Iron Baby

Antony Gormley's statue - unusually, not of himself - in the Royal Academy courtyard:

Inside, his new exhibition has just opened.

The baby, according to the show's Guardian review, is described by Gormley as "a bomb", ripe with destructive potential but vulnerable. OK then...

Yes, Gormley uses his own body for most of his sculpture. Predictably for the Guardian, that's a problem:

Gormley is a white, male, Cambridge-educated son of a pharmaceuticals magnate. This wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference to his work were it not for the fact that, in using his own body, he unavoidably presents himself as an everyhuman to whom we are all asked, impossibly, to relate. Furthermore, he leaves representations of this privileged white guy around a world dominated by privileged white guys. This is a one-size-fits-all universalism that is as problematic as it always has been.

Comments

[Dom]

“... in using his own body, he unavoidably presents himself as an everyhuman to whom we are all asked, impossibly, to relate.”

You can say that if he were any other race or gender. We can at least be glad that she didn’t include “Cis” as one of his problematic attributes.

[David]

Thought this had its moments, especially the figures from rectangles in the first room, but his stuff works much better outside especially Another Place in Crosby.

[TDK]

I popped into the Tardis and got a got of a review from the Guardian in 2020:

"Antony Gormley's latest work showing a BME man, demonstrates that white people are still stealing the stories of BME people. How many acts of cultural appropriation must happen before society decides that BME people must tell their own stories and not be mediated by privileged white men."

[Rob]

As he only has one fucking body he can’t do much else, can he?

Do Guardian weirdos truly believe all this stuff or are most of them trolling us?