By Dr Rebecca Leach
Antony Gormley’s sculpture project Event Horizon has moved to Manhattan recently. The glorious photo in the Guardian last week, and also in the Huffington Post shows some of the contrasting scales of experience of city life.
Gormley says,
“I want to play with the city and people’s perceptions. The gaze is the principle dynamic of the work; the idea of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, and in the process perhaps re-assessing your own position in the world. So in encountering these peripheral things, perhaps one becomes aware of one’s status of embedment.”
Gormley’s vision has mostly been about looking, with humanoid figures (himself mostly) looking out and above and away, although his famous project Field involves more of the communal horde staring at the viewer, like small creatures waiting to pounce. Gormley’s figure has been reproduced in projects around the world, but there’s an interesting contrast between his city locations and other sites. The Angel of the North and Another Place, for example, are resolutely looking away from the city, outside it and taking their position aloof from engagement.
Yet Event Horizon worships the city skyline. Some of the figures demonstrate human vulnerability: a simple naked body surrounded by unknown chaos. But overwhelmingly, Event Horizon can only work, surely, in a global city like New York, or London (in its previous incarnation) because Gormley’s work is so monumental, like the buildings it surveys. In Stoke-on-Trent, for example, it would die an instant death.
I was reminded of this again while re-reading a marvellous book by Christopher Reed, ‘Not at Home: the suppression of domesticity in modern art and architecture’. This collection of essays unravels the intellectual dynamic emergent in the early 20th century (and subsequently) which actively sought to construct the modern in counterpart to the domestic. Reed quotes Loos (‘ornament as crime’) and Le Corbusier( ‘One can see these same business men… away from their businesses in their own home, where everything seems to contradict their real existence – rooms too small, a conglomeration of useless and disparate objects, and a sickening spirit reigning over so many shams…, and absurd bric-a-brac. Our industrial friends seem sheepish and shrivelled like tigers in a cage’) as prime movers in the ridiculing of domestic space. Instead, modernism sought out the large, the heroic, the monumental and the ‘smooth’ (better affording, as Benjamin puts it, the leaving of no ‘stain’ or trace’).
Domestic houses – for which we can also read the feminised spaces of embodied everyday life – couldn’t possibly be the source of creativity in this monumental vision. Yet Reed’s own paper in his volume focuses on key English versions of modernism, namely in the work of the Bloomsbury group whose attempts to rework domesticity were part of their artistic vision. And more recent work by feminist artists has revived the radical nature of craft: home-made rather than ready-made?
I don’t even think the domestic has to be artistic to be interesting. In fact, its very existence as the binary counterpart to the modern – both emerging welded together in discourses of modernity – makes it intrinsically valuable and radical as a concept. The appeal of homeliness (and the fear of the uncanny/unheimlich), the desire to decorate (however anti-avant-garde) and the desire for small spaces, sequestered and unviewed is as much a part of modernist culture as the open space, the straight line and the monument to masculine authority.
In this context, Gormley’s latest show in Manhattan makes me uncomfortable – perhaps as it should. I’m more discomfited however by the continuing attachment of architects and urbanists to the wide open space and the grand vision. Some work is evident on humanising of urban visions, but if you scratch most architects and visionary planners, there’s surely a Le Corbusier under all their skins? They shifted a bit when Venturi and Rodriguez were momentarily fashionable but still the key motif of the city remains the heroic figure against the Manhattan skyline.
This is very worrying for places like Stoke-on-Trent. Where its cultural heroism ought to be explored for what it is: small, local, homely (in all the best, English, senses of the word). Where Manhattan is all we have to live up to, what hope is there?
