Antony Gormley Horizon Field KUB Projekt

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His projects with and in the context of urban and natural landscapes in particular show his attempt to extend the radical approaches of early Land Art from the 1960s and 1970s into a new dimension. Even though there are many isolated sculptural interventions by Gormley, measured against his own ideas, the great “field experiments” comprising multiple figures represent the real challenge. These consist of three key types: the first, the Field series, is involved with the idea of a mass of figures immeasurably potentiated, emanating from the social commitment of many lay-people to the production of the figures. The second, Event Horizon, works with a defined number of castings of the artist’s body sited in individual contexts. These figures link specific locations on buildings in a city and interact with an urban network. With Horizon Field, the third concept, starting with Another Place (1997), continuing with Inside Australia (2002) and Time Horizon (2006), Gormley proposes that critical engagement does not take place in value-neutral spaces of art determined by aesthetic laws, such as museums, galleries, and public places, but in and with nature. Gormley thus situates his work within a context that is meaningful for ever y individual, where beauty and the sublime are paired with the knowledge that nature’s resources are in danger of being exhausted at an ever faster rate. Another Place and Horizon Field demonstrate Gormley’s strategic, conceptual thinking. The few rules that define the artistic system are decisive, opening up time to a multiplicity of planes for seeing, thinking, and interrelating. These include the relationship between the individual figure and the series; between constructed space and natural space; and between the factors of movement and time. The multilateralism of a mass exponentiated into a series tends toward a dissolution of the center and is thus an important factor in the democratization of the relations between space, sculpture, and viewer. Gormley has always been fascinated by this since it gives him the opportunity to extend his work into the open spaces of nature. Horizon Field presents a bold attempt to bring art and nature into a state of empathy. The idea of installing 100 figures at a height of 2,039 meters is captivating, not so much as a logistical challenge, but as a vision of a large-scale experiment to conceive of art and culture as an integral part of nature and to encourage a revised awareness about our role as cultural beings. Gormley’s Horizon Field unites all his basic artistic concerns on a large scale. Removed from the influential context of a museum, it opens up new fields of interrelations by locating art in a socialized natural landscape. The mountain landscape of Vorarlberg, with its specific mix of natural beauty, urbanity, and socialization of old valley communities, is for Gormley the ideal experimental field for a new determination of the relationship between nature and culture. A comparison with the work of an earlier artist will make clear the paradigm shift accomplished by Gormley. Walter De Maria’s Land Art project The Lightning Field (1977) proclaims in almost heroic
Antony Gormley Another Place | 1997 Gusseisen 100 Elemente, je 189 × 53 × 29 cm Installationsansicht, Cuxhaven Seite 12/13 Antony Gormley | Horizon Field August 2010 – April 2012 Eine Landschaftsinstallation im alpinen Hochgebirge Vorarlbergs, Österreich 100 lebensgroße Abgüsse eines menschlichen Körpers aus massivem Gusseisen, verteilt über ein Gebiet von 150 Quadratkilo metern (Detailaufnahme) Presented by Kunsthaus Bregenz © Antony Gormley und Kunsthaus Bregenz; Foto: Markus Tretter 10 11 terms the autonomy of art and, by extension, of all culture. The Lightning Field lies at a height of 2,195 meters on a plateau in west-central New Mexico. It consists of 400 polished, stainless steel poles, 5.2 centimeters thick and 6.2 meters long, placed 6.7 meters apart to stake out a grid measuring a mile on one axis and a kilometer on the other. The poles are arranged so that their tips define an absolutely level plane, echoing the terrain. Nature here forms a grandiose backdrop for a demonstration of sublimity, evoked by the machine-made uniformity and beauty of the poles and by the mathematical exactitude of the grid. The work represents an act of unconditional freedom and self-assertion on the part of art vis-à-vis nature, made visible through the serial anonymity of the poles and their ordered configuration. The spectator experiences a value-free coexistence of two systems, their individual beauty enhanced by the dramatic form of their conjunction. With his work, De Maria increased awareness of the sublimity of a self-contained system called “art” by heightening its logical consistency through confrontation with nature. In contrast, Gormley integrates and almost loses his human shaped masses within a field determined by a given topography that links the palpable, the perceivable, and the conceptual in a seamless way. He aims to address issues relating to natural freedom and social embedment. Each of his 100 figures embodies a striving for both individuality and society. They face in ever y direction, but never towards one another. The distance between them, which varies according to the terrain, ranges from 60 meters to several kilometers. Together, they form a horizon that can be apprehended KUBProjekt Antony Gormley
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Antony Gormley Horizon Field KUB Projekt

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