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Antony Gormley: Blind Light

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The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
The South Bank Centre,Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX

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Description: Specially commissioned new work on a monumental scale by the acclaimed artist, together with pieces from the last three decades.

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Lost in the fog

 

Limited vision: those who enter the Blind Light room, above, take their lives in their hands, but it does provide entertainment for people on the outside looking in. Hanging figures, below, are yet more of Gormley's body-casts

<b>Cement works: Allotment II, not to be confused with bat and bird boxes at B&Q

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Those who admire Antony Gormley and those who do not must all, on one matter, agree - that the quality of his self-promotion is unrivalled in the history of art. Can there be a Citybound passer-by who has not in the last week or two encountered a cast of the sculptor's naked body in the streets or on the skyline?

In his omnipresent nudity his whole body is better known than that of Michelangelo's David or the warriors of the Elgin Marbles, his genitals and buttocks more familiar to millions than those of any porn star. Has any newspaper, free to all takers or overpriced and paid for, failed to publish photographs of both the eminent man and his images of himself? Is there a duke or dustman who has not read of him? Could any pensioner, slumped before a television set, have slept through all the coverage that he's had? Has any critic (other than me) failed to review his latest show in terms of gushing adulation? And have not writers, poets and politicians, in their profound ignorance of all the visual arts, peddled without pause their praise of Gormley ever since the exhibition opened? Were Leonardo and Raphael ever so much interviewed?

This triumph of self-exposure is the consequence of hefty organisation and, no doubt, extravagant expense - and the sceptic, seeing little aesthetic merit in the work, wonders just how much public money has been poured into it, not just for the benefit of Gormley and the profit of his dealer, Jay Jopling, but even more for the aggrandisement of Ralph Rugoff, the new American director of the Hayward Gallery, unknown to most of us and thus determined to make his mark. There is, of course, a sponsor, one of the world's largest law firms, but can it really have paid for all this - for Event Horizon, for the installation of Gormley's body-casts in 31 locations, as well as a semi-retrospective and for a Gormley-now show in the gallery? If it has, then clearly its fees are far too high; and if it has not, then the accounts should be open to scrutiny so that we know exactly how much we, the taxpaying public that in one way or another funds such exercises, have put into the pockets of Gormley and Jopling. This exhibition is presented both as "a public art commission" and as one of the "brand new monumental works specially conceived for the Hayward Gallery ..." - to whom, then, does it belong and by whom and how has it been funded?

Works specially conceived for galleries and other public spaces (the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, for example) have in recent years had interesting histories; though paid for by the galleries in question, some, at the end of exhibitions, have reverted to the artists and their dealers and have then, with a little tinkering, been adapted to the premises of new owners who have paid for them again. My view of such chicanery is that the works, if not wanted for the permanent collections of the commissioning galleries, should be sold for their benefit and their benefit alone, preferably on the open market (Christie's and Sotheby's would surely oblige) and not entrusted to the artist's dealer.

This is a matter into which the Department for Culture should have enquired years ago, just as it should investigate the benefits that accrue to the very few artists (and indirectly their dealers) who receive most of the patronage in promotion and cash doled out by Tate Modern and the Arts and British Councils, with the immediate consequence of the Turner Prize or an international exhibition a hefty increase in the prices asked (and got) for every scrap of work. Year after year, through these public agencies, public money is pumped into artists - Gormley, Kapoor, Hirst foremost among them - who are millionaires supported by (and supporting) even richer dealers; neither the artists nor the dealers need these subsidies.

I know that this is not a clear-cut issue, that the public should be kept aware of major artists' recent work and that the country should be represented at great international events by the best artists that we have - but nothing of this is done without cost to the public and great benefit to the artist. There ought to be some kickback to the public purse and, at the very least, the occasional gift by the artist of a significant work or two. At the moment, and for years past, the notorious artist and his dealer have by the rest of us been feather-bedded at enormous cost.

Twenty years ago, when Gormley was 35 or so and had for at least five years employed his body as object, subject and manufacturing tool on an industrial scale, I thought I could discern in his work an intense and melancholy talent, perhaps at a crucial moment of change, self re-assessment and burgeoning development. There was about his body-casts something eerie and disturbing, all human qualities and characteristics smoothed, generalised and even neutered, the figure forced into enigmatic forms and attitudes that seemed, at the time, to suggest the spirit imprisoned. Human only in a symbolic sense, these simplified figures, ponderously limbed, asserted the nature of the iron or lead with which they were made, never Gormley's skin or features. My one misgiving was the sameness of them all, the suspicion that Gormley was, so like so many other contemporary artists, tied to one desperately thin idea.

Only my misgiving has been fulfilled. Gormley refers constantly to his own work and is perfectly happy to repeat it, as in the various Fields, without significant variation, the close reduplication of motifs a device to wring from them every possible slight shift of meaning. Once in a while the source of a new work may be an external borrowing; in his Space Station, fresh this year, he reflects the monumental ugliness of Paolozzi's public sculpture; his celebrated Angel of the North of the late 1990s had, a German curator suggests, a forerunner in the photography of Dieter Appelt, in which the artist used his own body (albeit naked only above the waist) with canvas wings to construct an image, published in 1980, of a disconcertingly Gormleyan Daedalus or Icarus. Event Horizon, a reworking of Gormley's folly in Stavanger six years ago, ultimately reaches back to the baroque idea of sculpture as the terminal element of the constituents of traditional monumental architecture, but the random installation of his bodycasts atop the blank facades of London's office blocks has not exactly turned them into rivals to St Peter's or established him as a new Bernini. In such a comparison Gormley's single static figures, thought they may add a point of focus for those given to gazing at horizons, seem wooden, mean and meaningless small things of scant aesthetic interest.

Even Blind Light, the work that has given so much perverse unaesthetic pleasure to visitors unable to distinguish a work of art from a circus side show, had a precedent in Westkunst, Cologne, in 1981 - a room filled with shredded paper through which the visitor, disoriented, had to find his way. Blind Light, a glass room within the gallery, is filled with cloud-like humidity so dense that visibility can be measured only in inches, and the cautious visitor, if he is to find his way back to the door, should keep a hand on the glass walls - this provides modest entertainment for spectators outside the box. Tessa Jowell is reported to have thought the jape a work of genius; I think it a silly nonsense and Gormley an arrant fool. No one with asthma or a heart disease of any kind should enter it; my immediate response was difficulty in drawing breath, followed by violent sneezing, then equally violent coughing and a crazily erratic heartbeat. As in so many galleries, there is nowhere in the Hayward to sit, so retreat to the loo was the only option for recovery.

In Allotment II of 1996 Gormley simply increased to 300 variations the single motif of his Room cast in concrete a decade earlier, an imprisoning box that at a height of over two metres might just have contained Gormley himself, with apertures for his mouth and ears in the small upper section, and anus and penis in the lower. In multiplying the number and varying the scale to accommodate human beings of every size and shape - in this case inhabitants of Malmö aged between 18 months and 85 years - and then arranging them on a grid groundplan, they resemble both a miniature model of a post-nuclear New York and a sale at B&Q of bat and bird boxes or council blocks for little furry animals.

Mother's Pride may suggest that Gormley is not entirely dour and humourless for the medium is sliced white bread and the subject a foetal silhouette bitten from them by the man himself - but it is a feeble schoolboy joke. Dated 1982/2007, it is, I presume, a recent reworking of an earlier idea too puerile, the sane man must think, to be worth the repetition. Does the 1982 version still exist, I wonder? - I ask only because, when in 1988 in Liverpool I saw another work by Gormley in sliced bread, his Bed, of 1981, I noted the active presence of weevil and the menace of black mould. A Tate curator of the time (of pre-Serotan vintage) perhaps pulled my leg when he explained that Gormley, in eating his body shapes (fore and aft) in depth and volume into this Andrean spoof (the bed in some simple sense recalls Carl Andre's brick Equivalents), had for days consumed nothing but the bread and then cast his stools in lead, seeing some significance in the transformation of so much into so little. These stools, it seems, are to be found among the unidentified objects in Natural Selection, an immediately contemporary work now in the Tate's permanent collection; legpull or not, this conceit fits well with so much coprological art of the later 20th century.

The so-called catalogue is useless; virtually devoid of the information expected in such a volume (and the very little that there is, printed very small in almost invisible grey ink), it consists of flattering photography (how the camera can lie), a sycophantic interview primarily by Rugoff, and three ludicrously and ostentatiously exhibitionist essays by American academics. Two of these do nothing but quote other academics and philosophers, phenomenologists, Alberti, Winckelmann and even Diodorus of Sicily, the uncritical compiler of myths and history in Julius Caesar's day who means so much to most of us; the third must be credited with the invention of a word for Gormley's sculptures of himself, the clumsy fusion of his surname with the Hebrew golem, of which, apparently, the literal translation is cocoon - Gormlem. What fees, I wonder, were paid these American nincompoops? Could Rugoff not have found familiar English fools at half the price for twice the jabberwocky?

Gormlem? It is an ugly word even for Gormley's featureless figures. I hope it doesn't stick.

• Antony Gormley: Blind Light is at the Hayward Gallery (0871 663 2500) until 19 August. Open Sun-Thurs 10am-6pm; Fri-Sat 10am-10pm. Admission £8; concessions available. www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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