take for granted.
One of Gormley's earlier pieces was Field, a collection of tiny terracotta figures made by members of a Liverpool community. With Allotment he has created 300 figures based on the inhabitants of the island of Malmö. Maybe these are grave markers, maybe a memorial to a culture that still exists. The work resonates with its location in that Gormley requested the same white concrete mix that had been used in the building of the National Theatre and which has a particular response to light. With Hatch, we enter another type of matrix that, as with Blind Light, can be quite unnerving. In place of the softness of a cloud we have a maze of harsh aluminium tubing reaching out from walls and ceiling. It is as if we had entered a three-dimensional Mondrian painting and must discover a way of placing our body in order to negotiate our way through the matrix.
Much as been said about the relationship between art and science, some of it rather superficial, yet in the hours I spent walking through Gormley's spaces my thoughts turned to two areas. One was the failure of the artificial intelligence programme and the other was the physicist's dream of a theory of everything. As regards the latter, some are seeking to create a pre-space structure out of which space-time and matter would emerge. The tools they use are abstract algebras, which the mathematician David Hilbert defined as "the relationship of relationships." Gormley has made use of this insight since these "relationships of relationships" are present in his series of Matrices and Expansions, just as they were in his Quantum Cloud pieces. Here human forms emerge out of open structures, matrices of straight or curved rods, while in Capacitor the body cast and open matrix have been combined as if the human body is generating a field of energy.
And as to that first consideration, the programme to produce true artificial intelligence, here I feel Gormley has something profound to say to us. The original AI programme was defined in 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, with the goal of constructing machines that would begin to function like artificial brains, make original mathematical discoveries and see and negotiate their way through a landscape. Later, the goal of a full understanding of language, translation and the composition of "music of classical quality" was added. While there was some degree of progress, half a century has now passed and the ultimate goal of true AI seems as remote as ever.
To enter Gormley's exhibition is to enter a laboratory of the self, of what it means to be human; an incorporate being with a sense of self and the skill of proprioception. All these things are familiar to us from the first years of life, but they involve what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called "tacit" knowledge—inherent skills whose explicit structure is not consciously known. In all his work, Gormley makes us aware of the vast reservoir of tacit knowledge we hold in the body and of our ability of negotiate the world. Yet it also tells us that we don't really know, in any analytic way, how it is we can do these things. And if we don't know then we will never be able to programme a machine with the inherent abilities of a corporeal being.
