Antony Gormley: Body Politic @ White Cube Bermondsey
“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Wandering through the polished concrete expanse of the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey is like the experience of a post-industrial Valley of the Kings. The objects littering the main corridor, as well as the four exhibition chambers, seem at first like the relics of some lost civilisation. They might be devotional idols or obsolete gods, no longer worshipped, though still possessing an aura of sanctity. Antony Gormley’s exhibition titled Body Politic is divided into five discrete sections: Retreat, Bind, Stand, Resting Place, and Weave Works.
Antony Gormley, Body Politic, 2023. Installation View. White Cube, London. Photo Courtesy: White Cube.
All five components of Body Politic are concerned with individuality and mediation with the spaces and other bodies around us. For example, both Weave Work and Bind interact with ideas around dissolution of the external boundaries of our bodies, entailing a sublimation into the universal. This fusing of the internal and external is reminiscent of a Buddhist notion of a world singularity where the subjective individual or self is something of an illusion. However, notions of the spiritual, ideal, and immaterial butt firmly against the pure physicality of steel, brick, and concrete.
While walking through Gormley’s exhibition, it is almost impossible not to be reminded of the Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias. A warning against the innately human sin of hubris, this poem seems perfectly illustrated by the forms that Gormley has constructed for this white-washed space. A traveller recounts to the narrator of the poem about an encounter with the remains of a bygone kingdom, or empire, perhaps one once thought to be unsurpassable in its splendour. A fiefdom whose riches allowed for the raising of a colossal statue of its “king of kings” Ozymandias. This statue now razed, laying broken in the sand, belies not “cold command” but instead stands as evidence of an arrogance and impudence against the incontrovertible march of time. Values and ideals formerly believed to be immutable now scattered with the drifting sands. The genius of Shelley’s poem is its omni-relevance, a warning to every would-be Ozymandias no matter how deaf the ears.
In 1992 Fukuyama famously predicted the coming of the “end of history”. Neo-Liberal Democratic supremacy would be the result of a long dialectical conflagration, and not communism as Marx had predicted. Fukuyama’s counter-prediction of a global hegemony led by the West was also supposed to bring unprecedented stability and security, which, as is now clear to us in the 2020s, has not materialised. It is the symptoms of neo-liberalism of which Gormley’s show seems to be the most critical. Pestilent by-products of Western modernity such as rampant individualism, polarising identity politics, and increased insularity are all under scrutiny here.
Anthony Gormley, Retreat, 2023. White Cube, London. Photo Courtesy: Hamish Strudwick.
The first group of works you encounter as you enter White Cube is Retreat. Nine grey concrete sculptures are arranged at equal distance along the length of the central corridor. They are tightly formed from rigid cuboids that only just express the huddled human form from which they are cast. Reminiscent of his sculptures from 1981-2, Three Ways: Mould Hole and Passage, which are among his first to employ the technique of casting his own body, Retreat now suggests a much more guarded and defensive posture both literally and conceptually. Gormley’s idea of the body as a personal bunker is reinforced by these concrete forms. Punctured only by one orifice for exit and entry, each figure suggests an impenetrable shield against the outside world. The essential toughness and rigidity of these sculptures asks us whether this defensive posture is in fact a protection or an entombment. Inevitably such dramatic attempts to barrier ourselves against the external world prohibits us from threats as well promises. A lack of receptiveness to external influence, either corrupting or enriching, which is exemplified for example by an echo-chamber media landscape is critiqued here. We are forced to consider the consequences of such juvenile confidence in, and neurotic defensiveness of the ‘known’. To what degree is this personal protection also a restriction?
Antony Gormley, Bind, 2023. White Cube, London. Photo Courtesy: Hamish Strudwick.
The first room on your left, contains the work entitled Bind. A lone figure is locked in the centre of the room at the intersection of five steel beams. In, the film accompanying the exhibition by John O’Rourke, the work is described as a meditation on the relationship between our body and external space. Like probing limbs emanating from the central figure, the steel beams assert the limitations of the space’s volume. The information gathered from these limbs therefore, delimits the possibilities available to the body of movement and freedom. These interactions with the outside world manifest the dialectic between inhibition and prohibition, possibility and denial inherent in living within enclosed spaces. Gormley’s interest in the body as the receptacle or container of consciousness makes metaphor of the limits of the body to the external world. Not only is this an exploration of the relationship between external surfaces and volumes, but it is also a proposition concerning the ways our inner essential mind or spirit inhabits limits of the body’s internal volume. Questions are raised around how we feel the limits of our bodies in environments of different volumes, and to what extent the external defines the internal.
Antony Gormley, Stand, 2023. White Cube, London. Photo Courtesy: Hamish Strudwick.
Next along is Gormley’s anti-monument entitled Stand which manifests an open dialogue about monumentality and statues of remembrance. With this work we are called to question a society’s right to erect an object with a normative statement so immutable. The anti-monument reflects debates cast into the fore in recent years, which reached their zenith in the UK with the toppling of Colston’s statue in Bristol. This statue is constructed of 150mm Corten blocks whose joints are manufactured such that the figure can be dismantled as easily as it was fabricated. In effect, obsolescence is built into the construction of this monument and this challenges our perception of the role memorialising statues play in our social narratives. Unlike Shelley’s shattered effigy of Ozymandias, hubris and obsequious devotion to legacy are the very things Gormley’s Stand seeks to critique.
Antony Gormley, Resting Place, 2023. White Cube, London. Photo Courtesy: Hamish Strudwick.
Turning left again along the corridor you find Resting Place. The scene in the room, when you crouch to ground level, is like a sprawling necropolis, or an archaeological site in a concrete desert. If you walk around long enough, watching your feet, slowly stepping through between the constructions, it’s easy to disassociate them from their intended human form. Then, it surprises you each time, the blocks suddenly gain a humorous anthropomorphism. A jovially obscene pose is struck by the blocky figure at your feet. The inanimate objects adopt, momentarily, a veritable personality. Equally quickly however the scene again acquires the form of a necropolis or mass grave in the austere surroundings. Or perhaps more like an open morgue, the bodies displayed in the positions they were found.
It is hard to avoid the resemblance to images we see all too frequently now in the nightly news. Bodies left strewn, either on beaches, or in the fractured remains of apartment blocks. The evidence of a contemporary politics that demonises migrants and problematises the very notion of home and what it means to belong. Immigration, and emigration, either voluntary or involuntarily have been explored by Gormley in the past such as in Another Place of 1997. This group of works situated at Crosby beach in Liverpool features life scale casts of human figures. They are placed irregularly and distant from one another, buried to their ankles in the sand. Staring out to the sea which with each tide envelopes and uncovers them, they silently contemplate the possibility of departure. Both Another Place and Resting Place gain new prescience today when, either because of conflict or climate change, mass transit of people is more frequent, and the surrounding politics is most fraught.
What’s more, tension is created between the material and the form. According to Gormley each figure in Resting Place is entirely unique in terms of the configuration of the blocks and the pose. Ironically it is the brick shape the forms the very basis of the regularised formation of the architecture around us in urban environments. The contemporary urban setting, especially those patterned on a grid, is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Again, we are called to question how these regularised urban external spaces help to shape our individual identities and the way we organise our bodies to fit around them. Are we alienated from our true internal and external identity by a necessity to conform?
Antony Gormley, Weave Works, 2021. White Cube, London. Photo Courtesy: Hamish Strudwick.
Finally, leaving Resting Place, and crossing the corridor, you arrive at the group entitled Weave Works. Gormley is quoted, saying the only absolute site of freedom is in the infinite darkness of the body cavity. His forms suggest both an inner matrix, a semi-solid framework, as well as substance and physicality. Yet also the negative space in his lattice structured bodies offers the possibility that beneath the opaque veneer of skin there might be a vacuum where, at least spiritually, we might be able to retreat for safety. The Weave Works are first formed in 20mm square polystyrene, and then cast in solid recycled steel. This process of casting leaves no obvious trace between the blocks offering a sense of solidity and the rough texture left over from the polystyrene as well as the oxidized surface lend an organic quality.
Antony Gormley’s works effectively cast light on the universal human experience as well as point issues of hyper-specificity and focus. It is impossible not identify with the figures in life-scale, in their quiet repose, as well as awe at his anti-monument. Like the statue of Ozymandias, Gormley’s figures stand as evidence of an arrogance inherent in predictions of a neo-liberal ‘end of history’. We, like Shelley’s traveller, encounter these icons and idols and wonder at our own fates, and the fallibility of the status quo.
Antony Gormley’s Body Politic exhibited at White Cube Bermondsey from November 22 2023 to January 28 2024.
Hamish Strudwick
Features Co-Editor, MADE IN BED