Blind Light

So I managed to squeeze in a couple of days in London in between all my marking, and had the opportunity to spend a sunny Friday afternoon at the Southbank. I went to see the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward, and it was absolutely fascinating, to the point where his work pushes one to reconceptualising the relationships between space, place and the body. I will pick out two key installations that I loved

1) Event Horizon: this is a project which sees life-size figures - casts of the artist's body- placed on rooftops and streets around the Hayward. All the figures face towards the gallery's main outdoor, roof-top sculpture terraces. A whole series of paradoxes and oppositions thus occurs. The streets and the roofs surrounding the gallery become the site of the work, but the place for viewing it (the gallery) has been emptied of content. Therefore, in order to see the sculpture, we also interact with the city scape itself, which becomes part of the sculpture. As the eye seeks out a far off figure on a roof top a mile away, so it also takes in the scope of different shapes - the soft curve of the London eye, the blocks of the Shell building, the triangles of the Hayward roof. The built city turns into sinuous sculpture, a play of shapes. Or the sculpture becomes architectural, part of the city, fixed into its buildings. Furthermore, people on the viewing galleries looking at the sculptures point to horizon, huddle in groups, forming the shapes of classical sculptures themsleves as they hunt for sculptures elsewhere. So the people on the sculpture terraces themselves become sculptures, part of a living, flexible sculpture. Our bodies are like the casts of Gormley's figures, husks that contain us, but are not us.

2) Blind Light: Blind Light also offers this kind of paradoxical play between the act of looking at art, and the act of being part of a work of art. From the outside, you can observe people vanish as they enter a brightly-lit, cloud filled box. Inside, the visibility is extremely limited (less than two foot) and in the middle of a gallery, you feel yourself lost on top of a mountain, unable to see anything (but your hands, following the wall to guide you round, can be seen by people on the outside). People giggle, loom out of the mist. Sound carries. It is spooky, disorienting, and there in the middle of the city, you feel the strangeness of other places.

This is a wonderful exhibition. It makes you think hard about what it means to look at Art; what it means to live in a city; what the difference is between sculpture and architecture; what the difference is between inside and outside. Where does the body stop and the world begin? As I walked back across the river, feeling the delightful warmth of the day on my back, I felt a contentment spreading through me, as I experienced the city itself as a work of art, a kaleidoscope of ever changing colours and shapes. It made me think that one of the functions of art is one that asks us to relook again at our surroundings, that suggests something new about our most basic experiences, and that reminds us of our common humanity. Go and see this exhibition!!