Angel of The South (Bank)

There is a survey trotted out by journalists to illustrate the dearth of knowledge amongst the general public about contemporary British artists. It goes like this: one hundred people are stopped in the street and asked to name a living British artist. Of those hundred, 94% quote Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin: respectively the enfant (now middle aged) terrible and ladette of British art. The remaining 6% of votes are apportioned thus: two votes for Gilbert and George, one for Rachel Whitehouse (it’s Whiteread but marks for trying,) one for Picasso (dead and Spanish,) and two for Anthony Gormley.

The survey goes one step further: each participant is asked to name a work of art by their chosen artist. Without exception all nominators of Hirst choose ‘The Shark Tank’ and all champions of Miss Emin ‘The Bed’ (the Rachel Whitehouse fan also plumps for Emin’s masterwork.) The two Gilbert and George fans cannot not name a single work by the duo and the Picasso aficionado suggests‘Sunflowers’ (that’s Van Gogh: French, and also dead.) Full marks though to the Gormley fans who not only displayed admirable originality and artistic nous for rejecting Emin and Hirst but who correctly identified Gormley as the artist behind The Angel of The North.

In the wake of Gormley’s Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery in London, I would hope that a second survey would reveal a contingent of Gormley converts: someone needs to release the stranglehold that Emin and Hirst hold on the imaginations of the general public. It is a superlative exhibition possessing both style and substance in an age when too few contemporary artists muster anything more than the former. The focus of the exhibition is the human body. Not the body’s visceral workings as extensively catalogued by Emin nor its inner psychological yearnings, but rather an examination of the body in relation to its environment. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia are the watchwords here. Life-size lead casts of Gormley’s own body are imprisoned by iron spikes or perch atop rooftops along the North and South Banks annihilated by the vastness of the skyline.

The eponymous piece of the exhibition is a 20ft glass room filled with thick water vapour generated by ultrasonic humidifiers. Its aim is to disorientate. Gormley likens it to ‘being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea.’ Visibility was said to be no more than two feet, in reality it was a matter of inches. The peasouper conditions reduced visitors to cripples, shuffling forward incrementally, hands outstretched, searching for a wall, a fixed point by which to navigate. The space is small enough to keep fear at bay. How different it would be if the experiment was reproduced on a larger scale; the clammy isolation magnified ten or fifteen times, the exit panic-inducingly distant.

The space is no less impressive from the outside. You watch as those trapped inside emerge from the swirling mists, flatten their palms against the comforting solidity of the glass walls, summon their courage and stride off again into the unknown. One gorilla in the mist had daubed ‘HELP!’ in the condensation of the glass striking a humorous note in an otherwise disquieting exhibit.

Less successful was Gormley’s Space Station, a 27ton steel structure tilted precariously on its axis and perforated by square openings. Gormley likened it to a ‘dark, labyrinthine, prison’ and also to the compressed, foetal form of a human embryo. Try though I might, squinting as if looking for the unicorn in a Magic Eye picture, the foetal form remained hidden.

Upstairs, this foetal motif is used to greater effect. Matrices and Expansions is a collection of suspended works in stainless steel, their tentacles interlacing with all the intricacies of coral. They recall hornet’s nests or a chrysalis and within their tendrils, a human-shaped void is discernable, floating like a laboratory specimen, not waving but drowning.

The crowning glory of the exhibition is Event Horizon. Thirty golems, life-size casts of Gormely’s own body, stand atop buildings on the North and South banks, over a distance of 1.5 sq km. From the Hayward’s terraces you can spot them; one atop the National Theatre, one on Waterloo Bridge, another atop the Royal Festival Hall, like a latter day Terracotta Army, standing sentinel over the heart of London. More disturbingly, their precarious stations at the precipices of each building suggest incipient suicide leaps into the abyssal Thames. It is a superlative and innovative staging of a sculptural installation, animating the buildings along the river banks and uniting the disparate styles of the North and South. The sentinels are due to be removed when the exhibition closes. I wish they could remain, not only as river guardians, but as permanent reminders that there are greater forces at work in modern Britain than Emin and Hirst.