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I don’t mind the staircase so much as the exposed steel beam. Overall though, the building certainly fits, I think they got the scale and footprint just right.

FT Article on Gormley

Lunch with the FT: Antony Gormley
By Jackie Wullschlager

Published: May 28 2010 16:22 | Last updated: May 28 2010 16:22

On a warm spring day, a giant in a fluorescent yellow jacket and woolly hat strides into the Lord Stanley, a wood-panelled gastro-pub in Camden, north London. A head and shoulders taller than everyone else, Antony Gormley gazes effortlessly over the throng of drinkers at his local and hastens to our table. He has a long mobile face and darting eyes behind square silver glasses. He gives me a peck on each cheek and places a solicitous hand on my arm. “Hello, how has your day been so far?” he opens. “Can I get you a drink?”

It is a vicarish approach, anxious to appear easy-going, one of the crowd. I tell him the FT pays for lunch. He requests a lemonade and peels off his cyclist’s gear, revealing dark hair flecked with grey and couldn’t-care-less clothes – brown turtle-neck jumper, beige trousers. Without further ado, he produces a catalogue for a recent show from his rucksack and shows me a diagram of a triangle within a triangle. “You see, this is so beautiful! I said to Roger Penrose [professor of mathematics at Oxford], ‘I’ve been dealing with this bubble geometry and I’m not making much sense of it, can you help?’ He was an absolute joy, so open-minded, he spent hours taking me through this jungle of possibilities.”

I try to interest Gormley in the blackboard menu but he lingers on the trisector theorem illustration, summarising rapidly: “If you trisect a triangle’s angles internally, the intersections provide the vertices of a smaller triangle. Whatever the original shape, the smaller triangle will be equilateral. It shows the relationship of the random to the absolute.”

Is Gormley a philosopher? He is aware that “either my work can be seen as really bad figurative sculpture, or as a provocation to a state of reflection”. Few artists divide audiences in more complex ways. He is seen by some as a traditional sculptor of the human form, and by others as a cutting-edge conceptualist – and he’s admired or loathed on both counts. He is popular with the public but has equally attracted opprobrium from the critical establishment for the very accessibility of works such as “Angel of the North”, his massive motorway landmark, or “Field”, an installation of 40,000 clay-sized figurines made with a community in St Helen’s, Merseyside, for which he won the Turner Prize in 1994. Last year’s “One and Other” for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, won widespread acclaim. So has “Event Horizon”, the recent installation of fibreglass and iron sculptures of a naked man across New York’s skyline, a reprise of the event in London in 2007.

Test Sites, opening at London’s White Cube next week, brings Gormley’s conversations between architecture, geometry and the human body into the gallery. It includes massive blocks of rusted iron, which aim “to make the condition of architecture absolutely apparent as a way of describing the body”, and a space frame: “a drawing but also an object – virtual but also real. It’s a forest of verticality, a 3D hologram but somehow you’re part of it.” The viewer edges his way through the frame in total darkness until, on a timed cycle, blinding light floods the room, recalling the installation “Blind Light” at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2007. “It’s intensely uncomfortable – what was illusory becomes visual, and you find yourself up against your fellow men. It’s very experiential – very scary. When I showed a version in New York, people became totally freaked out.” He imitates an east coast twang: “Turn those lights off!”

Why put people through it like this? “[The philosopher Edmund] Burke said there’s no beauty without terror. I want people to react by saying, ‘What the hell is this?’, then become the object and ask the same question.” This insistence on putting the spotlight on the viewer makes Gormley a modern-day grand inquisitor, an interrogator of souls.

Certainly his uncompromising conceptual focus is matched by asceticism at lunch. With barely a glance at the Mediterranean-leaning menu of meat and fish, he selects the cheapest thing on it – a vegetable risotto. Neither starter nor desert are contenders. The waiter suggests an accompanying green salad; I order an onion tart.

Gormley, 60, is lean and fit and puts himself through extreme physical trial in the bedrock of his art: casting moulds from his own body. “The idea of making a surrogate body or getting someone else to do what I can legitimately use myself to do – I couldn’t do that,” he says. “It’s my moment of truth. If there’s a truth claim in the work, it’s not an interpretation of life but that it comes from a lived moment in time. I may be applying logical and conceptual principles of the mind/body problem, but this is not expressive. I’m trying to tell things as they are – as evidence of something actual. It’s the thing people kill me for.”

He means, I think, the underlay of human figuration as a basis for conceptual art. Why has this provoked such vehement responses? “I’ve been battling this all my life. There’s a sense that somehow the work is unaccepted within the canon because it’s still going on about the body. There are people who characterise my project as a one-shout idea. But you don’t criticise a dancer for using his body. People seem to make a connection with the work. The body is capable of transcending creed, race, language, to tell of human experience including thought, feeling, indeed the fact of human existence. We need images of the body now as much as we have ever needed them and no one knows how to make them make sense.”

It is not too hard to read this offering of his body – and a certain petulance that the meaning of the sacrifice is not universally acknowledged – in terms of Gormley’s rigorously Roman Catholic upbringing. “Oh, yes, there was lots of kneeling in dark places praying to non-existent gods,” he says, but most seminal – though nothing to do with religion – are memories as a child of seven or eight of “the experience of the enforced sleep – being made to go to sleep when I wasn’t tired between two and three in broad daylight. That’s when I got to know the body as a place, not a thing. It was a feeling of incredible claustrophobia. I remember the metal-balconied room in the middle of our house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, facing south. It was incredibly hot, bright, pink, the size of a matchbox, completely suffocating. I felt almost sick with nausea from its confinement. The slow release from that into a space that was dark, cool and infinite – I got used to having that experience. The tiny room opened out, turned into something without dimensions. I can’t think of anything that I have made that doesn’t refer to that or hasn’t come out of it.”

The food arrives. My tart, served with potato and walnut salad, is rich and robustly flavoured with rosemary. Gormley takes forkfuls of risotto, a fresh, creamy-looking concoction of morels, peas, broad beans and basil, without interest. Was his childhood happy? “Not really – but it wasn’t sad either,” he answers, as if the question were irrelevant. Antony Mark David Gormley – the initials AMDG are, not coincidentally, those you encounter in churches across Europe, where they stand for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, to the greater glory of God – was born in 1950, seventh child in an affluent family. His father was manager of a pharmaceutical company and a “captain of industry” who “had a passion for 15th-century paintings”. He was also, says Gormley, “a maniac. He was hopeless – he believed in discipline but I’m not sure that he was particularly disciplined. Motivation is very difficult to pin down. With my father, although he took my scribbled poems to his secretary and brought them back typed out, there was always a sense that nothing was quite good enough. The whole family suffered from the feeling that in his view the potential of one’s offerings was not quite adequate.”

At Ampleforth, a Catholic boarding school in north Yorkshire, Gormley “made a radio, a boat, a sandyacht”; monks “listened to my poems and helped me find the right paints – I have a lot to be thankful for in my education.” He read architecture and anthropology at Cambridge, then travelled in India, where he developed an interest in Buddhism that has remained a constant. He did not set out to be an artist: “I wouldn’t have had that presumption or assumption. It was only when I realised it was the only conclusion to who I was. I was three months off 30 when I came out of art college. I kept my options open a long time. And I have been very wilful.” After art school – Central St Martin’s, Goldsmiths and the Slade – he worked and lived in Peckham, south London, for years with painter Vicken Parsons. “Such an amazing wife and mother,” he says, “and still my best critic, merciless and very good.” The couple have three children: filmmaker Ivo; Guy, who studied sculpture at Goldsmiths; and architect Paloma. “They are so brilliant and interesting. I say that with no sense of self-congratulation. It’s been none of my business but I’m intensely proud of them.”

Our main courses finished, Gormley eats his way dutifully through the salad. The pub is heaving but nothing distracts him; he speaks warmly of younger generations of artists. His own cohort includes Tony Cragg, Peter Randall-Page, Bill Woodrow and his great rival Anish Kapoor. Though the two no longer talk to each other, Gormley says Kapoor “still makes extraordinary, challenging things”. But, he says, “That generation has been eclipsed, quite rightly, by the very lively Thatcher’s children [the Young British Artists]. They were able to do what we couldn’t dream of – we were happy to wait for galleries and institutions to take an interest while we showed our work shyly to each other. They said, ‘We are going to take control of our destinies’ and I take my hat off to them.”

Although he considers that “Damien [Hirst] is a natural philosopher”, he distinguishes his generation from the rest of the YBAs because “there is a really deep thing for us – of thinking about the issue of where sculpture fits with the world of made things and perhaps a bit wider – an expectation that you would set the terms of your own project and articulate it as well. You had to chart your journey but also the reason for the voyage in the first place.”

Although his admirations tend to the abstract – Malevich, Pollock and Serra – a crucial point in Gormley’s journey was the “revelation” of encountering Jacob Epstein. “After seeing Epstein, I felt I didn’t have a choice. He dealt with sex, procreation, death. Epstein made a pregnant woman, Moore made a Madonna. Moore had holes but not many vaginas and giant schlongs wapping around.” Gormley waves his arms suggestively. “You don’t see many tumescent penises in Moore. Epstein was filled with American vigour and a call for this primary language of direct carving. He infected the world. While English painting was dealing with formal issues, Epstein was dealing with the question, ‘Is the human project going to last?’”

This, updated to an environmentally threatened and technology-led age, is the question posed by Gormley’s art, too – most recently in the 390ft sculpture of a naked man, engineered as a minimalist pylon, which he proposed for the Olympic commission. We are meeting soon after this was rejected in favour of Kapoor’s “ArcelorMittal Orbit”, and days after the Sunday Times published an illustration based on its own artist’s impression rather than on Gormley’s actual proposal – and he invites me to see the “true Olympic model”. I apologise on behalf of my profession, and try to prolong lunch. His lemonade never arrived, so I reorder and he downs it hastily. I pay the bill and we walk five minutes to his warehouse-studio.

Did he expect to win the Olympic commission? “I didn’t think they could possibly fail to appreciate that this is what the Olympics needs,” he answers wryly, showing me how viewers would have been invited to climb the man-pylon. “It would have been approachable but also an experience – the framing of a situation in which the viewer becomes the viewed. It’s a collective approach, where participation is essential to make a new moving body. It’s the industrial sublime, a mountain you climb in the city.”

Gormley is a paradox: a minimalist and also a romantic; an abstract thinker whose work turns on the human figure; a giant ego who denies individual expression but instals casts of his own body worldwide as Everyman. “The work is driving me, evolving and I’m keeping up with it – it makes enormous demands not just on me but on everyone who helps.” Again the absolutism, inclusiveness, recall the Catholic ideal, yet I wonder if Gormley is an optimist?

“Well, no. I probably suffer from melancholy, but we have to believe if the sun has got 6bn years of energy left, we have a part to play. I make contemporary megalithic markers in time and space. Leaving a record of human experience beyond the time when we’re talking to ourselves is a primary urge. We’re insignificant. I’m attracted to sculpture that recognises that. Most culture is a reaction to amnesia – not just human memory but the way whole galaxies disappear into black holes – cosmic amnesia. Sculpture is a railing against that.”

Antony Gormley, ‘Test Sites’, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London SW1, June 4-July 10. ‘Event Horizon’, New York, to August 15. ‘Critical Mass’, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, until August

……………………………

Any thoughts?

I like the suggestion gunter, but I think Lucan would be better served by a heavier rial system, trams are meant for city centre and not long distances. I think the most sensible thing to do would be to extend Luas Red Line from Heuston Station (or possibly new Inchicore Station but that would have to be post IC) along the route you suggested (James St to College Green), but all the way to Ringsend/Irishtown.

This would create an east-west axis in the city centre on the south side, mirroring that on the north side. Im sure (although have no figures to back this up) would be a much more feasible option then current Lucan Luas proposals because it serves a part of the city centre with limited public transport and links with existing Red line and Dart at Heuston and Pearse Street and eventually Green line.

The figure of eight that Dick Gleeson came up with in 2004 was not much different and probably makes as much sense now as it did then. I think you need to look at JIMG’s post on Zurich; trams are best in the CC and by building a line down James’ St to College Green and Pearse St you give the feeling of continetal sophistication to areas that excluding Lord E St to College St really need it; the question is where do you cross the river to bring the Point into play as the perfect eight?

If this was built along with Luas BX (Green line extension as far as O’Connell Street only with possible extension to Broombridge in the future), it would make Dublin a much more accessible city. Im sure these two lines (from Heuston to Ringsend and BX) could have been built for not too much more than the cost of the pointless Citywest and Cherrywood extensions and would be much more viable

Certainly some form of North / South link required as part of the system; Ballymun/Finglas being the target and in that regard a complete review of the options that fit with the Maynooth line needs to be examined.

Resident were just opposed to Luas full stop.

They are absolutely right; the vast bulk of Ballyer is less than 1kms from the Adamstown stretch of the Dart network post interconnector as displayed in the map below.

http://www.multimap.com/maps/#map=53.35393,-6.3949|14|4&bd=useful_information&loc=IE:53.34528:-6.35889:14|ballyfermot|Ballyfermot,%20County%20Dublin

Perhaps at some stage in the future (if it is needed) a new heavy rail line could be built from Inchicore (again post IC), along the N4 to Lucan and onto Leixlip and linking with Maynooth line.

As you can see from the aerial shot below it is a very short distance from the North bank of the Liffey at Lucan to the Maynooth line; the land is undeveloped; build a spur a station and a pedestrian bridge and Lucan has Dart.

http://www.multimap.com/maps/#map=53.35516,-6.40297|14|4&bd=useful_information&loc=IE:53.35753:-6.44561:14|lucan|LUCAN,%20SOUTH%20DUBLIN

What Dublin needs is a light rail system focussed primarily on the City Centre and grade seperated branch lines serving towns such as Lucan. The one loser in this process would be Liffey Valley SC; but is it worth spending a €1bn on a meandering route just to plug in one shopping centre?

@cgcsb wrote:

Oh my God total subject change, you said that it doesn’t connect with other lines (it does) then when I corrected you you start talking about drumcondra already being served and dardistown’s population.

The context was Portland Oregan where the scheme appeared to be a unifying piece of network like the interconnector and in that context MN beyond a new radial line through 3 bed semi land connects nothing that is not already connected; the proponents put it forward as unifying but clarify one element of the existing network that it connects that is now remote?.

Seattle does use a Luas to connect to SeaTac airport which could be a solution for Dublin as could Irish Rail’s airport spur. As Rumpelstiltskin said now is the time to think within the envelope of what is fiscally deliverable and I think that extending Luas to places like Ballymun and connecting Abbey Street to Stephens Green and a Branch line to James’ St up Schistchurch as part of a wider humanisation of Dame St/College Green would be a much better bet with the public purse versus a Greek style kamikazee ‘fiscal stimulus’ that would bloat the deficit for 5 of the most crucial years in the reduction phase.

Dardistown is in the main a series of high bay logisitics warehouses which are mostly operated by firms who do air-freight distribution; it has no population and there is no dart; what was your point on Dardistown; an area I must confess I’d never heard of adressed as anything other than Northwood Business Park.

What you need to realise is that there are three more austerity budgets on the way over the next three years; healthcare, old age pensions and public sector pay will all be in the firing line. What is clear is that all programmes including capital expenditure will need to be cut and either MN or the Interconnector will be cut; it must bne MN which never stacked up in all but one where developers paid about €100m a year in development levies; those days are gone but the overcrowding on Dart gets worse.

@rumpelstiltskin wrote:

It’s obvious that it would be nuts to go ahead with Metro North, and that the Interconnector is the only vital piece of underground rail infrastructure. Instead of looking at the worst side of things, we should see this as an opportunity to create a more comprehensive Luas network which will go hand in hand with pedestrianisation. Can you imagine anything better for Dublin than for the entire stretch from James St. to College Green pedestrianised, with a row of trees down the centre and trams trundling by every few minutes. It’s time for a bit of imagination, and Metro North is a waste of money.

Amen

@cgcsb wrote:

@PVC King. Even if construction on metro started now, it wouldn’t be completed until 2015. By that time, Ballymun’s regeration will be completed, Swords will have a population around 80,000(about the same as Tallaght, which is served by a very busy luas line), DCU’s student numbers will have increased significantly and Dublin Airport’s T2 will be fully operational. Also the numbers of people in employment will have risen.

Also upon it’s opening, it will have an 100+year lifespan, what’s not to like?

Are you on drugs?

Swords will have a population of 35,000 tops in 2020; total housing output in Fingal is about 1,000 units a year and that includes Blanch where far more housing is being built.

Where is the money to increase student numbers at DCU? Fiscal Austerity…..
T2; its a facility not a demand driver, look at the Dubai Metro a complete flop.

I could go on……..

@OisinT wrote:

Portland, Oregon is a city of a similar area but slightly higher population than Dublin. It faces VERY similar transport issues as Dublin. It is widely considered one of the best “light rail” cities in the world..

I am encouraged to see that an airport can be served by light rail; a similar Luas type arrangement is now completed inSeattle costing a $225m

@OisinT wrote:

The 49% increase was not from 1998-2010, the 49% increase was seen in overall ridership (on all lines) immediately after the Red Line (city centre to airport) line was opened..

The article is far from clear but it appears to have been a 5.9kms connecting line and not a single spoke; if there were connecting properties you would expect a similar uplift as it would leverage other routes; Metro North provides no such connectivity it simples feeds passengers from a narrow corridor to the City Centre.

@OisinT wrote:

IIRC there are sections of the line which are underground and some tunnels and overpasses.

What was the cost the article doesn’t make that clear.

I’ve never been to Oregan but I have no doubt there is an entirely different context to Dublin other than the link with Intel; in any event 49% increase between 1998 and 2010 is unremarkable in comparison to the growth experienced on the DART and outer commuter network over a similar period. The key point in your anology which you neglected to share is that the network is light rail on surface which would have development costs comparable to Luas and not have a price tag of billions.

A 30 minute busride is not going to deter potential travellers to the City Centre but €2bn will place unneccessary stress on the Government deficit at a time when deficit reduction is vital.

Conversely I’d say that the FT in general and John Aurthurs in the Lex column has been one of the most complimentary commentators re the Irish fiscal situation. However the view in the markets has changed towards all sovereign debt and the idea that another 3-4 years of Keynsian stimulus is acceptable is gone.

Domenico Lombardi, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution, said the 16-member group that uses the euro is in a “precarious” situation that requires more assertive action.

The euro has sunk to four-year lows against the dollar in recent days as fears grew of a spillover of the sovereign-debt crisis.

Lombardi blamed the lack of timely action for the common currency’s descent and said the market is now pricing in “somewhat higher probability” that the euro area may fall apart if its governments can’t reach a credible solution to running the monetary union.

Put simply the ability to borrow is dramatically curtailed; I’d not focus on the UK too much as their budget was swollen by a government facing re-election and one that has historically had an ideological bent towards regional redistribution of wealth from London to the North, Scotland and Wales. The current government were elected on a platform of fiscal rectitude so have a clear mandate to wield the knife.

What I would worry about is taking on projects that involve large repayments of future debt. Set against falling passenger numbers MN clearly is far more risk than it is worth.

PARIS (Dow Jones)–European governments are right to intensify their efforts to cut borrowing, and there is little risk they will cause a double-dip recession, said the chief economist of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“Countries are taking stronger measures than one might have expected a few weeks or months ago. The timing isn’t changing, but the intensity of the measures is, which is appropriate because the fiscal consolidation challenges are large,” Pier Carlo Padoan told Dow Jones Newswires in a telephone interview before the release of the think tank’s twice yearly Economic Outlook Wednesday.

Recent austerity measures announced by Spain and Portugal to counter concerns over their ability to pay debts have heightened worries about the strength of economic growth in the euro zone.

Spanish Finance Minister Elena Salgado said openly last week that governments should continue to cut their budget deficits, even if that results in slower growth.

“We do not think our forecasts for growth will be dramatically changed, even taking into account new measures and therefore we do not see the risk of a double dip, certainly not a double dip coming out as a consequence of fiscal consolidation,” Padoan said Tuesday.

Padoan also said the weakening of the euro that has accompanied concerns over growth and government debt burdens in Europe takes the currency in the right direction.

“The fact that the euro is weakening goes in the right direction because the euro was possibly overvalued for some time in the past,” Padoan said.

He added that major currencies often move in wide swings, so the recent large fall in the euro against the dollar isn’t surprising.

If we redeployed you and that fantasist Morgan Kelly to Moneypoint there would be a dramatic fall in hot air fired power generation costs; great for the deficit reduction measures.