It's official: Antony Gormley is better than Rodin—at least according to the public. The 57 year old—most famous for his metal casts of his body—was responsible for the most-visited single artist show in London last year, at the Hayward. With an average daily 2,255 visitors, it was more popular than Holbein and Hogarth at Tate Britain and, incredibly, Rodin at the RA.
Yet the art world—critics, curators, art enthusiasts—mostly agrees that Gormley is terrible. His catalogue essays are written by lesser art historians. Bloggers have renamed him "gormless." Many revile his oeuvre of self-casting, seeing it as a sculptural personality cult reminiscent of Stalin. I emailed a friend of mine, the editor of a German art magazine, about him. "Gormley is horror," he responded. Admittedly, Gormley gets the big shows, but I suspect this has more to do with his crowd-pulling powers than with museum directors' admiration for his work.
With all this in mind, I set off with a heavy step for Gormley's new exhibition at the White Cube—although "new," with Gormley, is a word to use with caution. Downstairs, Gormley had constructed one of his familiar mathematical figures, an enormous crouching giant, rendered in an intricate web of welded steel rods. The ground floor was populated by the body casts he's been doing for 20 years, glued, as usual, to the floor, walls and ceiling. The gallery guide told me that the artist had "activated the space" with a "haptic field"—the adjective, pretentious and Greek, indicating that it was meant to have some kind of tactile effect. I tried to feel something without success. It was a little disorientating, with all those figures on the walls. I wondered if I had lost my sense of gravity. Perhaps I was in a space station, or in a frozen moment, sucked into a vortex with lots of bodies spinning around me. Then I got bored and left.
But what about the opposing view? We need a way of explaining the sensation of bombast, exploitation, sentimentality and boredom that Gormley's work evokes. Unfortunately, art criticism today is not suited to constructing negative critiques. One option is simply to denounce Gormley's monotony—but in this respect he hardly differs from most contemporary artists. Aesthetically, I think Serra is the key to understanding Gormley's failure. The former's work is politically critical, dangerous and aggressive—think of his huge sheets of steel that bisect American squares, cutting off people's view of political institutions, and his leaning corridors of steel elipses that appear about to fall on the viewer's head. But where Serra is scary and disorientating, Gormley is comforting. Another Place, the series of casts Gormley strewed across Crosby beach, near Liverpool, which the tide reveals and conceals, is a work of pure romanticism—like Caspar David Friedrich's monks on a windswept seashore. But it is also one that makes the space "safe": the level at which the sea laps at the blobs permit the beachgoer to calculate the depth of the water.
It struck me, going round the White Cube, that one way to get a handle on Gormley is by comparing him to a leading figure from another field. Dan Brown has sold untold millions of copies of The Da Vinci Code, yet no one would argue that he is a great writer, only an exciting one for some. Brown and Gormley work with familiar genres, which they have apparently revitalised—with Gormley it's the statue, with Brown it's the religious mystery. The clichés of Brown's prose find their counterpart in the olde-style patinated surfaces of Gormley's figures.
Gormley himself claims to be uninterested in narrative—"I don't do the theatrical school of sculpture"—but he is in denial. His works look like scenes from blockbuster movies. Field, which helped him win the 1994 Turner prize, was an expanse of 40,000 cuddly little Shrek-like creatures—all made by members of the public, who were asked to turn lumps of clay into figures, using pencils to make eyeholes. The gravity-defying body casts, meanwhile, are like superheroes. What could be more comic-like than a human figure who can walk up walls? But this doesn't mean, of course, that Gormley is bad. Many critics would say the Spiderman movies were "good," meaning that the story was exciting and the special effects convincing. So perhaps there's nothing wrong with Gormley—as long as we realise that he's just harmless, escapist fun.
