Garage Makes Space For Famed Sculptor

Antony Gormley’s sculptures pop up with such frequency in public places around the world that one is tempted to think of him as the closest thing to Britain’s official state artist. “Domain Field,” which recently opened at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, is one of a staggering seven Gormley shows currently on around the world.

But in light of what tends to pass for official and public art in Moscow, “Domain Field” is an excellent reminder of how lucky the British are to have him. His career has been one long upward ascendancy. Tate director Nicholas Serota put on Gormley’s first exhibition in 1981. While director of the Whitechapel Gallery, he was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, and his massive 1998 statue, “The Angel of the North,” has become a national monument, catapulting him to international fame. Made in 2003 for the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, it features 287 standing human figures composed of small, stainless steel bars. These were developed after casting — in both senses of the word — volunteers from the local Newcastle area, from the ages of 1 1/2 to 84.

“The title comes from the double meanings of ‘domain,’” Gormley said at the exhibition’s opening. “Domain is a place where you live, it can describe a piece of territory, or a dwelling, or a combination of both. But it also refers to our cyberage and the fact that we live now in a time where virtual domains are fought over and given names.”

Gormley has spent his career redeveloping artistic conceptions of the human body. For many years, that was his own, made in various materials from casts assisted by his wife. That apparent self-centeredness, however, belies a democratic conception of the body as a place rather than as an object — his subject has always been the viewer.

“The content of the art is not in the art, it is in you,” he explained. “So, the idea is that each of you makes your own journey through this field of the work and in a sense continues the work. The work only starts to happen when it is occupied by one or two living bodies.”

As it happens, scarcely more bodies than that will fit into the exhibition space at one time. Though Garage’s beautiful, constructivist 8,500-square-meter space is Moscow’s largest by a considerable distance, Gormley’s figures are crammed into a gallery-sized white box. It is, in fact, so small that visitors are essentially not getting the whole experience. A sneaky peak around the back into the service room revealed several figures quite literally standing around on their own, although since then they have been moved out of sight.

This does little to detract from experiencing Gormley’s work. The overall effect is not one centered on its physical capacity to strike but the intangible atmosphere it creates.

Gormley’s work, then, is a challenge to what we traditionally think that the body is about — and, in a way, a contrarian answer to the old question about trees falling in the woods. He attested in an interview that “no idea has any value until it’s made physical. I’m making abstract bodies, if that’s not a total tautology. I’ve come to the body not as a result of years of life drawing and anatomy lessons but from the arena of human experience. I think I am a conceptualist who chooses to work with the body because it can carry not simply ideas but also feeling and effect, as well as thought.”

Those who prefer their sculpture in wide-open spaces should get their chance to do so in September through “Event Horizon,” a special project of the upcoming Moscow Biennale. That said, permission from the city authorities is still pending. But the idea of a Gormley figure in the Kremlin is great pause for thought — and a stroll through the old Soviet sculpture park by the Moscow River, with Zurab Tsereteli’s giant statue of Peter the Great beside it, is more than enough to confirm that.

“Domain Field” is at CCC Garage to Sept. 2. 19A Ulitsa Obraztsova. Metro Savyolovskaya. 645-0520.