Speaker: Antony Gormley (Artist)
Presenter: Sui Jianguo (Artist, Professor of the Department of Sculpture in Central Academy of Fine Arts)
This is the third lecture of the CAFAM Lecture Series “Thoughts and Experiences”, which is co-hosted by the CAFA Art Museum and Galleria Continua, and supported by the British Council.
Sui Jianguo: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We are pleased to invite Sir Antony Gormley to be our speaker today. Sir Gormley came to Beijing in 2003 when he was invited to attend the exhibition “Asian Land” at the National Museum. During that time he visited CAFA for once, however, by then, CAFA Art Museum has not existed. He told me this is great to see the new fantastic building here. The theme of Gormley’s lecture today is about the capability and power of art to create the space.
►What is art? Is it a noun? Or a verb existing in the behavior of “eating bread”?
Antony Gormley: I am really interested in just using this time to ask some very basic questions here - what is art? what it works for? Is art a thing or a process? Is it a noun or a verb?
I think we could start with bread. We are sitting here together with a little slice of bread. We are here in our bodies, in space, in time. I can eat this material.
So during the process of eating bread, you just witnessed a sculpture was made. I ate this bread, the bread was becoming my energy, and might become my thought. This is what I am interested in — how things that we already know be transformed. So we could look at the world again, in a way that we wouldn’t — if we haven’t yet come across this translation in this way.
The work “Bread Line” consisted of a whole lot of bread, which is re-described in a way that we don't see so often. The work didn’t take any skill, but it invited us to look, and to think, and even to walk along with this line.
I am thinking of where art exists. Does it exist in an object? Or does it exists in a viewer who has to walk the line, and experience the experience of someone else who did those bites but didn’t swallow them?
What I try to describe is the transition, the function and the nature of art. I think it is a very extraordinary time that we are living in, in terms of what art is, how we can act on the world, and how it calls upon us to participate in its generation.
It is very important that art is more a place than a thing, and more a process than an object. What Duchamp called “the viewer doing half of the work” is a way that the place of art has become an open place of participation and possibility. It is a place where the future can be imagined and molded.
►What I want to experience is “the interaction between the place and two kinds of potential”
This work named “Rearranged Desert”. I went back to a place that is powerful for me, where Walter De Maria make his parallel chalk drawing in Arizona. I made this pile, taking a hand-size stone, and throwing it as far as I could. I used this as the radius to clear the whole area by stones.
This “rearranged desert” seems like not much different from the desert I found, but it is a place about human energy, will and the possibility of the interface between matter, body, and mind. You can’t sell this work. It is just about the interaction between the place and two kinds of potential - the potential of the material and my will, my bodily potential.
I am thinking about something about the body. Actually, a planet is a body in space; every stone there is a body in space, which is acted by gravity. We are all in a common, continued space.
What I want to do is to make a connection to objects which are spinning around. I throw the stones to all directions, trying to put myself into a position where the force was generated. I think I was trying to find a way to re-concern the body not as a hero or a representation, but as a place of possibility. I am searching a way to engage the body which is not about putting a work, telling a story, or making your representation. I was interested in how to talk about the body as a place that we all live in as another side of the appearance. Now I am speaking to you from the other side of my appearance. I don’t know what I look like. What I look like belongs to you. Now I am watching your face and I aware that what you look like belongs to me.
►Waiting absence - Memory of the body
The work “Snowfall” is an opening for me to think that maybe we can use a work to create a kind of memory of a place of the body. If I do so, what we want to say through this place?
This work was been made even earlier. I just ran as fast as I could, and then backward fallen in the snow. This work is like my first tool to make a shadow, an absence that the other people can fill with their own experience. It is about waiting for absence, indicating a place where a particular body once was there but then anybody could be. It uses common material and common gestures, like eating or walking. But what for? I want to require again into the condition in which we all live.
► Bring art back to everyday life
This work called “Bed”. It is a body divided into two parts. I made it by eating bread.
In the renaissance, people would impose an idea/image in their mind in the marble to create a beautiful body, but I am thinking what is the process of life? Can we make a reversion and change the places of things? Bread is normally for consuming but not for keeping.The process of transformation is something that all of us are involved in, a business that turning matter into mind.
This work is called “Bed” but looks like a tomb. It is not an accident. It is a whole one thing that made out of many different pieces. It looks like Carl Andre’s "Equivalent VIII". It is also not an accident. I still like having conversations with minimalism, with these big heroes of American art in the post-war period. But I want to bring art back from formalism into things to do with everyday life.
►Mediating between gravity and centrifuge
The next step is just about to register the body. About two years ago, this is just a normal thing happening in my studio every day.I just stood there, and other people covered me with plaster and then let me out. There were two things I have to do - Trying to make the fragile plaster mold last longer, and making the plaster complete sealed. So the dark, interior empty space would hold the precise imprint of my body and the other side of the insulating skin.
The next challenge was to put the work in the meaning of the relationship with the world. I called this work “Close”. It is like a mother and a child - a very traditional subject for art. This is a body that mediates between gravity and centrifuge, and it is desperately trying to hang on to the surfaces of our planet.
This work is a complete opposite of a heroic, male, standing sculpture, but acting on us as a kind of reminder, telling us that things are not fixed. It let us think, in the history of sculpture, how often it has played the role of the architectures, in order to let us think the social order, the hierarchy of power, and how it is fixed, what they did in term of reinforcing the social order (eg. the status of Mao). So this sculpture is the opposite, a demonstration of our dependence on the planet.
►Nothing is fixed, however, what is the essence of a thing?
Now I want to talk about science. It is important for me that my work is about using the potential of the body in sculptures, which obviously pertain to a status. It’s not for representation, but for reflexibility.
We all know that nothing is fixed. The earth is spinning around its axis at a speed of 1470km/h. Planets are traveling around the sun at a speed of about 104,000km/h. All of that is a very small part in terms of the journey our galaxy is making. We made 20 circles around the galaxy in the last 50 billion years, traveling at the speed around 828,000km/h. But actually, it is inconsiderable with putting the cosmological context which now called Hubble constant. Every 3.25 lightyears we are traveling away from all other gravitationally clusters in space, which is about 265,680km/h. This is an expanding universe. The sculpture actually can remind us about change, and free us from the constraints of those intimations of being structured conceptually, politically, ideologically, and physically.
The critical thing here is what is the economy of our relationship with an object like this: still, silent, not surfaces to see, and no beautifully crafted representation. What does it call on from us? It calls on everything that it doesn’t have. It has no thought, no feeling, only an inert piece of material. Bur nevertheless it been formed, into a void empty box in a human form. It calls on our feeling, thinking and potential energy with our empathy to inhabit its space. I think this is a completely other kinds of economy. This is the economy of “the beholder share” and “the viewer doing the half work”. The art is no longer about the exercise of power, money or possession of beauty, but the idea of a place, in which we not only feel our vulnerability, but also our potential - each of us, individually, as participants in making the future.
This is a work that investigated time and appearance. This work called “First Tree”. The first year’s growth was marked in the center of this 80-year-old pine tree. I am thinking about how time existed in these kinds of objects, and how objects draw time from us, time of contemplation, meditation, or time out from doing.
►Appearance is untrustworthy
This work was made up of 47 bowls. Each bowl was put inside the one before. The relationship between the inner emptiness and space around is about the meditation on the vessel, which means to contain the space. Also, I want to think about the behavior of the replies of water, also the way that things are revealed by light. Appearance is not necessarily telling you the nature of a thing. The appearance itself is temporal, uncertain, and untrustworthy.
This work called “Floor”. The shape is an outline of my feet. This is the cut out of rubber. The idea is translated from the work “Tree”. What I want to say is - skin is not the essence of a thing.
I want to apply the same idea of “taking away” in some other works. This work is about a 53-year-old Australian woman named Roland Williams. We remove 66.66 percent of her weight and turned her into a sculpture and placed her in a desert. This is a participatory project in which we invited people to come and be scanned. The process is about moving the exceedance of the appearance, revealing what in a core of a body and then revealing that to light.
►I am interested in the idea of appearance and disappearance
The site we placed the work is carefully chosen. This is a salt lake, 70km long and 30km wide. There are 51 sculptures made from 51 individuals from the age of 6 to 75. Half of them are aboriginal and half of them are white folks. The idea was using this sacred place of dreaming to reconnect the notion of identity, space, and land. The participation of these people was not just donating their body, but also the way they experience the work. You can see these marks are the pathway when we stored these sculptures. Everybody was walking on this white, chemical surface, leave these prints. The work becomes a kind of drawing, when the rains or visitors come, a new drawing comes.
There is two distinct way to see this work. One is from the top of hell, so you will see an emerging drawing. The other is yourself became the work.
What you will feel like to be out there? This place is about 40-50 degrees centigrade. This is not just a visual but a physical experience. You will carry your memory and feeling of the last piece you encountered(a woman/man/child) to the next sculpture you met. This is a relation of feel, in which you as a viewer will make a connection. I am interested in the idea of appearance and disappearance, of potential and entropy - the thing that we were looking at with the possibility of growth but also with the possibility of loss and diminishment.
The works at the very edge are hardly visible. They like hairs in the viewing of a rifle or a pair of binoculars. Sometimes it was hot, so the sculptures were waving in the heatwave. As you looked around, you will be attracted by these tiny interruptions in your horizons that led your forward. So the experience of these works is very physical, but also perceptual. You were involved in negotiating your passage through space and taking your memory of where you were and encounters that you had to the next point of confrontation or meeting.
►Host: Refind the balance between “nature” and “human nature”
This work is exhibited now in my exhibition “Host” in Galleria Continua. It was only be made twice before, one is about 18 years ago in 1997.
The last piece asks what is the relationship between memory and anticipation, between identity and land. What I want to ask is some really simple questions - who we ware, where we come from, and where we are going. This work uses totally uninscribed material. We stored a hundred tones of clay from local and 50,000 liters of waters form the Tianjin sea. The work is unformed. Where the art exists is absolutely in the viewer who is invited to stand on the threshold, between the constructed world of the architecture, and the unformed elemental world of water and earth.
You could say this is a watercolor painting that simply uses the ground, the cultural space of the gallery in order to bring the outside in, to make nature have a dialogue with culture. But art exists in every viewer who stand in the threshold and makes that link between mater and mind. For me, it is the only purpose for the art in the end - to help each of us in some way to feel our power and potential in relation to the earth.
In a time of Anthropocene, we are so aware of the industrialization. The idea of the space of art can give us this opportunity of rebalancing, and maybe to discover that human nature is just a part of nature.
Thank you very much.
