Thoughts on a Thinking "Model" of Antony Gormley:

Recasting the History of Sculpture

TENSHIN Keiko

Introduction

Antony Gonnley (1950-), a British contemporary sculptor, is a thinking "model" to recast the history
of sculpture. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider some of his representative works on which I have
discussed in my graduation thesis l and to extend the range of my interpretation into his latest iron works.
My aim is not only to explain an idiosyncrasy and consistency amongst his various works, but also to
discern his locus in the history of sculpture. Many of the other's observations about Gonnley's works are
divided broadly into two tendencies, the resurrection of figurative sculpture 2 and the lineage of British
sculpture. 3 Certainly such kinds of perspectives would sympathize with Kenneth Clark's grief to the de-
generation of the body in art of those days, ironically finishing in the plate of Henry Moore's Reclining
Figure in his book, The Nude, printed in 1956 and furthennore, it must suit the geo-political strategy
which resists American Fonnalism. 4 However I would like to deal with Gonnley's sculptures outside
these contexts if possible. For the introduction of radical feminism,S ecology, post-colonialism and post~
structuralism into Art History seems to make it possible that sculpture may be encroached by ideology
again as it was prior to World War Two.
"The language of this art was the body", R. M. Rilke wrote in The Rodin-Book in 1903, must have
been the truth of sculpture that has been ceaselessly metamorphosing and pretending to be itself for a
century. Beyond the crisis of categorical collapse, sculpture with its plasticity like clay and durability
like iron was not as valuable as it is today. Gonnley's maxim "the body is the location of one's being"
produces special resonance in this time when the body acquires the visual renewal and universal lan-
guages as a cultural idiom. What I find myself in his sculpture, as every genuine sculptor and faithful
appreciators did, is "the language of sculpture,,6 that exceeds beyond antinomy between figurativeness

TENSHIN Keiko, "Essay on Antony Gonnley : Interface of Mind/Body and Emptiness / Embodiment Problem"
(in Japanese), Bijutsukakenkyu, No.17, Osaka Kyoiku University, 2000, pp.143-161.
2 Donald Kuspit, "The Decline, Fall and Magical Resurrection of the Body" Sculpture vol.l3. (May /June 1994),
pp.21-23 and Tom Flynn, The Body in Sculpture, London: Everyman Art Library, 1998.
3 Simon Wilson, British Art, from Holbein to the present age, The Tate gallery & the Bodley Head, 1979,
Japanese trans. by Tada Minoru, Iwasaki Bijutsu-sha. Co., Ltd. 2001and Lynne Cooke, "Re-definition : The
'New British' Sculpture of the Eighties" Starlit waters: British sculpture: an international art, 1968-1988,
Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1988, pp.45-49.
4 Andrew Causey points out the disagreement about sculpture between Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg. See
Causey, Sculpture Since 1945, London: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.61-63.
5 A leading scholar of Feminist Art History, Linda Nochlin supposes that fragments of the body in any scale, as
they appear in art from the end of the eighteenth century, carry the meaning of loss of narrative, canon, support,
base, and can be read as "metaphor of modernity" in The Body in Pieces : The Fragment as a metaphor of mod-
ernity, New York: Thames & Hudsow 1994.
6 Graham. D. Martin expresses this universal language of sculpture as "Statuese", that is, proprioception, in ref-
erence to Gormley's Angel of the North. See Martin,"Proprioception, Mental Imagery and Sculpture" in From

-71-
and objectivity, which William Tucker characterizes as the divide of sculpture between the 19th and the
20th century.7 Gonnley's sculpture bears resemblance to his senior's works, and paradoxically this seems
to amend the demarcation and classification of Art History in time and place, by incarnating man's tes-
tament to the world as a compound of mind and body. I try to remark that his ceuvres contribute to recast
the history of sculpture not representing but relocating the human body, and thereby I will give voice
to the invalidity of Rosalind Krauss's notorious diagram in "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1979)8
and to refute her negative perversion of sculpture for the periodization of Art History.9

1. "Expanded Field" : Krauss's model of Art History and its problem

The diamond-shaped diagram of "Expanded Field" which Krauss fabricated is a sketch map to illus-
trate the complexity and neutrality of pseudo-sculptural works at particular moments, rather than univer-
sal theory on sculpture. This seems to embody her image to the cul-de-sac of Art History influenced by
horizontality, labyrinth, twist and defonnation of 'sculpture' in the 1960-70s. 1O Adapting mathematical
models and the paradigmatic logic of linguistic semiology, this field consists of four categories II to
which the sculptural works group should belong as equivalents at first like the development of the pyra-
mids, other than the usual genealogy of Art History like a tree diagram. Nonetheless, this diagram re-
mains to hold pyramidal hierarchy about the position of 'sculpture' wandering and excursing within the
given field. In short, Krauss's diagram "Expanded Field" itself could be seen like the graveyard of a
pyramid covering mummified corpses that furthered the ideation, degeneration and demise of sculpture
at that time. Once its correspondences to the actual site broke off, in turn, we understand this
schematism of the barren ground, not as the innovation but rather as the regression after this.
However, I could not personally be taken as a means only by merely blaming the anachronism of
Krauss's diagram, because naturally art theory has always carried out both the fate to the trend of
thought of those days or the art style. To tell the truth, my investigations are indebt to Krauss's polemics
of characterizing sculpture as in-between tenn, thereby redefining the function of sculpture as synthesis
to per-de-deux of the mind/body problems hereafter. 12 And what is more important is not to propose an

Rodin to Giacometti - Sculpture and Literature in France 1880-1950, ed. by Keith Aspley, Elizabeth Cowling,
Peter Shasta, Amsterdam: Atlanta. GA, 2000. pp.199-214.
7 WilHam Tucker, The Language of Sculpture (1974). London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. pp. 9-13.
8 Rosalind E. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1979), October no.8 (spring 1979). repro in The
Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, 1985. pp.276-290. This question as to
"Expanded Field" originates from my doubt about Daniel Birnbaum's application of Krauss's account to
Gormley's Allotment. See Birnbaum, "LIGHTNESS AND WEIGHT" [Betong (Miroslaw Balka, Antony
Gormley, Anish Kapoor), Sweden: Malmo Konsthall, 1996, p.l04]
9 Analyzing a change of mode in the 60-70s architectures. Charles Jencks objects to Krauss's application of the
term of postmodernism in sculpture, instead, substituting it with "late-modernism." See Jencks, "Postmodern vs.
Late-modem", Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy, ed. by Ingeborg Hoesterey, Indiana
University Press, 1991, p.15.
10 Donald Preziosi comments that "Expanded Field" successfully achieved an effect complementary to that of
Foucault's" death of author" by demonstrating the non-universality and historical boundedness of 'sculpture' as an
art historical category, thereby actually troubling certain basic conventional disciplinary assumptions. See The Art
of Art History: a critical anthology, ed. by Preziosi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, p.279.
11 In "Expanded Field" where other three categories are occupied by Earth Art works and quasi-architectural con-
structions, a model of 'sculpture' Krauss looks upon as the strongest work which will reflect the condition of the
logical space of "Expanded Field" is Joel Shapiro's miniature in the 1970s setting the images of architecture
within vast landscape. Krauss might think sculpture as a kind of mimesis of landscape, metaphor of a place
where man can 110 longer inhabit. On the contrary of her inhuman consideration, Shapiro actually showed his
tiny things, abstract/representational forms in a way of placing singly within empty space of the art gallery, and
thereby allowed objects to belong to the human body like a chair, or to enclose and protect it like a house.
12 In "This New Art: To Draw in Space"(l981), Krauss develops this logic and defines the idea of copy as a mid-
dle term between 'not-abstract' and 'not-mimetic' analyzing the translation of Julio Gonzalez's sculpture from his
drawing. See Krauss, op.cit, p. 126.

-72-
alternative plan but to make direct dialogues with works on which her diagram grounds. 1 will make
comparison of Gormley's sculptures with his seemingly morphological precedents of Earth Art works
and Minimalist objects, which Krauss seems to envisage as the zenith of decentredness and depersonal-
ization, namely a loss of site in sculpture, which she calls "a categorical no-man's-land", inaugurated by
Rodin's monuments. Before beginning with this detailed comparison, 1 hypothesize that Gormley's
Learning to Think might be understood as a kind of antithesis to Rodin's Thinker in some aspects. When
Gormley asserts that "I didn't simply w~nt to continue where Rodin left off, but re-invent the body from
the inside, from the point of view of existence" 13, he must be speculating upon another model of sculp-
ture dated from its origin.

2 . Learning to Think and Thinkers : Model before Homo sapiens

I am also trying to ask, "Where does sculpture belong?" It isn't a category of a thing [which) has a pre-
fixed or known place. Learning to Think was also asking how sculpture could connect with our experience
of architecture, not by being elevated by virtue of a plinth, but by being inserted into the space of a room,
so that we might think about thoughts as originating in the body and the body as something that displaces
space. 14 --Antony Gormley, 2001

Compared with The Thinker, Gormley makes a brilliant account of Learning to Think: "Rodin's
Thinker suggests that in some way we can be masters of our own destiny and my Learning to Think,
in its ironical title, suggests perhaps that we arc not, that we are immersed, and that part of thinking is
an escape from embodiment." [my italic]15 The Thinker is a synonym of Rodin, and moreover a proto-
type of 'sculpture.' The Thinker has survived in terms of its exploitations and translation by multimedia
from multiples of bronze casts to its commercial overexposure.I 6 Stereotyped Thinker seems to have
caused the misunderstanding and unsympathetic reaction to sculpture in general thereafter. A number of
quasi-Thinkers as visual cliches would make us a picture of a genuine "Thinker" in our mind, which
should be "a statue", made "by a great artist", "bronze cast" seated "on the plinth." The idea, dematerialization
of sculpture amplified by The Thinker must deepen the gap on an idea of 'sculpture' between Avant-
garde artists and ordinary people. A radical artist regards it as an anti-symbol, like the toppled-down
statue of the Czar of Russia, of their vandalism, while the public often honors it as a masterpiece. Rodin,
the last and greatest champion in the "Bronze Age" where sculpture was obliged to be make-believe of
human figure, was a rightful successor to the "Golden Age" from glorious Greco-Roman statues to its
renaissance by Michelangelo, transmuting the classical deity shown in the representation of god, a holly
icon and hero into romantic humanity. Furthermore 1 would call the "Iron Age" that period when the
practices of anti-anthropomorphism advanced by purification of Cubist-Formalism reached the climaxY
Although 1 will define Gormley's "Neo Iron Age" as a silent volcano to protect human rights in sculp-

13 Antony Gormley and E. H. Gombrich, "E. H. Gombrich in conversation with Antony Gormley", Antony
Gonnley, London: Phaidon, 1995, p. 10.
14 Gormley's reply to my letter, 2001
15 Ibid.
16 This thinking pose has been popularized via advertising, consumer goods like a mascot of a key ring, the front
page of the magazine and caricatures. See Albert E. Elsen, Rodin I s Thinker and the Dilemmas of Modern Public
Sculpture, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985, pp.146-152.
17 David Smith and Anthony Caro's geometric lightened construction made from welded and jointed metals in the
1950s inherited the experimental iron works that Picasso and Gonzalez innovated in the late 1920s. This gene-
alogy of linear and frame-like structures in modem sculpture meets Greenberg's demand for transparency and
space enclosure, opticality, cerebration and his abolition of Greco-Roman-Renaissance tradition in "The New
Sculpture" (1949). [Greenberg's The Collected Essay and Criticism, vol.4, Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-
1969. ed. by John O'Brian. (Chicago, 1993), pp.55-61.)

-73-
 ture against his previous generations, I acknowledge that such a neologism tends to misrepresent the
truth of sculpture and I do not care to rupture Gormley's practices with his preqedents at all. Rather via
his body-works, I intend to inoculate 'non-sculpture' with the trunk of the tree of life in Art History be-
yond some of periodization : the 19th and the 20th century, pre-war and post-war period, modernism
and postrnodernism. Gormley's sculpture can indicate where the genealogy of sculpture has been rooted
and whereby it has been nourished.
Learning to Think, which consists of five lead figures without any introspective poses, alludes to so-
cially variable and physically repetitive conditions around a work of art and our body. It is premature
to assert that this installation might allegorize man who has no idea. Headless and suspended bodies in-
sist that now we must not rely on a given ideology, imagery and logos, but can only think with our cor-
poreal experience. Modern sculptures since Rodin have managed to survive by asking an ontological
question to themselves: "What sculpture is." Autonomy of sculpture is, as Gormley wants, to "re-
place representation (or illusion) with reflexivity,,18, discharging of "sculpture thinking of sculpture" from
logico-formalist self-reference. Independent of the iconography of Thinker,19 Learning to Think can
hold this reflexivity, however, his figures do not think. The thinking subject is not the statue but the self
in us. The interior space of lead figures is a room made for our thoughts, for our participation in this
space can compensate for their lost heads. It indicates that the object of speculation is not the outside
of these sculptures, but rather in the existence of sculpture within us. Avoiding Descartes' cogito of the
self as bodiless fiction that caused the mindl body dualism, his sculpture could give us a proposition :
"I think of sculpture, therefore 1 am and sculpture is." To think of an idea is to create an illusion that
I am incorporeal, as Gormley remarks, "part of thinking is an escape from embodiment." However now
I think of sculpture as an object to act on the least intelligence and the most sensorium. I cannot think
of sculpture without the help of the properties and dynamics of an object or imaginary sensation based
on my experience. Therefore it is no exaggeration to say that I exist as long as 1 think of sculpture.
Learning to Think can lead us to the way out from Modernist self-skepticism, abstractness as flight into
an idea.
The Walking Man incarnated Rodin's formula of a headless body after the model of fragments of
Antique sculpture, condensing dynamism of torso into the combination of two legs like a compass. If
we see The Thinker as a prototype of Homo sapiens (wise man), The Walking Man might retrace our
memory more backward, Homo erectus (erect man). However the historical model of Learning to Think
seems to be more aboriginal than Rodin's. It reflects not to the "Golden Age" but to the Old Stone Age
or Upper Paleolithic period. When and where did sculpture come from? 1 am sure that sculpture began
with our origin, the birth of this world. Antony Gormley believes the potential of sculpture to reflect on
death and life, and therewith chooses the method of body-casting as an instrument and mise-en-scene
to make us aware of this. The origin of sculpture is not in our brain to visualize the object as an icon,
but in our heart to feel it or our hands as the agent of tactile space 20 , because all kinds of ideology, pic-
tures and logos are nothing but by-products and fabrication of our brain. Learning to Think with both

18 Antony Gormley, Gormley / Theweleit (Host, Field, Another Place) : a conversation with Klaus Theweleit and
Monika Theweleit-Kubale, Kerber, 1999, p.73.
19 It has been often said that The Thinker got inspiration from Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Ugo/ino and His son
(1860), mainly because of the father's seated position and the placement of his right arm. Albert. E. Elsen objects
to such an accepted opinion to ascribe The Thinker to Carpeaux's Ugolino or any other 19th century source.
Through his careful observation to pose of the figures, Elsen indicates that The Thinker's distinctive movement
was indebt to parts of the bodies of Michelangelo's Times of the Day, Dawn and Giuliano de Medici or The
Belvedere Torso. See Elsen, op.cit, pp.30-33.
20 Not to mention, this observation on the origin of sculpture is relied on H. Read's notion that sculpture originated
from the handled and portable amulet and talisman in The Art of Sculpture (1956). Therefore I doubt whether
the systematic shifts of sculpture, Krauss remarks in "Expanded Field", remains to be a matter of course and
epoch-making event every time I see many of students often speak so. For loss of pedestal and historicism to

-74-
hands allows us to recall everyone's intrinsic nostalgia and the duty of self-revelation more than Rodin's
enlightening Thinker. Learning to Think is, I suppose, a kind of homage and mirage to Homo habilis
(skilful man), the oldest man who was born about two million years ago. When one's hands touched with
something and its inner-space consented to be embodied not as an overbearing possession but as a token
of affection toward another being, sculpture has come into the world-a warm-blooded figure and an
anonymous object eulogizing life as the spring of creativity like The Willendorf Woman (30,000-
25,000 BC). It is true that Gormley "did not simply want to continue where Rodin left off" presuming
a genuine and primordial model for his sculpture to antedate the basis of philosophy, civilization and an
edifice of beauty2!. Differed from hyperrealist sculptures of George Segal, John De Andrea and Duane
Hanson, Gormley's commencement as a sculptor is based on our primordial sensibility and like a residue
of memory of an embryo in our body inherited from remote ancestors and the vital bodily function such
as breathing. His Field series must be accumulate and distribute the sensorial experience of sculpture for
everyone to mold the earth all over the world. In this sense, sculpture is an never ontological absence,
but rather is everywhere and every time we think, "what we are."
, F. D. Martin points out that the origin of sculpture has never been a popular and rarely a serious topic
amongst that of art in general22 , however, it would be true that the first sculptors preceded the first paint-
ers, because radiocarbon tests place the earliest extant sculptures before the earliest extant paintings.
Human beings are, Gormley hopes, integrated by homology of the body beyond the distinction of lan-
guage, race, religion, sex, nation and thoughts. As it turns out, we cannot think, "what is sculpture"
without our body. Using the "-ing" inflection, in the title of his works, which implies lack of a subject,
sculpture can evade from art historian's terminism and signify the being and becoming of all living
things. "We are here"- this is sculptural theorem to encourage us to learn to think of the self and the
world. Orienting to both our origin and our becoming, Gormley's method of body-casting seems to pro-
test against marginality and homelessness of sculpture, Krauss thinks, traced from Rodin's fragmentation
and disarticulation of the body, abortiveness of life-size figure because of the denunciation against
Bronze Age and successively the loss of skeletal support in Brancusi's Sleeping Muse. In fact Gormley
respects Rodin's idea of the "thinking statue", or anyway the idea that the space of the statue invites the
occupation of thought, nonetheless, the way that he makes his work is "a way of occupying with full
awareness the space that a statue occupies, but with a living body."23

3. Sculpture as "Meta-site" : neither as "Para-site" nor "Non-site"

Establishing up his international fame by lead pieces cast from his own body in the eighties, Gormley
suddenly interrupted persisting in this convention. Whereas his despair of survival made lead pieces de-

link of Earth Art works and constructions with Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, are nothing but a matter of a
posteriori accessory of sculpture and a phase of more shortsighted history of sculpture. The discourse of
postmodernist periodization has nothing to do with the nature of sculpture, what is worse, makes it difficult for
us to comprehend it.
21 Rudolf Wittkower confers upon stone carving as the orthodox method and material of sculpture, which generated
as early as the pre-historical period when mankind learned to use a fire stone or a stone implement. For
Wittkower, these tools were the oldest verification of man's skill, from which one improves his ability to process
a tool in order to freely transform its shape or another object. The methodology had elevated gradually from
primitive way of shaving and chopping to technique of polishing and casting by secondary tools made from cop-
per, bronze and iron. Although I agree with his methodological explication as to the origin of sculpture,
Wittkower seems to so deliberately pass historical judgment on sculpture as to authorize carved figures gener-
ated in the Mediterranean civilization, Egyptian, Babylonian, Orient, Greek and Roman. However I doubt that
man could not create the first sculpture without such a secondary, slight higher instrument. [See Wittkower,
Sculpture: Process and Principle (1977), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Japanese tr. by Ikegami Chuji,
Chuo-Koron Bijyutsu Shuppan Co.Ltd., 1994, p. 7.)
22 F. David Martin, Sculpture & Enlivened Space: Aesthetics and History. Kentucky University Press. 1981, p.l19
23 Gormley's reply to my letter, 2001

-75-
 fensive and indestructible under a fear of nuclear disaster, Gormley decided to cast off his skin to
"try to be honest about vulnerability.,,24 The first version of Field of 150 statuettes in 1989 was made
by himself and his assistants, sun-baked, placed in a circle. During the 1990s, it changed into the famil-
iar style of tens of thousands of pieces, kiln fired, by hand of many people, forming a square. The earthi-
ness, use of low material, its multiplicity, popularity and spectacle in Field became the genesis of
Gormley's other works. Its iconoclasm led to Host, and its repetition of figuration and hand-casting gave
birth to a multiple number of iron figures in the nineties such as Another Place. The Field series is a
peripetia through his artistic carrier, and also should be seen as a volte-face of the history of sculpture.
For Field and its derivative iron installations require us to reformulate the trial and error of revolutionary
works in the end of the 1960s when the standstill of Art History was rumored.
I oppose to the view of Field as a counterfeit of Walter de Maria's Earth Rooms. Considering the re-
lationship of Field with Host within the same gallery in 1997,25 I assert that Earth Room is but anallo-
trope of Field, contrariwise Host, evocative of smells and sounds of the seaside complementary to
tactile, haptic, kinetic sensations 26 , enfeebling so excessive visibility must be thought as an isotope of
Field as regards sensorial inflammation of sculpture and its limitation of architecture against vast field
of view of landscape. Host is not only Gormley's iconographic variant, but also the isometric space of
art gallery, namely the methodological application of Field. This methodology is the logic of casting,
what I called "double body-casting" by addition of the positives of the first and the second body:
the outer-space of the flesh and inner-space of architecture (it is not 'non-architecture'). This expresses
transition from "objectness" to "placeness" in the artist's words. Bodies dissolved into the sea, our birth-
place and identify themselves with space.
By plenty of his omniscience and imaginations, W.J.T. Mitchell excellently illustrates Gormley's ref-
erences to Art History and the tribal society, and deduces the self-imposed problems on sculpture from
'Gormley's reuvres 27 Although I learned considerably from Mitchell's awareness of the issues on sculp-
ture, I doubt somewhat about his superficially iconographical and topographical approach to Gormley's
association with the other's art-works, Especially as to the location of Gormley's Another Place and
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Mitchell applies Smithson's dialectics 'site' and 'non-site' to Gormley's
figures in general: "His mechanically reproduced 'corpographs' are already non-sites in themselves,
like three dimensional photograph' that refer to the absent space of body. These non-sites are then trans-
ported to a wide variety of places, some in traditional locations for sculpture (plazas, squares, museums,
galleries) others in natural settings'." 28

24 Gonnley / Theweleit (Host, Field, Another Place), p. 41.

25 Two inside installations in Kiel is that : Host was displayed in the ground floor, Field was exhibited in upstairs.
Different from Field, Host consists of the formless mixture of mud and seawater full of the floor of the gallery
space. The latest and greatest version of Field, entitled Asian Field of 120,000 figures will go on a tour of
Chinese cities including Beijing and Shanghai this spring.
26 My thought on imaginative sensations and anonymity of sculpture depends on Rovert. D. Vance's "SCULPT
URE", [British Journal of Aesthetics, Vo1.35, No.3 (July 1995), pp. 217-226] He explains the trouble of sculp-
ture is that the variety and plurality of external appearance of sculpture prevent us from finding a content, what
a sculptor intends. Quoting from accounts of two Analytic Philosophers of authority, Kendall Walton and
Richard WoIIheim, Vance's aim is to seek for principle peculiar to sculpture in order to unify the
multifariousness of object-like sculptures, and connect it even to traditional statues in terms of imaginative ex-
perience of object's materiality and human sensation and feelings. Vance regrets that Wollheim, who character-
ized "Minimalism", has little dealt with sculpture in Art and its objects (1968).
27 W. J. T. Mitchell, "What Sculpture Wants: Placing Antony Gormley" Antony Gonnley 2nd ed., revised and ex-
panded. London: Phaidon, 2000, p.l66-191. Mitchell finally seems to conclude that Gormley's escape from his
own body toward Field, Allotment series, mass reproduction of iron figures, and latest Quantum Clouds gener-
ates "place to be" of sculpture coming. and going between statue and site. However, in my view, Gormley's
anonymousness and lack of self-mystification of artist, anthropological, if not anthropocentric, viewpoint seem
to have appeared in his lead pieces and earlier works from his starting point.
28 Mitchell, op.cit, p.179.

-76-
 Mitchell means that Gonnley's figures have similarity to Smithson's reconstitution of material sam-
ples, geographic maps and photographic documentations as 'non-site', namely an inside installation of
natural objects away from its original locatedness, but Gonnley's Another Place, in reverse, is an outside
installation. Certainly his bodycasts might be the absence as a token of an individual's body, however,
they exist there as neither representation nor sitelessness, but as another, independent substance away
from the artist's hands and his anticipation. We must refrain from an unquestioning application of artist's
coinage and theorist's ideation, instead, try to describe the lexicon of sculpture through the direct en-
counter with art-objects and its place. While the seascape serves as the ground supporting the figure of
a whirlpool in Spiral Jetty, Another Place makes the visitor feel the dynamics of the ebb and flow of the
tide in contrast to the immobility of figures. Spiral Jetty, submerged under the Great Salt Lake by a wa-
tery grave after Smithson's death, becomes emblematic of Earth Art as a whole and an ideal monument,
for the absence of work itself should mythologize the life of an individual artist and his tenninology.29
On the contrary, in Another Place, which was momentary installed, the presence of figures depends on
the tide and thereby we comprehend that repeatedly foregrounding and being a background under raging
waves of time and oxidation, the human body is no doubt there in equilibrium between the dissolution
of individuality and the integration into group-body. It seems to be an antithesis to Krauss's divisionism,
dispersal and displacement of the human body in sculpture.
Earth Art projects on an inhuman scale, such as De Maria's The Lightning Field, Michael Heizer's
Double Negative and Mary Miss's Perimeters/pavilions/Decoys, avert to the anthropomorphic experi-
ence of traditional sculpture. Here the body is hidden undemeath the ground, not centralized but ex-
pelled in periphery where the spectator is pennitted to experience the periodical, not-prospective
phenomenon of the natural world. They reduced a mass of somatic experiences with which sculpture has
essentially meddled to only a plane of visual sensations and mental allusions. Identification with land-
scape is the origin of sculptural misery. For most of Earth Art work has a short-tenned life, gestalt
views, and memorizes us by photographing. The history to which it affiliated is not the actual but the
ideal, dream, myth and fantasy. Sculpture should be a memento in esse, a token of our lived moments.
Earth Art stimulated man's grief as a mortality and obliged him to have an aversion to blood and flesh,
and accordingly spoiled the sculptural ability to grant pleasure of life to mankind as a physical existence.
Landscapes functioned as a step to accelerate morphological, topological and methodological exodus of
sculpture from the base of the human body. Therefore it is true that Gonnley commenced making Earth
Art-like works in search for a way out from his mannerism of self-body-casting. Although I will men-
tion later as to the relationship of sculpture with architecture, we need to distinguish in words Gonnley's
concept of space from Smithson's dialectics in space-time. 3D I dare to say that sculpture is neither "para-
site" to architecture nor "non-site" against landscape, but "meta-site", which means a physically and
metaphysically transitional zone where the body is always placed as a rival of cybernetic world.

29 Besides Smithson's anti-humanistic experience of art-work, I would like to indicate that Another Place can plead
against his pessimistic attitude to Progressivism relied on technology and civilization. Undemeath the theory of
entropy, Smithson disliked sculpture made of indestructible steel, which never altered in appearance, and
seemed somehow 'timeless.' [Smithson, "Entropy and the New Monuments" Artforum (June 1966), repro in The
Writings of Robert Smithson (1979), ed.by Nancy Holt, New York, 1996, p.g.] As well as being methodological
and iconographical revision to welded-iron constructions in the "Iron Age", Gormley's iron bodycasts enduring
in oxidation of sea water permits us to have opportunity to rethink Smithson's remarks that the fundamental
property of iron is rust: "In the technological mind rust evokes a fear of disuse, inactivity, entropy and ruin.
Why steel is valued over rust is a technological value, not an artistic one."["A Sedimentation of the Mind:
Earth Project's", Artforum (September 1968), repro op.cit, p. 106.]
30 Although Earth Art works arc often considered as contraposition against Minimalism, the former is not complete
denial of the latter, but one pole of a pair of conflicting qualities; 'site' and 'non-site'; technological progressivism
and archaeology, geology; the present time and the past, 'geologic time'; industrialism and naturalism, human-
ism; mind and matter; verticality and horizontality; "above ground" and "below ground"; time and place; high

-77-
 4. Regrounded Monument : Angel of the North and Crucifixion
Differed from Earth Art work, whose size grows in a given plan and has the potential of being a hori-
zontal and infinite extension, Gormley's Angel of the North originates from his life-sized Angel series,
and moreover resurrects the verticality, organic vitality and monumentality of sculpture in a different
way of traditional monument. 3l Just as this Angel expresses both the earthbound, gravitational pull of
sculpture and its transcendental, aerial, utopian idealism, so I will remark that his Angels can function
as a crossing-over between Earth Art project and Minimalist sculptures, monument and object. 32 To this
end, I would like to add the issuc of Crucifixion to the other's observations on Angel of the North.33 The
eighties shows humiliation and sanctification of sculpture as public monument by triggering so harshly
political and ideological quarrels like Hans Haake's Und ihr habt doch geseigt (1988) which was a close
facsimile of a Nazi monument fifty years ago. Although Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial is per-
haps the most notable example of the about-tum from revilement to reverence for public sculpture,34 people
seem to have rarely granted citizenship as an artistic value to huge figurative sculpture since 1945 before
Angel of the North.
Whereas radical spatial dynamism in Richard Serra's Tilted Arc activated a dispute as to the relationship
of sculpture with the site, this exclusive "Iron Curtain" was thoroughly removed due to public refusal and
vaporized, namely memorized as an ideological monument that left the seed of discord behind. On the con-
trary Gormley's Angel of the North has survived and is still enlivening the ground, overcoming a lot of eco-
nomic obstacles, socio-moral prejudices and has shouldered favorable friendship of conscientious ordinary
people. For his Angel is there, neither rising above "the life beyond" nor falling forward in the mundane
world, but functioning as an actual space across the distinguished spheres; our daily milieu and art-world,
actuality and fantasy. There is a broad space between the epistemological world of the subject and the on-
tological world of the object. The space is a place where sculpture performs a kind of alchemical mystery
of changing the physical into the spiritual. The Cross is an icon that symbolizes the transcendency from the
actual space to the ideal when we experience a sculpture. This Angel is an epigraph of sculpture as a mid-'
die-term between an object and a monument, and verifies the quintessence of sculpture Gormley's body-
casting can achieve, that is, the unison of personhood with objecthood and the fusion of matter with form.
And this monument appeared at the end of the 20th century, could take the initiative of his "Neo Iron
Age" and the change of mode in the history of sculpture. The Angels as the whole of this project (different
scaled maquettes and even 3-D graphic images) plus his earlier Angel-like sculptures will employ them-

and low; form and formless; place and placeless; subject and object; cosmos and chaos. As Smithson's arrange-
ment at interval of compartment in the art gallery and the gestalt of Spiral Jetty shows, Earth artists have much
terms with Minimalism.
31 Gormley defines the size of Allotment and Field series as the reverse of traditional monument: "They re-
generate scale in a way that is differcnt from the huge single object, and they reverse the traditional monument's
concern with memorial and the past. Both works are concerned with the future: with what will be." ["Allot
ment : Interview with Hans Anderson", Antony Gormley, 2000, p.l48]
32 Minimalists have a great interest in the scale of sculpture. Quoting from the notable comment by Tony Smith.
Robert Morris says, "In the perception of relative size the human body enters into the total continuum of sizes
and establishes itself as a constant on the scale." See Morris, "Notes on Sculpture: Part 2" Artforum, vol.5,
no.2, (October 1966), pp.20-23; repr. in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology ed. by Gregory Battocock,
E.P.Dutton & Co.Inc. (New York, 1968), new edn. 1995, p.230.
33 Gail-Nina Anderson provides an interesting iconographical consideration by incorporating the Angel into the
context of subject of angel. ["Angels" in Making an angel: Antony Gormley. London, Booth-Clibborn
Editions, 1998, pp.l04-107] Stephanie Brown intends to place the Angel in the transition of sculpture in post-
war period following by quarter categorization: 'form' 'structure' 'place', which Carl Andre invested in 1978,
and the fourth 'socio-cultural space' Lynne Cooke proposed. ["An Enlightened Icarus" op.cit. pp.88-92]
34 Michael North refers to it by comparison with Hance Haacke's installation. See North. "The Public as Sculpt
ure : From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament", in ed. by W.J.T. Mitchell, Art and the public sphere. The
University of Chicago Press, 1992, p.23-28

-78-
selves in adaptation of the Object Age for almost a hundred years, the period of self-skepticism of sculp-
ture. Now is the time when a gigantic iron angel glides down entrusting with a mission to heal the func-
tional disease of sculpture from Rodin's Balzac and The Gate of Hell to Serra's Tilted Are, which reached
the zenith of patience and betrayal smoldering between sculpture and people.
The reference to Crucifixion brings us to place Gormley's Angels and his crucified concrete column
Flesh as a mediation between Christian iconography and Minimalist relocation of this conventional sign
such as Frank Stella's Die Fache Hoch! My intention is to find evidence that cruciform in Gormley's
sculpture operates as ambivalent vectors of dissolution and integration of the body, that is, the threshold
between life and death as grid lines of the seams in Learning to Think imply. A Cross is an emblem of
academic paradigm, causing the deadness of the body due to the artificial and limited conditions under
which the model was observed. Expurgating this static icon in midpoint of the third architectural model
in terra cotta, Rodin's Gate of Hell could leap from the conventional narrative relief toward the subjec-
tive expression of pathos and chaotic arrangements of figure, from core to surface. Meanwhile
Modernism aimed at anti-crucifixion (abstraction as the Ascension) under the slogan of reductive icono-
clasm, Minimalist morphology came from employing a host of conventional systems of ordering to de-
termine composition, because the Cross itself relates to the most primitive sign of placing an object in
space, and stands for heterogeneity of mind/body and figure/object. And furthermore, Gormley's anal-
ogy with Minimalist objects, I think, may put a question to the propriety of such geometric, rigid sys-
tems and an art-historical cross-fertilization.

5. Neo Iron Age : Testing the Object Sculptures

Minimalist objects that have most affinity with Gormley's works are Robert Morris's. Gormley's iron
body installations, Testing a World View and Drawn seem to reflect to Morris's way of emplacement
of objects in L Beams and Comer Piece. Adding his performance of hiding himself inside the columns,
Morris's Two Column managed to introduce movement of the body into a work like a kinetic sculpture:
On the other hand in Gormley's concrete Passage and Immersion, the body is suggested not by such a
posteriori inscription of an individual's action but as a priori, anonymous model (in fact the holes where his
hands and feet are shown on the columns leave a slight trace of universal mankind as if the stigmata implies
to the Lord). Gormley's three-dimensional fingerprint has no identification with its maker as his Rubber like
an annual ring of a tree cannot give its name. In this sense, Gormley's pursuit is not iconographical plagiarism
but methodological application of the logic of Minimalist structure. Reflecting to Morris's coordination of ob-
jects in space, Gormley's iron figures reorient their vector of momentum in all direction with no hierarchy
and thereby sculpture holds eqUilibrium of gravitation and buoyancy, attraction and repulsion, drawing a pas-
senger's attention like a magnet other than Minimalist objects like stones scattered and arranged at interval
and Earth Art like a whirlwind passing through between individuals. Mind-Body Column relates not only to
its likeness of Brancusi's Endless Column but also to Carl Andre's anti-priapic recombination of the unit-by-
unit system into Equivalent VfJ!, and thereby casually harmonizes the rhythm and homoiothermy of bodies
grouping one after another in a double file with the inorganic buildings in Japanese cityscape.
Behind Gormley's word "I test a box and a cross .. 35 , I would like to read his real intention of testing
Minimalist objects, in other words, extracting principles to think of sculpture from their exploration of
the condition of sculpture and thereby he seems to strengthen peculiarity of his body-sculptures other
than traditional and contemporary figurative sculptures. Gormley must accept Minimalist strategy of
modeling its structure not on the privacy of the psychological space but on the public, conventional na-
ture of what might be called cultural space, because Minimalist morphology did not derive from purifi-
cation, abstractness of Cubist-Formalism but oriented to repetition of a bodily experience in daily life
by sections of a working process and use of manufactured objects. Minimalist structural implication of

35 Gormley's reply to my letter, 2001

-79-
 Duchampian readymade as a counterblow against solipsism in Abstract Expressionist paintinl6 is true
of Gormley's body-casting. The body he thinks as "readymade" is reproduced and replaced as an
equivalent to minerals, animals, vegetations and the air, that is, space as a whole. While Gormley's
sculpture owes its depersonalization, a gearshift from his own mental portrait, to Minimalist externaliza-
tion of meaning, he seems to intend to unify pieces of somatic sensations and memories of our life his-
tory, dismembered, rearranged, scrapped, piled and trampled down by Minimalist syntax in it whole
body. Therefore his body-sculptures are endowed with inertial force like a pendulum endlessly swinging
between personhood and objecthood. Gormley seems to rethink of doublethink involved in Minimalist
objects, that an eclipse from a model of the self caused either an antinomy of mind/body,
internality/externality and subjectivity /objectivity or a deviation from sculpturality.
Critical Mass at the Royal Academy in 1998 exceeds beyond Minimalist pursuit of the seriality and
displacement of art-objects, in terms of extraordinary multiplicity and diversity of massive iron
bodycasts, their magical and uncanny emplacement within and without an art gallery.37 This dramatic
encounter of his iron figures with the authoritative surroundings could indicate Gormley's enthusiasm to
tackle the dilemma between sculpture and architecture, and high and low cultures. Like a deposed statue,
each of the figures are earth-hugging, crouching, standing and finally falling backwards, which have po-
tency to incarnate "the lexicon of the language before language, of body posture.,,3B This sculptor at-
tempts to realize the potential of sculpture and inert material to invite the viewer to interact with it and
to produce energy. The illusion of Romanesque basilica sculptures that Herbert Read found in Moore's
modern ornaments - monumentality as syntheses of dialectics between architecture (enclosure of
space) and sculpture (occupation of space)39 has become extinct because of two exclusive disciplines,
Modernism and Functionalism. Minimalism, by re-interpretation of Russian Constructivism, made dia-
logue of sculpture and architecture possible again. Minimalist accomplishment was conferring an archi-
.tectural function to include the viewer in its own ambience, its own physical area of influence upon the
sculpture, and thereby claiming that sculpture's space and personal space were really one. By means of
Minimalist attachment of art to life, Gormley, like other sculptors, must grasp the raison d'etre of sculp-
ture as socio-cultural space.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, his little debt to the Minimalist monotony created a trilogy
of newer iron syntax in his "Neo Iron Age" : three series of narrow, voided, lightened artd complex
bodies which reflects slightly man's silhouette, Insiders, Domain and Quantum Clouds. Some of
Insiders acquire the vitality and flexibility through their humorous movements unlike Giacometti's thin
figures allied to tomb sculpture. Apart from Surrealist psychological metaphor, Giacometti set about
milking statues before a living model, nonetheless, his ambition resulted in a simile of his own emotion
and fear of life. The frontality, stability and isolation of Giacometti's figures made a vast distance from
the beholder ("out-sight seeing" in my opinion), whereas Gormley's slender figures have space into
which our feelings, sensation and thoughts could penetrate ("in-sight seeing"). In Quantum Clouds
which are derived from Domains, and filled with the intricate assemblage of square steel tubes.. inside
a plaster mould, the spectator can experience the repetition of presence and the disappearance of a
human figure like holography by a change of our gaze and parallax.
Quantum Clouds are a climax to expiate his (and everyone's) 'sin' of distraction, self-protection in

36 Krauss states that the logic of Minimalist structure and the thematic selection in Pop Art are founded on exploitation of
Duchampian readymade in common. See Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1981, p.250
37 '''Critical Mass" is a tenn from nuclear physics that means the point of maximum molecular density in an isotope
of uranium before nuclear fission takes place.
38 Antony Gonnley, "A Conversation between George Benjamin and Antony Gonnley" in Critical Mass, London:
Royal Academy of Arts, 1998, p.2
39 See Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture (1956), Princeton University Press, Japanese tr. by Usami Eiji, Nichibo
Shuppan Co. Ltd., 1995, pp.62-63.

-80-
 lead body-cases, from fear of nuclear weapons and Holocaust since the eighties. Gormley defines the
configuration of Quantum Clouds as ambivalence between aesthetic canon in Antiquity and an image
of the forefront physical science. Using consciously contra posto position, he wanted the deconstruction
and change in his work "from mass to energy, or from mass to random matrix which in some way in-
vokes Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and quantum mechanics to be in contrast with or in tension
with the classical image of sculpture.,,4o Gormley's vandalism of 'sculpture' as a statue is based on a cor-
poreal experience, that is, renewable contact of the body, an eternal model for sculpture, with matter.
His figure itself can be no longer seen as an object of idol worship, because the body, not sculpture,
"becomes a central issue, a central icon in the art of the 21st century."41
Like his Angels, this series evolved into as an unexampled colossal monument Quantum Cloud
(2000). We might associate its pre-existence of architectural model and a cavity and an aerial flux be-
tween the internality and the externality with appearance of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third
International or Naum Gabo's Column in the 1920s. Donald Judd purged a priori interior systems of
Russian Constructivism based on idealistic, rationalist philosophy. If Minimalist achieves a collapse of
convention of sculptural models, Gormley's works must be seen not as a simple resistance against
Minimalist adaptation of historical models, but rather as a re-examination and renovation of Minimalist
skepticism about "what sculpture was" by testing it for not only the physical but also the ideological
frame. Quantum Clouds seem to reframe the organic reciprocity of the discarded inner-self and an outer
world by neutralizing the antagonism between Minimalism and Russian Constructivism, and thereby it
could secure a position of sculpture, as a constant of the body drawing locus within the domain from a
handy object to a huge monument. Via the testament of Minimalism and Earth Art, Gormley's works ob-
tain the grid's bivalent mechanism; "centrifugal" force brings sculpture to expand from the object to the
place, and "centripetal'.' force causes its reduction. 42 Whether he is dislocated in periphery or re-oriented
in the center, man continues to be as the axis to think the existence of the world as an undulation of en-
ergy and a mount of quanta.

6. Conclusion and Re-definition : What sculpture is to be

A genuine artist must feel himself or herself to be part of an international and supranational commu-
nity, whose audience is potentially worldwide. For American art critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Hal
Foster43 , Minimalism and Earth Art were not the distant dead ends but rather a contemporary "crux" in
Art History, especially in the Occidental culture, politics and economics, as a paradigm shift toward
postmodernist practices. However the innovation of the 1960-70s artists seems to be just traces which
were marked and fixed on the earth by a few of the representatives of human beings within the macro-
cosmic history of sculpture or from an anthropological perspective. Nonetheless, Minimalism, Earth Art,
Body Art, performance, happening, readymade and so on - these kinds of pseudo-sculptural works
were a necessary evil for the sake of self-adaptation of a given sculpture positioned in royal statesman-
ship of history. For their proposition "what sculpture is like" could allot the wasted sculpture in post-
war period to the role of sculpture as the aesthetic revelation of physical situations surrounding the
viewer, its efficacy of alchemic transformation of the ideal into the physical. For purposes of grasping

40 Gonnley's reply to my letter, 2001

41 Ibid.
42 My thought of the twofold vectors immanent in Gonnley's grid lines is indebt to Krauss's account of the grid.
Krauss illustrates bivalent structure of the grid as to two pieces of Mondrian's Composition series. "the grid por-
tends the centrifugal or centripetal existence of the world of art." See Krauss, "Grids", October no.9 (summer
1979), repr. in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, 1985, p.18.
According to Krauss, this discussion of bivalent structure of the grid has been extensively made as an example
of John Elderfield's "Grids" in Artforum X, (May 1972), pp.52-59.
43 Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism" (1986), repr. in Foster, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, Mass., 1996,
pp.35-69.

-81-
its autonomic dynamics and testifying the condition of thc world, sculpture must have always taken bod-
ily sensations and our memory to pieces in a different way from purification of modern painting.
Gormley's sculpture should incorporate itself into the anthropological Art History both as an exodus
from the self-skepticism of sculpture and as the threshold toward Promised Land to regain human dig-
nity for the Diasporas, the resolution of identity and the oblivion of humanity, of our contemporaries
who immerse themselves in a mass of imagery and words amplified by the higher electronic media.
If Krauss has compiled the history of modern sculpture seen through Minimalist eyes in Passages in
Modern Sculpture, and as a result her diagram "Expanded Field" generated as a sign of this art histo-
rian's wishful thinking, just now we have to think again Art History through another model of sculpture,
via our encounter with the genuine sculpturesque sculpture which negotiates with countless quasi-
sculptural works. On the purpose of this, I believe, Antony Gormley is the best model, because his
sculpture can make the highest speculation both in quality and in quantity. His cutaneous sensation
would verify his aptitude for sculptor as a feeler of the world. His sculpture tells us that man, a physical
existence and a thinking substance, must confront with the nature of the world at any time and place.
And just as Gormley reflects to the history of sculpture as counter-memory, constantly recasting his ear-
lier works as a model for his creation, so his work itself ought to be cited as a model to re-examine the
common ground in contemporary sculptures hereafter. Sculpture has been essentially a mimicry of the
world. Whatever it can metamorphose itself into, sculpture to be sculpture always exist, as Gormley
thinks, our mortality is not extinction but transfer to another zone of being. Gormley's sculpture must
work on returning profits from the universe to man, a minimum unit of the world as Pascal's 'thinking
reed' : "All our dignity consists in thought, By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time
which we cannot jill."44 Furthermore, Antony Gormley is a thinking "model", that thinks with matter,
our being in this transitional world. Sculpture is a catalyst to the world, and a symbiosis with human be-
ings who are about to open up the new field of activity toward the "Space Age."

This paper is an extracted and revised version of my master thesis in 2003. I am most thankful to Mr. Antony
Gonnley who made a thoughtful reply to my questions. I am very grateful for advices and infonnation to Ms. NIl
Oloe and staffs of Contemporary Sculpture Center in Tokyo, curators of the Tokushima Modem Art Museum,
a Japanese sculptor Mr. MATSUNAGA Tsutomu, Prof. NAKA Sadahiko and teachers in Osaka Kyoiku University.
I greatly appreciate the scholarship awarded to me by the Ito Shaon Ikuei Foundation.

44 Blaise Pascal, Pensee (1670), quoted from Great Books of the Western World, No.30, ed. by Motimer J. Adler,
translated by W.P. Trotter, 1990, p.234.

-82-