Mick Hartley: ArtSpeak

Antony Gormley's "Blind Light" at the Hayward has certainly had its share of publicity. The BBC has a slideshow, while this Times' piece was pretty much lifted straight out of the advance PR:

The artist Antony Gormley unveiled his first London solo exhibition today, featuring a glass chamber which makes visitors disappear in the mist.
The installation is the highlight of Gormley’s Blind Light exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, which promises to be one of the major arts events of the summer, competing with the Tate Modern's giant slides.

Well, I've now done both - been down the slides at Tate Modern, and walked inside Gormley's steam-filled glass box. Do I get the T-shirt? What distinguishes both is that they're more fairground than art gallery. To paraphrase that old saying about religion and morals, when no one knows any more what art is, then anything can step in to the space that's left.

Here's Gormley, from the exhibition guide:

Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter this interior space that is the equivalent of being at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important to me that inside it you find the outside. Also you become the immersed figure in an endless ground, literally the subject of the work.

It is very important to me that inside it you find the outside. I felt the same way. Once inside it was very important to me to find the outside. Well, maybe I exaggerate: I didn't feel panic, or terror, or euphoria, but there is that slight concern about finding the way out once you're in. I walked tentatively forward for a while. You can't see anything beyond about a yard (that's 0.9144 meters) in front of you: it's just a whiteish-grey blank. Occasionally someone else will loom into your little observational area. I eventually reached the far side, then pretty much stuck by the wall as I made my way slowly back to the exit. It's like - well, it's like walking around in the dark. You could recreate the experience in your own home by going to the toilet in the middle of the night without switching the lights on - maybe that's where Gormley got the idea - with the added frisson of being half-asleep, plus the chance of treading on the cat and falling down the stairs.

From the Times piece:

“Didn’t Burke say, ‘there is no beauty without some terror in it’?” Gormley said. “But we have had three test groups in there and on the whole it has been euphoria, not panic. Usually you can hear laughter - sometimes nervous, but also joyful.
“I think regressive behaviour is normal. It’s similar to that sense of childlike delight you feel when you wake up in the morning and it’s snowing and all you want to do is go out and throw snowballs. You feel, ‘my goodness, this is my world but suddenly it has been transformed into something very different.”

Around 25 visitors at a time will be allowed to feel their way around the installation. Gormley said: “By the time you come across somebody, you are already well inside their ordinary zone of intimacy. That is quite intriguing to me. People react to each other in a different way in that environment.

“The most important thing for me is that it is a totally open work. There is no content other than what is brought by the viewer. The idea is to make no distinction between life and art.

“I have tried to make it as simple as possible. On one level it is the archetypical minimalist glass box, but there is a cloud of unknowing in it.”

Burke....zone of intimacy....a cloud of unknowing....ooh he's good, isn't he? And that old line about making "no distinction between life and art"....it'd be fine if he really meant it, but if he did he'd be out of a job. The distinction, which I've no doubt he's perfectly well aware of, is that for art I have to go to art galleries and fork out money; for life I don't.

And that's the main attraction. In fact, from the all the publicity it would seem to be the highlight of London's cultural life this summer: an enclosure where you can't see where you're going. Maybe it's a metaphor.

The rest of the exhibition? There's Allotment 11, a room full of concrete blocks based on the measurements of inhabitants of Malmo (why Malmo?...we're not told). Here's that exhibition guide again:

The individual units that congregate to form Allotment are derived from the vital statistics of real people aged between 18 months and 80 years. Besides the height and width of the bodies, thirteen precise measurements were taken from each of the 300 volunteers. The hollow concrete "body cases" constructed from these very personal dimensions have apertures for the mouth, ears, anus, and genitals...

[A clue there, perhaps, as to why Malmo: only the Swedes would put up with it. "Excuse me, I'm an artist. From England. Can I take precise measurements of your anus and genitals?" "Of course, yes, that is not a problem."]

"The body is our first habitation, the building our second. I wanted to use the form of this second body, architecture, to make concentrated volumes out of a personal space that carries the memory of an absent self, articulated through measurement... Bodies and buildings, cities and cells, monuments and intimacies, each of the "rooms" in this piece is someone's, is connected to the moving body of an individual, alive and breathing." Antony Gormley, 1997

He talks the talk alright - but this is a room full of rectangular concrete blocks, for god's sake. That's it. Aesthetically appealing it isn't. Interesting it isn't. You might as well shovel in a load of rubble from a building site and claim that each brick represents an animal in the Amazonian rain forest. It'd be better, in fact: you'd be making a suitably ecological point as well - "the fact that the dimensions of each piece correspond to those of threatened animals in the rain forest reinforces the message that lies at the heart of the work, while subverting our normal perception of what, precisely, is waste, as the natural world is cast aside in humanity's relentless destructive quest...." Or something.

The other main feature of the exhibition is Event Horizon, "an ambitious new installation commissioned by The Hayward" which consists of "life-size figures - casts of the artist's body - placed on rooftops and walkways both north and south of the Thames".

Event Horizon invites people to look afresh at the city and explores the way in which people view and interact with their everyday urban surroundings. As Gormley has said, "As you walk out on to the sculpture terraces you might encounter individuals or groups of people pointing at the horizon in the manner of a classical group of sculptures. This is exciting to me: reflexivity becoming a shared activity...
"The title comes from cosmological physics and refers to the boundary of the observable universe. Because it is expanding, there are parts of the universe that will never be visible because their light will never reach us. I think that one of the implications of Event Horizon is that people will have to entertain an uncertainty about the work's dimensions: the spread and number of bodies. Beyond the figures that you can actually see, how many more are there that you can't see?" Antony Gormley 2007

Again there's the inflated language: people will have to entertain an uncertainty about the work's dimensions. You mean, they won't be able to see all the figures? It's the language doing all the work here: the actual piece - though probably the most successful in the show, conjuring a faintly disturbing Big Brother-type atmosphere with all those statues up on the rooftops looking at you - is nothing special. It's clever publicity, though.

The exhibition's a disappointment, then. What really annoys, though, is the the way it's presented; the language used to push its claim of relevance and importance. Gormley, as you can see from the quotes I've included, is something of a master at this. But peer closely and the meaning dissolves. It's all wind, blown up with a monumental sense of self-importance:

The body is our first habitation, the building our second. I wanted to use the form of this second body, architecture, to make concentrated volumes out of a personal space that carries the memory of an absent self, articulated through measurement...

It's the same kind of postmodern discourse that's so disfigured English studies over the past couple of decades: the same way of using language to intimidate rather than inform; to impress rather than educate. There are maybe a couple of differences though. Firstly, artspeak tends not to have the same grandiose baroque flourishes as academic postmodernism. It's a more home-grown - which is to say anglophone - phenomenon, and doesn't rely to the same extent on the French maîtres à penser like Lacan, Althusser, or Derrida. Secondly, with artspeak, there would appear to be no possibility of a Sokal moment; no hoax to expose the hollow pretentiousness of it all. If major art galleries can pay thousands of pounds for tins of shit produced by a guy aiming to show what crap the art world is, and then, when it turns out not to be shit, say, oh well, it doesn't matter, it doesn't affect the subversive humour of the work, then clearly there's no way of getting through. The whole set-up is impregnable.

Not that Gormley is a complete con-artist, of course. He has a substantial body of work behind him, including Angel of the North. That's why I went along to this exhibition genuinely expecting something worthwhile, and why I was so disappointed to find such a poor show inflated by this pretentious and insulting artspeak. Why do we put up with it?