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It's out with the old and in with the even older
By Louise Jury, Evening Standard 21.08.07
Keeping watch: The British Museum's Katrina Whenham looks over one of the Terracotta Warriors
Close up: The event has already attracted huge ticket sales
Marching orders: An Antony Gormley life-size statue is removed from Waterloo Bridge
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As one set of men is towed away, another marches into view.
On the South Bank work has begun on the slow removal of the 31 statues by Antony Gormley that have proved such a talking point since May.
Meanwhile, in the British Museum, curators have begun the painstaking operation of opening up crates in which China's Terracotta Warriors have arrived.
Anticipation is high over the exhibition of treasures from the burial tombs of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor. Nearly 59,000 tickets have been sold already.
A 6ft cavalryman weighing about 28 stone was among the first items unpacked at the museum yesterday.
Senior heavy object handler Darrel Day said some of the items arriving from China presented particular problems.
The horses in their crates are too large to get through the doors of the Reading Room, where the exhibition is being mounted, so have to be unpacked outside.
The temporary platform installed in the Reading Room cannot hold the weight of a fork-lift truck, so alternative hydraulic lifters are being used.
Mr Day said: "We do quite a lot of this stuff so we're quite used to it but it's always a worry. So much can happen in transit."
Museum staff went to help the packing operation in the city of Xi'an and sent back photographs and detailed emails to ease the process of taking the treasures out of their boxes.
As the warriors arrive, Gormley's army of 31 life-size statues, made in a mould of his own body, are being returned to him. They were given only temporary planning permission by London councils. The statues on Waterloo and Westminster Bridges have been removed first, with those on Bush House, in the Strand and at Freemasons' Hall to follow. All will be down within a couple of weeks.
A total of 210,000 people visited the rest of the Gormley exhibition in the Hayward Gallery. It was the most visited show by a living artist at the Hayward and the fifth most popular of any put on at the gallery.
Blind Light, the central glass room of dense mist, will be exhibited in New York this autumn. It is not yet known whether the statues, together known as Event Horizon, will be displayed elsewhere.
The terracotta army is the first of London's autumn blockbusters. Others will include The Golden Age Of Couture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Turner Prize retrospective at Tate Britain and the Tutankhamun show at the 02 arena.
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