“It was in India that I had to choose whether to become a Buddhist monk or an artist.” Antony Gormley was twenty-one when, in the autumn of 1972, in the mountains of the western Himalayas, he met a Burmese Vipassana master and, over the following two years, undertook ten retreats. It was in the eastern Himalayas, in the summer of 1974, that he made the decision that the monastery was not his path. Not for lack of spiritual vocation — quite the opposite. But to reach enlightenment, a Buddhist monk must learn to free himself from the body. And he was not willing to do that. Back in England, he enrolled at the Central School of Art. He had never set foot in an art school: it was a revelation. “What I had learned in India was, essentially, that all I wanted to do was spend time with matter. And sculpture had to do with matter, with the body. I had to become a sculptor.” More than fifty years later, Gormley — Britain’s foremost living sculptor, winner of the 1994 Turner Prize, creator of the monumental Angel of the North and of works held in the collections of the world’s major museums — still starts from there, from the body. The place from which all the great questions arise. The exhibition What Holds Us, on view until September 13 at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, is its broadest and most varied formulation, where alongside his usual materials — metal and stone — he brings in cardboard, to build a labyrinth-city that occupies the stalls of the former theatre housing the historic gallery. At first glance it looks like an Amazon warehouse. “That’s exactly the impression I wanted to give,” Gormley smiles.
The exhibition is titled What Holds Us, with no question mark.
Yes, it’s very important that there’s no question mark. I’m preparing another exhibition, for the end of the year, called Where — also without a question mark there. There’s a difference between asking a question and dwelling inside a question. It’s a question that doesn’t wait for an answer, that asks to be inhabited. It’s a Socratic question, made physical through sculpture. That’s why there’s no question mark.
What is the question, exactly?
What holds us: what sustains us, what contains us. But “hold,” in English, is also used for a ship’s hold: the deepest place, where ballast and cargo are kept. To hold, to contain, to belong. These are words with a density that in Italian is perhaps spread across several different terms. And behind this title lies a larger question: are we monads, born alone and destined to die alone? Or are we a phenomenon dependent on relationships — with other human beings, with animals, plants, and the Earth itself? Perhaps we are both.
In the digital age, what’s the point of still making sculpture?
Today we’re so distracted that we confuse information with experience. These are radically different things. Sculpture, as a material proposition, is able to reinforce physical experience. And in that sense the question “where are you?” is the most honest one you can ask. Usually people answer with a geographic location — “I’m in San Gimignano,” “I’m in Milan.” But the true answer is: “I’m here.” I am in a body. I am in something I call my body, over which, looked at closely, I have no total control. The first “where” is that you are an embodied consciousness, capable of thinking and feeling only insofar as you are in a body. I have always wanted to bring the body back into the language of sculpture, after the most powerful forces in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century art — Minimalism and Conceptualism — had essentially denied it.
A return to the figurative tradition?
No, I’m looking for a path that avoids the rhetoric of the statue, which has always served to uphold power, desire, or a certain historical narrative. My answer is to start from the truth of bodily existence. From a position of radical subjectivity, as far as possible from ideology and from theocratic belief systems.
But why this insistence, specifically, on the idea of the “body”?
I grew up in a devout Catholic family. When I was a child, after lunch, I was sent to rest in a room that was a sort of enclosed balcony, full of light. I would close my eyes and find myself in a red space, warm, claustrophobic. But as the minutes passed that space would transform: it grew cooler, expanded, became darker, more blue. It was a space I was glad to return to. Later, in India, going through ten Vipassana retreats between the western and eastern Himalayas, I came to know more deeply that space I had known as a child. When you close your eyes and enter the darkness of the body, you find yourself in a place with no objects, no boundaries. Inside each of us there is infinity.
How have you translated that kind of experience into sculpture?
My work is not an attempt to shape the equivalent of a body seen from a distance — that’s what Giacometti does. He registers the distance itself in the object — resulting in the diminishment of the body that Sartre called “the art of alienation.” My answer to Alberto is: I deny the duality of an observing subject and an observed body. I start from what it feels like to be in a body. Every one of my works is simply the index of a moment of time lived inside my own flesh — for twenty years captured through plaster casts, now through digital scanning.
What does Innercity, the large installation you made for San Gimignano, have to do with all this?
It consists of fifteen cardboard buildings that form a kind of urban labyrinth. They are body-shaped buildings, monumental in scale, porous and hollow, which you’re invited to enter. To do so, though, you have to bend down. Go on all fours. You have to behave like an animal, or like a child. I want people to lose their adult certainty, the one that makes us read spaces only through their function. Corbusier spoke of architecture as a machine for living — but everything alive in that idea has been forgotten. I think of architecture as a second body.
In what sense?
First we inhabit the body, then, as a species, we built this constructed world, which is essentially its extension. If we think of our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors, what contained them was the night sky with its stars, the smell of the wind, the seasons of the year, the relationship with other living creatures and with plants. Now what contains us is steel and glass and concrete, asphalt, electric light. We have forgotten, as a species, the degree to which the shapes of our cities are expressions of our deepest desires and our deepest fears — because we’re so used to the urban context as our primary condition that we no longer even see it.
Do cities reveal who we are?
San Gimignano is, like New York, a model of high-density, high-rise habitat. And it’s extraordinary that Lorenzetti, in his fresco Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena, already shows that relationship between the condensation of human life in the city and the surrounding landscape — worked, known, inhabited. That tension is the most urgent political, economic, and spiritual problem of our time: how to strike a balance between the necessary condensation of human life in the city and our responsibility toward the planet.
Why did you choose cardboard to make Innercity?
At first for pragmatic reasons. Cardboard is light, relatively sturdy, easily recyclable. Had I chosen something else, I’d have ended up with a three-hundred-ton work that, once the exhibition closed, I wouldn’t have known where to put. Then I realized there was also a metaphorical level. Cardboard is the material of the digital age, a symbol of online shopping. In the past, one of the pleasures of social life was going to the market to buy vegetables, smelling the fruit. Amazon delivers more than six billion packages a year worldwide. And I like the term they use: fulfillment center. These enormous anonymous warehouses, full of boxes full of promises not yet kept. There’s something in it that resembles the rituals of Christmas: the need to wrap things to preserve the surprise, the anticipation of what lies on the other side of the paper. But here the revelation is that nothing is delivered — or rather, what’s returned to you is the primacy of your own physical experience. To reach the work, you have to get down to the ground. You have to become an animal. And you are returned to yourself.
Earlier you spoke of the “deepest desires and fears” that inhabit the shapes of our cities. What do you desire? What are you afraid of?
Like everyone, I would like to be loved. I would like to be recognized. These are elementary desires, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. What I’m afraid of, instead, is that fear will win. That the forces that divide will prevail over the forces that unite. Edward Wilson used to say: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. Three unstable partners. The new arms race is the race for artificial intelligence models. If we reach the point where these machines set their own goals, we will be delegating moral responsibility to them. Which is, in essence, the end of human nature. Then there’s the promise of infinite economic growth. From Hayek to Milton Friedman: it’s not a viable path, because if we keep thinking in terms of exploiting resources, before long there won’t be a planet left to live on. And yet the choice is still there. Every crisis is an opportunity for reconsideration, for reformulation, for the necessity of a new model.
You grew up in a Catholic family. What’s your relationship to that origin?
If you grow up in a system in which all the great questions already have an answer — “Why did God create us?” “God created us to know, love, and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him in the next, in heaven” — you’re likely to spend the rest of your life trying to build a secular, personal equivalent, but one still grounded in those same questions. That’s what I’m doing. The dialectics of heaven and hell, of being in a state of grace or of sin, were decisive in how, as a child, I saw myself and understood my experience. I am enormously grateful to the Catholic Church, with all its failures. I am very grateful to the Benedictine monks who educated me from the age of eleven to seventeen. And I’m grateful to have grown up in a house of faith. Because faith, in the end, is a form of imagination. A form of active imagination.
Antony Gormley. I Am Here, I Am in a Body