Gormley and Gombrich in conversation

What are the roots of 20th century art and how should artists relate to the past? Can our response to art transcend our own culture? Antony Gormley, Britain's foremost sculptor and a recent winner of the Turner prize, discusses the purpose of art and much else, with Ernst Gombrich, the great art historian

Antony Gormley: You ought to know that it was reading your book The Story of Art at school that inspired my interest in art.

Ernst Gombrich: Really!



AG: It made the whole possibility not only of studying art but also of becoming an artist a reality.

EG: That's very flattering and very surprising.

AG: I thought we might talk about the relationship of contemporary art to art history generally: what is necessary to retain and what we can discard.

EG: I would like to start with Field (see right). I'm interested in the psychology of perception; if a face emerges from a shape you are bound to see an expression. The Swiss inventor of the comic strip, Rodolphe T?er, says that one can acquire the fundamentals of practical physiognomy without ever actually having studied the face, head or human contours, but just through scribbling eyes, ears, and nose. Even a recluse, if he's observant and persevering, could soon acquire all he needs to know about physiognomy to produce expressive faces. I have called this T?er's law: the discovery that expressiveness does not depend on observation or skill but on self-observation.

AG: For me the extraordinary thing about the genesis of form of the individual figures in Field is that it isn't about visual appearances at all. What I've encouraged people to do is to treat the clay almost as an extension of their own bodies. It's about taking a ball of clay and using the space between the hands as a kind of mould out of which the form arises.

EG: Anyone who has ever played with clay has experienced this elemental form. It has played a crucial role in 20th century art. Picasso did it from morning to night, didn't he? He just toyed with what would come out when he created these shapes. When we loosen the constraints of academic tradition we not only create an expressive physiognomy but an expressive shape, a more independent usage; that's what we admire in children's drawings. The basis of our whole relationship to the world, as babies or as toddlers, is that we make no distinction between animate and inanimate things: they all speak to us, they all have a kind of character or voice. If you think back to your childhood, not only toys but most things which you encounter have this very strong character or physiognomy as "beings" of some sort. I'm sure that this is one of the roots of 20th century art, to try to recapture this. It was too exciting to discover how creative and expressive the images made by children, the insane and the untutored were. It's no wonder that artists longed to become like little children, to throw away the ballast of tradition that cramped their spontaneity and thus thwarted their creativity. But it's no wonder also that new questions arose about the nature of art which were not so easily answered. Deprived of the armature of tradition and skill, art was in danger of collapsing into shapelessness. There were some who welcomed this collapse-the Dadaists and other varieties of anti-artists. But anti-artists only functioned as long as there was an art to rebel against, and this happy situation could hardly last. Whatever art may be, it cannot pursue a line of resistance. If the pursuit of creativity as such proves easy to the point of triviality then there is the need for new difficulties, new restraints. I believe that it would be possible to write the history of 20th century art not in terms of revolutions and the overthrow of rules and traditions but rather as the continuity of a quest, a quest for problems worthy of the artist's nature. Whether we think of Picasso's restless search for creative novelty, or of Mondrian's impulse to paint, all the modernists may be described as knights errant in search of a challenge. Would you accept this?

AG: I think it's true that this idea of a reaction against a kind of orthodoxy is no longer a viable source of energy for art today. But I did not simply want to continue where Rodin left off; I wanted to re-invent the body from the inside, from the point of view of existence. I had to start with my own existence.

EG: I think in your art also, you are trying to find some kind of restraint. You want us to respond to the images of bodies, of your "standard" body?

AG: I like that idea of a "standard" body, but what I hope I've done is to completely remove the problem of the subject. I have a subject, which is life, within my own body. But in working with that I hope that it isn't just a "standard" body: it is a particular one which becomes standardised by the process.

EG: The question is whether this internal body can be externalised. The problem starts from the most trivial fact that when we feel the cavities of our own body, let us say the interior of the mouth, we have an entirely different scale. Any crumb in our teeth feels very large and then when we get it out we are surprised that it is so small, and if the dentist belabours your tooth you have the feeling that the tooth is as large as you are. Then it turns out, if you look in the mirror, that it was an ordinary small tooth. In a sense that is true of all internal sensations: the internal world seems to have a different scale from the external world.

AG: I think that's a brilliant, accessible example of what I'm interested in. There was a repeated sensation that I had as a child before sleep, which was that the space behind my eyes was incredibly tight-a tiny, dark matchbox, suffocating in its claustrophobic imprisonment. Slowly the space would expand and expand until it was enormous. In a way I feel that experience is still the basis of my work.

EG: In our sleep we are governed by these body sensations which we project into some kind of outside world and see as things which they aren't. You say that in Buddhist meditation this is also so-but it isn't. There you try to get away from thingness.

AG: What I was trying to describe was the first experience of this inner body which was in my childhood. I think then the experience of learning Vipassana with Goenka in India was much more disciplined, but was about the same thing. The minute you close your eyes in a conscious state you are aware of the darkness. With the Vipassana you explore that space systematically. First of all you?

EG: You have to learn to relax.

AG: Well, it is an interesting mixture. Anapana, or mindfulness of breathing, gives you concentration. You then use that concentration to look at the sensation of being in the body; that is a tool I try to transfer to sculpture.

EG: Yes, but my problem is how you bridge these intense experiences which we can call "subjective," and what you want the other to feel.

AG: That for me is the real challenge of sculpture. How do you make something out there, material, separate from you, an object among other objects, somehow carry on the feeling of being. In a way, where you ended in Art and Illusion is where I want to begin. The idea that there are things which can be conveyed in a material way, but which can never be given a precise word equivalent.

EG: Certainly not. Our language isn't made like that. Our language serves a certain purpose, and that purpose is orientation of oneself and others in the three- dimensional world. But I cannot describe the feeling I have in my thumb right now, the mixture between tension and relaxation. Sometimes if you go to the doctor you feel this helplessness in describing what your sensations are, there are no words. That is an important part of all human existence, that we have these limits. But your problem as far as I see it is to transcend these limits.

AG: I want to start where language ends.

EG: But you want to make me feel what you feel.

AG: But I also want you to feel what you feel. I want the works to be reflexive. So it isn't simply an embodiment of a feeling I once had? It's a meeting of the expressiveness of me, the artist, and the expressiveness of you, the viewer. For me the charge comes from that confrontation. It can be a confrontation between the movement of the viewer and the stillness of the object, which is an irreconcilable difference, but also an invitation for the viewer to sense his own body through this moment of stillness.

EG: In other words, what in early textbooks was called "empathy"-a feeling that you share in the character of a building, or a tree, or an animal. I am always interested in our reaction to animals, because we react very strongly. The hippopotamus has a very different character from the weasel, there is no doubt; we also talk to them in different ways.

AG: I think that you are saying two things there. One is the anthropomorphising of external stimuli and the other thing, which I am more interested in, is the idea of body size, mass; that a hippopotamus is huge and has rather a simple body shape, and a weasel is like a line and sharp. I am trying to treat the whole body in the same way as perhaps portrait painters in the past have treated the face. I am trying to use the body as a medium.

EG: It is not self-expression.

AG: I think that underlying my return to the human body is an idea of re-linking art with human survival. You have always been concerned with finding a value in art, the application of rational principles to the understanding of an emerging language, and I think that art-certainly in the earlier part of the 20th century-took a view of that history in order to validate its own vision. I think that it is more difficult to do that now. All of us are aware that western history is one history among many histories, and in some way there now has to be a reappraisal of where value has to come from. Subjective experience exists within a broader frame of reference. When you think about what happens next in art, it is very hard not to ask the question: what happens next in the development of global civilisation?

EG: I agree with you in that the value of our civilisation and the values of art are linked. One cannot have an art in a civilisation which believes in no value whatever. I think that all our response to art depends on the roots of our own culture, that is why it is quite hard to get to the root of eastern art. I also think that sometimes we can't understand the art of our own culture just as we don't understand the letters in Chinese calligraphy. Don't you agree?

AG: I think that it is invariably misunderstood, certainly at first experience. But my reply to the Chinese calligraphy question is my reply to anyone who finds it impossible to understand any one artist's work today. If there is some sympathy there, then the invitation is to get more familiar-look at the organic development of an individual language and see if that has a universal significance.

EG: The problem is how to distinguish a work of art from a crumpled piece of paper, which also has its physiognomy and its character. I think there is still a feeling of a person behind it, which adds to the confidence of the viewer, that here is an embodiment and the viewer is interested in engaging in it.

AG: Yes, that idea of purpose is embodied in the way in which something is put together, not just in its form. In some way that sense of purposefulness has to do with how clear the workmanship is, how?

EG: How manifest?

AG: Yes.

EG: It is really the "mental set" in 20th century art which is behind all these problems. You have to have a certain feel of what is going on there, otherwise it's just an object like any other.

AG: I think that we all are very visually informed these days. Maybe classical education within the visual arts has been replaced by a multiplicity of visual images that come through computers and advertising and all sorts of sources.

EG: Then you have the weirdest forms on television (I don't own one by the way), and the sometimes amusing shapes created for advertising or whatever else. The problem here is the limits of triviality.

AG: Yes exactly. How do you condense from this multiplicity of images, especially in sculpture, which is something still, silent, and therefore rather forbidding because it isn't like a moving image on a screen. It is not telling you to buy something. It is something that has a different relationship to life. That for me is the challenge of sculpture now: it may have within it a residue of 5,000 years of the body in art, but it must be approachable to somebody whose main experience of visual images is those things.

EG: You want them to feel the difference between a superficial response of amusement and mild interest, and something that has a certain gravity.

AG: Yes, I think it should be a confrontation (laughs).

EG: Coming to terms with it.

AG: And through coming to terms with it, coming to terms with themselves.

EG: Yes, perhaps that is a different matter.

AG: But that question of the difference between subjective response and the object is the essence of what I'm trying to get at. For me, the idea that the space that the object embodies is in some way both mine and everyone else's is very important-that it is as open to the subjective experience of the person looking as it is to me, the possessor of the body that gave that form in the first place.

EG: You'll agree that everybody's experience is likely to be a little different.

AG: Absolutely. We have moved out of the age where you would argue that, yes that is a Madonna, but, well, the drapery isn't quite fully achieved. Today we have moved from signs that have an ascribed meaning and an iconography that we know how to judge, to a notion of signs that have become liberated. Now that has a certain annoyance factor (laughs), but it also has a certain invitation for an involvement that was not possible before.

EG: But it was with architecture.

AG: Yes that's true. I think of my work, certainly in its first phase, as being a kind of architecture. It's a kind of intimate architecture that is inviting an emphatic inhabitation of the imagination of the viewer.

EG: But in architecture there was the constraint of the role of the tradition and purpose of a building. This is a church, and this is a railway station, and we approach them with different expectations. The problem for every artist is to establish some kind of framework wherein the response can develop.

AG: I'm working on it. I'd like us to talk a bit more about casting.

EG: Well, did you know that it has turned out that part of Donatello's Judith is cast from the body? It's astonishing. I remember Rodin was charged with casting from the body, it was considered a short cut, seen as very lazy, or cheating even.

AG: Yes, there's a negative attitude.

EG: Quite a number of posthumous busts are based on the cast of the death mask that is usually modified. But this practice is not usually condemned.

AG: Because the in-built morbidity of the death mask is in keeping with the idea of a memorial portrait?

EG: It fits into what you call the context.

AG: But the interesting thing is that idea of trace. Certainly as a child, probably the most potent portraits which affected me in visits to the National Portrait Gallery were the portrait of Richard Burton, which was a rather dark oil painting, and the head of William Blake, which was cast from life. What affected me as a child was feeling the presence of someone through the skin. It was as if something was trying to come through the surface of the skin. In a way the casting process in that instance, and I hope also in my work, is a way of getting beyond the minutiae of surface incident and instantly into that idea of presence, without there being something to do with interpretation. One of the bases of my work is that it has to come from real, individual experience. I can't be inside anyone else's body, so it's very important that I use my own. Each piece comes from a unique event in time. The whole project is to make the work from the inside rather than to manipulate it from the outside and use the whole mind/body mechanism as an instrument, unselfconsciously, in so far as I'm not aware while I'm being cast of what it looks like. I get out of the mould, I reassemble it and then I reappraise the thing I have been, and see how much potency it has. Sometimes it has none; I abandon it and start again.

EG: What does the potency depend on?

AG: The potency depends on the internal pressure being registered.

EG: How much of this is subjective and how much is inter-subjective?

AG: I am interested in something that one could call the collective subjective. I really like the idea that if something is intensely felt by one individual that intensity can be felt, even if the precise cause of the intensity is not recognised. I think that is to do with the equation that I am trying to make between an individual, highly personal experience and this very objective thing.

EG: You work as a guinea pig in a test to find out if the cast affects you. If it doesn't, you discard it.

AG: Yes, I think that has to be what I am judging when I see the immediate results of the body mould. What I am judging is its relationship to the feeling that I want the work to convey. Once I am out of it, it does become a more objective appraisal. I work very closely with my wife, the painter Vicken Parsons. Once we have defined what the position of the body will be then it is a matter of trying to hold that position with the maximum degree of concentration possible. Sometimes it's a practical thing; the position is so difficult to maintain that the mould goes limp. I lose it, I don't have the necessary muscular control and stamina to maintain it. More often, and more interestingly, it isn't those mechanical things but others that are more to do with intensity, and that can have to do with how much sleep I have had or simply with how in touch I am with what we are doing. The best work comes from a complete moment, which is a realisation. I then continue to edit the work. It rarely involves cutting an arm off and replacing it with another, but it may involve cutting through the neck and changing the angle two degrees. In terms of the process, we are talking about two stages, the first stage is making the mould. Then I go into the second stage which is making a journey from this very particularised moment to a more universal one, which is a process of adding skins. In the past this has meant using different colours, to make sure that each layer was exactly the same thickness. Now I just rely on my judgement that I have reached the point at which this notion of a universal body and a particular body is in a state of meaningful equilibrium.

EG: What you describe is a little like a painter stepping back from the canvas judging it, examining it as if it were from the outside. Now I will ask you a shocking question: why don't you just take a photograph of your body?

AG: This is a photograph; I regard this as a three-dimensional photograph.

EG: As you say a three-dimensional photograph, it could be done by holograph. Would you accept it?

AG: That wouldn't interest me. I am a classical sculptor in so far as I'm interested in mass.

EG: Tactility.

AG: Yes, the tactility is very important and the idea of making a virtual reality for me denies the real challenge and the great joy of sculpture which is a kind of body in space.

EG: And of course it is to scale, while the photograph on the whole needn't be and can hardly be demonstrably to scale.

AG: The other problem with a photograph is that it is a picture, and I am not really interested in pictures as I am not interested in illusion. This idea has in a way informed your book: the history of art as a succession of potential schema by which we are invited to make a picture of the world. As we evolve the visual language we continually revise the previous schema in order to find an illusion that works more and more effectively. I feel that I have left that whole issue behind. We have to find a new relationship between art and life. The task of art now is to strip us of illusion. To answer your question, how do we stop art from descending into formlessness or shapelessness? How do we find a challenge worthy of the artist's endeavour? My reply to that is, we have somehow to acknowledge the liberty of creativity in our own time, which has to abandon tradition as a principle of validation, to abandon the tradition of mainstream western art history and open itself up. Any work in the late 20th century has to speak to the whole world.

EG: It may have to, but it won't.

AG: Well, there is this whole question of gender and masculinity and how it relates to the idea of a universally recognisable experience. In some of my work, the sexuality is declared and relevant to the subject of the work and at other times it isn't. I have tried to escape from the male gaze, if we are thinking about the male gaze both in relation to nature as a place of slightly frightening otherness and the male gaze in relation to the female body as the object of desire, or the object of idealisation. I think the idealisation of my work and its relationship to landscape are very different from historical models. I am aware that the work is of a certain sex.

EG: Well everybody belongs to a certain gender and a certain age, you can't get out of that and I think it's silly to try.

AG: Yes, but what I'm saying is that this is a modified maleness; without trying to be the orthodox new man, a lot of work tests the prescribed nature of maleness in various ways, but I can't deny that it comes from a male body and from a male mind. Part of the reason that so much of the work tries to lay the verticality of the body down, or re-present it by putting it on the wall, is that I am aware that even when a body case is directly on the floor, because I am tall there is a sense of dominance, of a male confrontation? But I want to ask you one important question; you have done a lot for all of us in terms of making apparent the structures of our own visual culture and I get the feeling that you have a faith in the value of that story. I don't know what your faith is in the art of now, or of the future.

EG: About the future I know nothing. I am not a prophet. About the situation at present, I think that the framework of art is not a very desirable one-the framework of art-dealing, art shows and art criticism. But I don't think that it can be helped, it is part of destiny. Sensationalism and lack of concentration are not very desirable and not very healthy for art, but I don't despair of the future or at least the present of art. I wouldn't despair because there will always be artists as long as there are human beings who think that this is an important activity.

AG: But do you feel that we are at the end of the story that you wrote?

EG: No, of course not. I do feel that there is a disturbing element in the story; in the new edition I am working on the intrusion of fashions into art, which has always existed. Romanticism has created an atmosphere that makes it harder for an artist to be an artist, because there are always seductive cries or traps which may tempt the artist to this kind of sensationalism-like exhibiting the carcass of a sheep-because they are talking points. This temptation to play at talking points becomes the pivot of what the young then want to do, also to have the same talking point. I think this is a social problem rather than a problem of art.

AG: It is very difficult not to start talking about such things without sounding sententious and moralistic, but I do feel that art is one of the last realms of human endeavour left that hasn't been tainted by ideologies. In some way art does have this potential to be a focus for life which can be removed from the constraints of moral imperative, but nevertheless can invite people to think about their own actions.

EG: It has its own moral imperatives.

AG: It does for the artist making it. I think it is very, very difficult then to transfer that degree of moral commitment.

EG: It is not all that difficult. The artist mustn't cheat. It's as simple as that.

AG: He must take responsibility for his own actions.

EG: If he feels, as you just said, that something isn't good enough he must discard it. Self-criticism is part of this moral imperative, and has always been. It is the same whether you write a page or whatever you do; if it isn't good enough, you have to start again. It's as simple as that, isn't it? I once said it is a game which has only one rule; the rule is that as long as you think that you can do better you must do it, even if it means starting again. From that point of view I don't think that the situation has changed much.

AG: We keep touching on this problem of subjectivity and I don't think we are ever going to nail it down, but we have to replace the certainties of symbolism, mythology and classical illusion with something that is absolutely immediate and confronts the individual with his own life. Somehow truth has to be removed from a depicted absolute to a subjective experience.

EG: Your faith is a very noble one. I don't for a moment want to criticise it. The question with every faith is whether it holds in every circumstance, and that is a very different matter, isn't it?

AG: I think the idea of style as something that is inherited and with a kind of historical development now has to be replaced by an idea of an artist responsible to himself, to a language that may or not be conscious of historical precedent.

EG: But there is a problem in your faith; would you expect from now on every artist do what you do? Surely not.

AG: No, no.

EG: Exactly, so it's only one form of solving the problem, isn't it?

AG: I think that we can no longer assume that simply because the right subject matter or the right means are being used that there is value in an artist's project. I think that the authority has shifted from an external validation to an internal one and I would regard that as the great joy of being an artist. The liberation of art today is to try to find forms of expression that exist almost before language and to make them more apparent. I think that in an information age, in a sense, language is the one thing that we have plenty of, but what we need is a reinforcement of direct experience.

EG: I fear that this is a false trail; people always say: if it could be said it wouldn't be painted and things of that kind. But language serves a very different purpose. Language is an instrument; it was created as an instrument. Cavemen said "come here" or "run, there are bison about." It is quite clear that language is an instrument. Painting a bison is a very different thing from talking about a bison. Language is in statements, art is not. Language can lie. I would say that the majority of experiences are not accessible to language, but that some are.

AG: I agree with your idea that in some way language is an orientation, but the point is that once you have oriented yourself, you then have to leap, you have to go somewhere. The question then is whether you go into the known or into the unknown.