How It Is

From Umwelt, Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria, 2023

My first visit to Antony Gormley’s studio was on a bright blue day in late September. I was looking forward to seeing where his sculptures are made. Concealed at street level by tall metal gates, the studio, built in 2003, stands in a part of central London that remains semi-industrial. Around the corner a café and music studios have opened up, testament to the continued evolution of the city.

I was greeted by Michael Green, who works on publications. He explained that Antony would be down soon; we could look around in the meantime. The studio is an extraordinary place. Set at the back of a large industrial site, the building provides 10,000 square feet of studio space. As you walk in your gaze is drawn up by the double skylights that flood the studio with natural light, and to the many sculptures, wrapped in translucent plastic, which hang from the high ceiling like giant chrysalises. On the studio floor are more works, mostly unfinished. Assistants weld, grind, talk, assemble and clean. Michael explained that everybody who worked in the studio, including those not involved in making the work—the accountant, for example—gathered together often to discuss developments with Antony, who encouraged everyone to share their point of view on recently finished works. For Antony the studio is a factory for ‘thinking and feeling through making’¹, a place where doers and fabricators collaborate.

Michael introduced me to Jamie Bowler, who was working on a Strapwork destined for the present exhibition, Umwelt. It was not quite finished, with joins still visible where the strips of steel were welded together. The work would later be sandblasted and left outside to rust, but already there was a powerful sense of a sculpture that both inhabited and articulated space, and extended into yours. The steel strips that make up the sculpture are intricate, almost labyrinthine, like a map designed to get you lost. Jamie explained that he was guided in his work by precise digital drawings made on a programme called Rhino 3D. These drawings evolved from scans of Antony’s body, which replaced the plaster moulds he used until the late 2000s. Most difficult was keeping the steel strips straight, either vertically or horizontally, because of the distortion caused by the heat of welding. Jamie showed me the drawings on a computer, where the elements were colour-coded to assist in the sculpture’s assembly.

Antony arrived. We shook hands and, turning to say something to another assistant, he bumped into a sculpture, which nearly teetered over. He laughed. Steadying the sculpture with both hands, Antony explained that it was a favourite. Its stance was more naturalistic than the other works in the group—upright with arms by its sides—and it gave a strong sense of being both gravity-bound and weightless. I could see what he meant. The work, one in a series of Net Polyhedra sculptures, was ethereal. Fine steel pins carefully welded together into polygonal cells delineate the internal architecture of a body that you can see straight through. With barely a boundary to contain it, it was hard to distinguish the sculpture from its surroundings.

An artist who bumps into his own work is the sort of thing you might expect to find in Beckett. Later, when I remembered the moment to Antony, he smiled. He had in fact contacted Beckett two or three years before his death in 1989. After receiving photographs of Land Sea and Air II (1982), three life-sized lead encasements with only slits and holes for orifices, pictured on a Sussex beach, Beckett agreed to meet in Paris. Shortly before the appointment, he called to say that he was too ill. An extraordinary meeting of minds was missed. Beckett, to whom my essay owes its title, has long been an inspiration for Antony. Not only for the sense of alienation he conveys inimitably, but because Beckett confronts us with the sheer contingency of being alive—without theological consolations or narrative coherence.

I think a lot was compressed in that moment. The always-present tension in Antony’s work between mass and emptiness, surface and depth, insides and outsides. A sense of fragility and precariousness that speaks to what it feels like to be a person, what it feels like to be alive and to inhabit a body. And the humour, too.

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The first sculptures you encounter in this show are Strapworks. Antony started to make them in 2018. The one in the entrance, Tip (2021), is clearly recognisable as a human figure, with hands on hips and head bowed. You can see through it to an Extended Strapwork, which stands at the other end of the gallery. Both are made of 8 mm thick Corten steel strips welded together. They have been sandblasted and rusted, an effect achieved by leaving them outdoors, which opens the works to accident and the passage of time. Ochres drip unpredictably down their rust-bitten surfaces.

Antony compared the movements of the steel in these works to a Möbius strip. In the Euclidean experience of space, up and down, inside and outside, are clearly distinguishable, but the Möbius strip undoes these distinctions. The easiest way to get a sense of this is by tearing a long, narrow strip of paper, twisting it once, and joining its ends. Allow your finger to travel the length of the paper’s surface and you will touch both sides of the strip without ever crossing an edge. A similar effect is achieved by the steel strips in the Strapworks. Welded together at right angles, they also suggest an underlying grid or holding pattern.

The steel strips are referred to by Antony as ‘lines’, inviting us to see the sculptures as forms of drawing. This is true of earlier works, too, where line works to connect sculpture to the surrounding environment. In the aforementioned Land Sea and Air II, the lead body-cases—indexical impressions of Antony’s body—are intersected by longitudinal and latitudinal solder seams that map the sculptures onto the landscape, out towards the sea and its horizon. The difference is that, in the Strapworks, the line not only suggests a connection to nature but to the binary system zeroes and ones—used by computers and other digital devices: the body itself is translated into code, a virtual reality. ‘We are totally embedded in this system, whether we like it or not’, explained Antony. The implication is that this reality is not out there, so to speak, but in here, just beneath the surface of the skin.

Walk around the Strapworks and you will see and feel how they always change, both in relationship to your own body and to the room in which they are displayed. The way in which sculpture activates architecture, and vice versa, has long been central to Antony’s practice. He has called architecture our ‘second body’².

In the present exhibition this is especially pronounced in the so-called Extended Strapworks, sculptures such as Dwell (2022) and Implicate III (2022), where the rusted line never articulates or stays within a recognisable configuration—a human body—but is stretched beyond recognition, made architectonic. When seen through the gallery’s many doorways and apertures, the far reaches of the Extended Strapworks are concealed from view, pulled down corridors or into adjacent rooms, making it difficult to know where the works end and the interior begins. A similar claim could be made for a work from a different series, Run (2016), installed outside the gallery, which maps the interior of a standard-sized room. At once an object and site, it was described by Antony as ‘an invitation to enter a structure that articulates the space of the built environment at the scale of a room’. He also called it ‘a playground for adults’. In Run, the framing and articulation of space become the subject of the work, as does the experience of being within it.

Upon seeing these sculptures I was reminded of a passage in a book by the Buddhist psychotherapist Alan Watts, where he coins the word ‘inline’ to describe a twofold process: how the body acts upon the world and the world acts upon the body. ‘My outline, which is not just the outline of my skin but of every organ and cell in my body, is also the inline of the world.’³ Look now at the outline of your own body, and think of it as the world’s inline. It is a beautiful and simple way of decentring what conventionally goes under the name of the self. Antony’s sculptures do that also. They invite you to feel how the world delineates you, how you extend into the world, how you are entangled by it.

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On my second visit to the studio in December it was snowing. I felt relief at the cold when seasons seem gradually to disappear. The studio’s forecourt had been swept clean but everything was still white and bright. Antony invited me up to a large, well-lit room where he draws and works alone, away from the bustle of the main studio.

We sat down and spoke about recent works and spent some time looking at a virtual rendition of the exhibition on Rhino 3D. He guided me through the various rooms, answering questions and talking about the sculptures as he went. Antony was particularly attentive to how the sculptures were exhibited. The empty spaces articulated by the Strapworks, or other sculptures called Knotworks, which look like neural networks and where line is concentrated at the solar plexus, needed to be counterbalanced by denser sculptures such as cast Blockworks. As their name suggests, Blockworks like Still II (2021) fill space up; they are dense and opaque, almost brutally massive. Likewise, the predominance of vertical axes in certain rooms needed to be held in tension with sculptures that adopted a horizontal position, such as Earth II (2022), displayed in front of the reception desk, or Slump V (2019). Hidden around a corner in a room on the ground floor, the work catches you by surprise. Antony compared its position to ‘drunk people on the morning after New Year’s Eve found slumped against underground station walls’. Half a tonne of sheer despondency. Funny, too.

The Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Salzburg used to be a house, Antony explained. The neoclassical Villa Kast was built for Maximilian Karl Count O’Donnell after he saved the life of Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1853, thwarting an assassination attempt by a Hungarian nationalist in Vienna. It is now owned by the Mayr-Melnhof family and has housed the gallery since 1989. ‘It has been turned into a relatively neutral space, lost to history, lost to dwelling and the drama of daily life that might have existed in its time’, Antony has said. ‘This may also have been a delusion, but it has now, in a way, been replaced by another—the atopia of the contemporary art gallery.’⁴ A sense of affluence and domesticity remains, however, at least in the arrangement of the rooms, which are more intimate than those in a conventional gallery.

One of the questions posed by this exhibition is whether a renewed sense of being-in-the-world can be articulated by sculpture, whether sculpture can teach us to experience and dwell in the world differently. ‘What does it feel like to inhabit the space of the body?’, asked Antony. ‘And then what does it mean to inhabit this building; then, maybe, what does it mean to have made a world on a borrowed planet?’ The implication is that, as in a game of Russian dolls, the macrocosm contains the microcosm, and vice versa.

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When we reached the subject of ecology, Antony’s eyes lit up. Of special interest was the late cultural theorist Bruno Latour, whose writings underpinned much of his current thinking on art.

In one of his last publications, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis (2021), Latour developed his case for the interrelationship of people and things. Rather than encountering the world as composed of inert objects that we simply act upon, Latour argues that the world is made up of a myriad of agencies to which we bear a resemblance. ‘Everything we encounter, the mountains, the minerals, the air we breathe, the river we bathe in, the powdery humus in which we plant our lettuces, the viruses we seek to tame, the forest where we go looking for mushrooms, everything, even the blue sky’⁵, overlaps and encroaches.

For Latour, everything is so entangled that we cannot talk of an autonomous subject, if by that we mean a self-contained and independent individual. The higher animals, including humans, are redefined as ‘those that breathe the excreta of plants’⁶. Nor can we talk about discrete objects. ‘What is a “human body”’, he asks, ‘if the number of microbes needed for its maintenance exceeds by several orders of magnitude the number of its cells?’⁷

The interdependence of things Latour calls Life, with a capital L. Life subsists in a ‘critical zone’, which designates everything that exists in the fragile biofilm—‘the skin of things’—that makes Life possible on Earth. All things share a concern with how to subsist; life sustains the conditions for Life. For Latour, the Covid lockdowns provided us with an occasion to experience this reality more fully, allowing us to emerge from a less clearly perceived lockdown: ‘the “iron cage” of “the laws of economics”’⁸. Kafka’s short story, ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915), in which Gregor Samsa metamorphoses into a bug, is read as a new paradigm with which to think the modern. In a mad world it is Gregor’s becoming-bug that now seems normal, while his parents and those around him are mad for continuing on as if nothing had changed. And what could be madder, after Covid, than business as usual? Yet that is more or less where we humans are heading.

Covid provided Antony with a similar insight. ‘I think that Covid and isolation made me see more clearly how other bodies are part of the environment, and particularly the bodies of others that you habitually dwell with. In the end, it did make me reflect that the notion of living space is extended through those other bodies.’ Covid, one might say, forced us to acknowledge what in fact was already the case: our mutual entanglement.

In this exhibition, the sculptures that speak most directly to the experience of extending through are Circuit (2022), a Double Cast Liner, and Tangle (2022), a Double Strapwork. In the late 1980s Antony started to make ‘double’ works, one of which, Mountain and Sea (1987–88), was cast from a mould of Antony holding a plaster mould of himself. Then, as a result of the Covid lockdowns, he returned to the ‘doubles’, using different means to form them. Circuit, for example, evolved out of two different body scans put together, while Tangle is made from one scan that has been mirrored to create two bodies. In the resulting sculptures, the figures are completely entangled by a rusted line that ‘has no regard for the independence of the two bodies but just moves its way through them’, as Antony put it. The sculptures make the boundary between bodies, people and things active active because porous—drawing subject and object into zones of indistinction.

Circuit and Tangle were not in the studio for me to see. When Michael Green first described them to me, the myth of Pygmalion came to mind, an image of the artist enamoured of his own work. I raised the issue with Antony, and wondered whether the sculptures might be seen in this way. His answer was refreshingly undefended. Often people saw his work as narcissistic, he said, but the myth of Pygmalion did not account for what was taking place in the sculptures. The Double Strapworks, for instance, have an indexical relationship to his body, to be sure, yet they also dispossess him of it. They are not representations of a likeness but interpretations of a system. ‘The work comes from a subjective, particular, intimate experience, but stands for all experience—it comes from the particular but pertains to the universal.’

The concept of the universal has fallen into disrepute, replaced by a politics of difference. Yet what Antony said rang true, and helps to account for how his sculptures, Double Strapworks or otherwise, can reach across cultural divides and communicate to so many, echoing their sense of being. Spend time with a sculpture, walk around it, dare perhaps to touch it, and you may feel alone, dejected, free, anxious, joyous, fearful, stuck in a bad dream. Some works will suggest the idea of breath, peace, darkness and mystery. If a sculpture succeeds in arousing emotions in you, you, the spectator, or I, or we, become like it. This shift from ‘you’ to ‘I’ to ‘we’ to ‘it’ is suggestive of a world in which nobody, or nothing, can keep a firm skin on.

Artistic modernism has long been imagined as an aesthetic of violence, fragmentation and rupture. Hence the expression ‘avant-garde’. Derived from warfare, it suggests that art is inextricably tied to an ideology of conquest. Of course, this is not the only way to think about modern art, and to conquer the world through an aesthetic revolution is different to actual warfare. Yet the myth remains potent, as do the twin pillars that support it: the artist as autonomous subject and the artwork as discrete object.

Circuit and Tangle raise a different set of questions. What if art was not about conquest, but about facilitating an experience that elicits words like ‘continuity’, ‘connectivity’, ‘mutuality’ and ‘plasticity’? What if art was in the service of helping us recognise the permeability of one body to another and our embeddedness in the biosphere? ‘In terms of our sensorium’, Antony explained, ‘I would say that the bounding condition of the skin that art has been so interested in—that whole task of registering how light falls on the skin of things, being the basis of representation—well, that needs to be broken, or opened, or interrupted. I’m more interested in the porosities than I am in the absolutes, even though I have spent a lot of my life making hermetic and insulated cases.’

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Towards the end of our conversation, Antony pulled out a series of recent drawings of small human figures set against a dark horizon. (Later he showed me other related drawings, like Web II (2022) and Hold XII (2022), in which the body is figured as a nodal point in a network of lines that coalesce and extend beyond the edges of the page.) The medium was made out of inkcap mushrooms Antony picked as they deliquesced. He passed me the jar of liquid to smell, a pungent admixture of mulch and alcohol. The drawings were moving and felt quite personal both because of their scale—like the four smaller sculptures displayed in this exhibition, they look like worlds in miniature—and because they are ‘exercises in dowsing for feeling’, as Antony said. The page can be a site of experimentation in a way that steel cannot, and drawing has always helped him figure things out.

A week later I emailed Antony asking what mushrooms meant to him. He wrote back with a set of photographs and a short text in which he explained that, as a child, he was taken to a place outside East Wittering on the Sussex coast that grew mushrooms, a windowless Nissen hut made from corrugated asbestos cement. He remembered the mushrooms’ mulch-like smell and the peaty earth. Another memory was of forest walks with his grandfather in the Schwarzwald. Since moving to the countryside in Britain, Antony found great pleasure in registering the seasons through the growth of different mushrooms. He described them poetically as ‘periscopes sent up from a world that lies beyond sight’⁹. He also noted their role in carbon sequestration. Yet the greatest joy was finding inkcap mushrooms, which grow only between summer and late autumn and need to be picked just before they start to rot. ‘I love the ink’, he wrote, ‘the way that it behaves, charcoal black when it dries but gooey like egg albumen, so leaving trails that vary in width with its gluey held-togetherness.’¹⁰

This is not the first time Antony has used unorthodox materials when drawing. Semen, coffee, milk, crude oil and blood have served before, sometimes to similar effect. Blood, for instance, allowed Antony to connect drawing both to the circulatory rhythms of the body and to the molten iron at the earth’s core, suggesting a connection between the body’s temporality and the deep time of geology. More recently he has made Junction I, III and X (2022), a group of drawings in which two human figures merge and coalesce in pools of walnut ink. As with the mushroom drawings, the line separating nature and culture is made porous through the use of organic materials.

The use of inkcap mushrooms expresses an evolving interest in the productive labour of non-human life forms. ‘I don’t want to express myself’, Antony explained. ‘I want to express everything that is not myself.’ The drawings can be seen as attempts to modify the relationship between the human and its environment-world. To draw with mushroom is not to master nature but to collaborate with it. It is to acknowledge our implication in an unseen world, to recognise that we form part of Life when often we feel that we stand apart from it, or above it. Mushrooms also carry their own associations: mycelia underlying the earth’s skin, unseen, like capillaries, or an underworld or unconscious. In their comings and goings they remind us that everything in Life is but the temporary manifestation of a process.

The same might be said for the sculptures and drawings in this exhibition, Umwelt. The word ‘Umwelt’ is borrowed from Jakob von Uexküll, a twentieth-century biologist and a founder of modern ecology, who used it to describe the perceptual worlds of animals. For Uexküll, the small worlds of the fly, the spider and its web, for instance, coevolved and extend into one another in ways that exceed human rationalism. Likewise, to walk into the Villa Kast is to enter an ‘Umwelt’ fashioned neither by subjects nor by objects but their entanglements. As Beckett put it in his great unpunctuated book How It Is (1961), the text akin to a continuous line that passes through you: ‘in that reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure …’¹¹ One looks in vain for the joins.