A highfalutin way to recycle old ideas
Exhibition Antony Gormley: Subject Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
Antony Gormley stands in the far corner of the Sackler Gallery at Kettle’s Yard, a melancholy figure bathed in the wan light from an unseen window. If it isn’t Gormley himself, but a grid of steel bars filling in the contours of a human form, anyone even slightly familiar with Gormley’s work will realise that the body in question is the artist’s own. Britain’s best-known sculptor has always treated his body as a “ready-made” human form to be replicated in rods, cast in iron or even moulded in stacks of sliced bread. There are large numbers of surrogate Gormleys dotted all over Britain: projecting from walls, perched sentinel-like on rooftops or gazing off across beaches and mudflats.
For this exhibition, he uses just three incarnations of himself in his attempts to “activate and disrupt” one of Britain’s best-loved and most distinctive art institutions. But they give what might otherwise appear a stark minimalist exercise an immediately Gormleyesque feel.
Now 67, Gormley, who was an anthropology student at Cambridge, stays away from the Fifties interiors that make Kettle’s Yard one of the city’s most magical corners, focusing on the white-walled exhibition spaces created by architect Jamie Fobert that were opened to the public in February.
Echoing the lopsided perspectives of the older part of Kettle’s Yard, Gormley throws Fobert’s four-square spaces out of alignment by driving a thin steel bar through his central gallery at above head height. As this emerges into the foyer, it crosses another bar projecting into the adjacent Sackler Gallery, at an exact right angle: a competing “horizon line”, which the first bar never quite meets. A vertical bar running from floor to ceiling completes this set of geometric “coordinates”.
If Gormley wanted to bring a “big idea” to his alma mater (Kettle’s Yard belongs to the university), his conception of these steel threads projecting notionally beyond the building into the infinity of external space doesn’t feel remotely new. His notion of the work being completed through the involvement of the viewer, who becomes, through the sparseness of the piece, the “subject” of the work, is, as he freely admits, borrowed from Marcel Duchamp.
None the less, the tension between the geometries of Fobert’s rectilinear spaces and Gormley’s off-kilter steel incursions has a satisfyingly severe logic. Indeed, an out-and-out minimalist would probably have left it at that. Gormley, however, can’t resist adding versions of himself, in the form of existing pieces, that serve as companion subjects for the viewer.
The eponymous Subject, that steel bar-figure, induces a certain pathos through its clever positioning, facing away from us at the far end of the gallery. Edge III, 2012, however, is one of Gormley’s generic and rather lumpen cast-iron self-images, projecting feet first from the wall at roughly bed level. The position of the unsupported figure is designed to suggest the sleep that comes with a sense of security in our architectural environment, though the stiffness of the figure hardly suggests relaxation.
Gormley’s conception of the body as a “place” in its own right is embodied in Slip, 2007, in which he appears as a diving figure plummeting from the ceiling of the Clore Learning Studio, formed from a wide mesh designed to suggest the latitudinal and longitudinal lines of the earth. Around it is the same volume of mesh pulled apart to create a kind of protective sac.
If it sounds intriguing in principle, the central figure is extraordinarily inexpressive, and the philosophical rationale, about “a transfusion of space internal and external to the body”, feels grafted on to the work, rather than intrinsic to what we’re seeing. It feels like a highfalutin way of justifying the recycling of old work in the absence of new ideas.
Until Aug 27. Details: 01223 748100; kettlesyard.co.uk