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28/06/2023
THE ANONYMOUS BODY
The beauty of anonymity is rooted in its singularity.
Waterlily © Hande Eagle
I’ve recently been thinking about the body, not just the human body but the body as a whole of all things. The anonymous yet specific body. The body can be one’s limit but it can also be one’s container. Everything needs a vessel. A portable container for the mind, the psyche, the soul and whatever else you’d like to add. At times, the body is mere packaging. Sometimes it’s showy, at other times humble, even meagre. Sometimes what’s inside the body matters more than the body itself. Sometimes the body is an object of desire and at other times, it’s a reason for repulsion. Every so often, there’s no more to the body than meets the eye. Yet, the word “body” evokes a plethora of people and phenomena in my mind.
Trees, fungi, insects, reptiles, the seas, little fish, big fish,
mammals, babies, humans, the common daisy, grass, breath, tumbleweeds, lakes, Nymphaea and nymphs, symbolisms,
Peter Pan, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, George Seurat, Salvador Dalì,
Auguste Rodin, Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, the Terracotta Army, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Mevlânâ,
the breath within, the words I hear, Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, Isadora Duncan, a whirling dervish, Sol Gabetta’s cello,
Leonard Cohen’s voice, Schindler’s List, clocks and watches,
factory chimneys, darkness,
the bricks of a 15th century building, smog, construction workers, Zaha Hadid, my grandmother’s
thimble, Birhan Keskin, a supernova, Asuman Susam, The Blue Marble, Moby Dick,
the hush of dry sesame pods in the wind, my first trip to the dentist, Joseph Carey Merrick,
the milky scent of a newborn baby, growing pains, blood in veins,
William Harvey, the tarantella, figs and leaves, Pina Bausch, apples and germinating seeds, Adam and Eve,
the future of humankind, horses and their saddles, AI and robots, donkeys and their eyes,
my gaze that will one day join terra, my daughter’s pupils, white marble, green jade,
diggers and mines, cathedrals, temples, madrasahs and synagogues,
stately homes and chandeliers, banks and farms,
a walrus moustache above parched lips, a kite mid-air, mountains, beads of sweat upon brows,
Echo and Narcissus,
clouds, space,
death.
Exterior view of TAG Art Museum, Qingdao, China.
LIVING TIME: ANTONY GORMLEY IN CHINA
Antony Gormley at "Living Time", TAG Art Museum, China.
Photo © Chao Qixuan
For one contemporary artist in particular, the body is everything and nothing. I’m almost certain that most of you who are reading Live the Questions Now, are familiar with the British sculptor Antony Gormley (1950). If you type his name into any search engine you get about a million articles on him and his artistic production. Therefore, I don’t see the point in producing yet another biographical article about such a sought-after and world-famous artist. What I am rather interested in is to mention Gormley’s recently opened exhibition titled "Living Time" at the state-of-the art TAG Art Museum in Qingdao, China and to write around it. Since I haven't personally visited the exhibition, I am relying mostly on the press release which states that this is the “most comprehensive presentation of Antony Gormley’s work in Asia to-date”.
Climbing the Cartesian ladder, Gormley has omitted, mimicked, divided, replicated and reproduced his body in tens of sculptural works and installations, the outcome of four decades of his career, some of which can be listed as: "Bed" (1980-1981), "Field" (1991 and subsequent cross-continental series of installations where I see a direct link with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work on field theory and habitus), "Angel of the North" (1998), "Another Place" (1997), "Inside Australia (2003), "Event Horizon"(2007), "Clearing" (2004-2019), "Blind Light" and "Space Station" (2007), "Passage" (2016) and "Host (1991-2019).
For the experiencer, most of his works explore the relationship between the body and the mind as well as the relationship between the body, space, the cosmos and the built environment. The press release informs me that "Living Time" occupies two halls of the Museum; halls 4 and 5. Hall 4 features 35 sculptures (including his early lead works "Plateau" (1985–86) and "Diaphragm" (1995), as well as key works such as "Concentrate I" (2003), which marks Gormley’s first attempt to transform the ‘pixel’ into a physical mass, "Mean III" (2016), which translates the body’s interior into a greatly reduced steel grid, and "Tuck II" (2018), which sees the human body become a precarious construction of slabs that reference megalithic structures) displayed in a grid formation, in response to the enclosed space; marking the first occasion that Gormley has shown his work without reference to chronology, allowing visitors to form their own connections between the works, each of which take the artist's body as their subject and primary material. It is incredible to witness an artist who has based his entire ouevre on his own body: a subject that keeps giving and giving evidenced by the sheer number of works Gormley has produced.
TAG Art Museum, "Living Time", Hall 4, Installation view, 2023.
Photo © Huang Shaoli
TAG Art Museum, "Living Time", Hall 5, Installation View, 2023.
Photo © Huang Shaoli
In Gormley’s own words about returning to China after 30 years since his first visit in 1995 when he was conducting research for his large-scale installation "Asian Field" (2003) made in collaboration with the Chinese people. (This initial trip had taken Gormley from Xi’an to the Forbidden City to Nanjing to Yangshuo County and then to brick factories in Zibo, Shandong Province; hence my previous mention of the Terracotta Army): "I realised that China has a relationship with the pixel dating back 2000 years in treating the brick as a regular geometric unit that nevertheless relates to the embodied world. Going around China and seeing brick factories and the grey bricks of Nanjing’s city wall, for example, allowed me to see an extraordinary culture that is to do with formalising a relationship with earth…"
Gormley previously spoke of "Asian Field":
"As a work that I hope gives voice to the voiceless, and materialises a feeling of our present predicament, in
a time of migration, protest, overpopulation and climate emergency."
20 years on and the same concerns are evermore palpable.
In Hall 5 Gormley exhibits four of his "Expansion Works" (1990-1994) comprising "Body" (1991/93), "Fruit" (1991/92), "Earth" (1991/93) and "End Product" (1990/93), works that stand by his all-encompassing quote on the nature of sculpture; "Sculpture is not a picture of the world, it is an actual physical change to the world". These extremely heavy works in particular, weighing up to 8 tonnes, do impose an actual physical change to their environment. Coined as `contained explosions` by Gormley, these works emerged as the result of an obsession with renegotiating the boundary of the skin. Expanding the skin’s surface by pushing outwards, these works make a reference to the archaea, early cellular life forms or even fruits and vegetables. Contrary to many artists who refrain from placing their work into any specific mould or cast, Gormley almost always has a statement to make about his work. About "Living Time" he says: "This show reflects on the way that we have become increasingly contextualised by the built environment. The old saying that we make a world but then the world makes us has never been truer. I’m trying to reconcile the cyber world with the biological world and this show is a materialisation of the tension between them." Art - in all its forms and methods - always stems from the desire to leave something behind, to render one's ambition and creativity immortal. But as we all know, somewhere deep down in our hearts, a comet could end it all at any given time without our prior knowledge or consent.
TAG Art Museum, "Living Time", Hall 5, Installation View, 2023.
Photo © Huang Shaoli
From the early years of his artistic practice to our living time, Gormley has always stood on the verge of science and art, the tangible and intangible. The lifeblood of his work: the golden ratio that exists in many natural phenomena: it captivates your gaze, you are stunned by its perfection, and when you come to hold its pulse, you are so taken with it you cannot sense it. It surpasses your entire being. The unexplainable greatness of the works of some of the early Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and later pioneers such as George Seurat, Piet Mondrian, Salvador Dalì offer that same dazzling quality.
“Living Time” will be running until 10 December 2023. The exhibition is accompanied by a book that features extensive installation photography and essays by the curator Fan Di'an, producer Meng Xianwei, and scholar Yang Beichen, as well as a conversation between Antony Gormley and Hans Ulrich Obrist that aims to situate the exhibition within Gormley's wider practice and his enduring engagement with China.
ANONYMITY IS A RARE TALENT & PRIVILEGE
Bird's-eye view of the exterior of the TAG Art Museum, Qingdao, China.
When and if you look up the TAG Art Museum, you’ll realise that any information on the investor/s and proprietor/s of the organisation, or its board of directors is not available to the “layperson”, while there’s plenty of information about the project architect, Jean Nouvel, the landscape designer Gilles Clément, as well as previously exhibited international artists. In our contemporary times, a lot is done in the name and benefit of art for the people, but increasingly we do not know who these generous patrons are.
The press release further states: “Mr. Meng Xianwei, founder of TAG Art Museum, expressed on the opening, `This exhibition marks the first solo exhibition of a Western artist at TAG Art Museum, and the ninth contemporary art exhibition since the opening of the museum [in 2019]. This significant exhibition will positively contribute to the museum's academic influence and the public's understanding of international contemporary art. Notably, the works presented in the "Hanging Hall" [Hall 5] embodied our initial vision for a globally unique exhibition style and an exceptional viewing experience for the audience. It epitomizes the harmonious symbiosis and mutual interaction between artworks and spatial environment, as well as the activation and communication of the energies of contemporary art and contemporary architecture.”
However, if you type “Meng Xianwei, founder of TAG Art Museum” you encounter very few clues as to who Mr Xianwei is and why he decided to pour millions of whichever currencies into establishing such a tremendous arts centre built on breath-taking grounds. I for one, would surely like to meet the man who can make such a grand and impressive project possible and still succeed in remaining so anonymous in the public domain. Anonymity is a rare talent and privilege (especially when you are surrounded by world-famous collaborators) in our social-media-drowsy society. Having said that, hats off to the architectural and landscape design of the TAG Art Museum.
Located at the south bank of Tangdao Bay, West Coast New District Qingdao, the TAG Art Museum comprises 12 exhibition halls built along a coastline of 1200 metres. The complex is set in 80,000 m² of greening, 28 public art display spots, a 500-metre corridor and 8 lakes. Designed jointly by Jean Nouvel, renowned French architect whose past projects include the iconic Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), National Museum of Qatar, Philharmonie de Paris, Jane’s Carousel (New York), the Fondation Cartier, the Doha Tower as well as the sensational and heavily debated Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Gilles Clément, seasoned French garden designer, botanist, entomologist and writer; who appended his signature to some of France’s most celebrated public spaces had also worked with Nouvel on the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.
I must add that what they achieved with the TAG ART Museum looks far more impressive than the newly constructed and recently reopened Istanbul Modern designed by Renzo Piano, which I had the chance of visiting in May 2023, just before its official opening in June (it never fails to amaze me that the official opening took place weeks after the Museum was opened to the public). Although I am aware "everyone" is singing its praises, I would like to briefly air just one of my concerns. Why on earth did they bother to invest in so many windows when they knew that a giant cruise-liner would be anchored right in front of the building? This blinding, white colossus blocks out the marvellous and iconic view of the Bosphorus as well as all natural light. Perhaps, this and other criticisms deserve to be the subject of another article.
QINGDAO: AZURE ISLAND
Looking at Qingdao on the map and reading about the city that is home to 10 million people, one understands the vital role of geopolitical dynamics in the art market. The Tsingtao Brewery was founded here in 1903 by a German-British joint venture. The Wikipedia entry on Qingdao further informs that “a large number of German-style buildings are present in Qingdao’s city centre, a remarkable fact considering the German leased-territory period only lasted 16 years (1898-1914). Chinese architecture therein, combined with German demographic roots and a large Korean expatriate population, gives Qingdao a rather distinct atmosphere”. I can understand the pull of Qingdao for Antony Gormley who was born in London as the youngest of seven children to a German mother and a father of Irish descent. Hisense, a global electronics company, also has its headquarters in Qingdao and is one of the main sponsors of “Living Time” together with Galleria Continua[i] (a number of videos featuring Antony Gormley can be viewed here) and its affiliate organization Associazione Arte Continua. We all appreciate a feeling of likeness, that comforting feeling of knowing we are among those who are like us and who like us/what we do.
A few years ago, when everyone was hyping about the rise of the East in all things, most Europeans were responding to it with what some in the arts industry politely called “skepticism”. Though, I would rather be brutally honest, it was and is still short-sightedness. After all, as American economist William J. Baumol stated in a chapter titled, “The Arts in the New Economy”: “Economic circumstances powerfully influence both innovation and the arts. The state of the economy cannot produce creativity, but it can stimulate the exercise of creativity and facilitate dissemination and utilisation of its products” (p: 341)[ii]. I for one believe that the future of art and culture, tourism, technology, medicine, food, employment opportunities and pretty much all else, lies in China, South Korea, Japan, UAE and Qatar.
Culture constitutes a country’s window display for attracting international interest and investment. It must stun, impress and woe people from all socio-economic backgrounds; therein lies its success. The Medici knew that very well and, slowly but surely, the East has homed in on this fact through the past 400 years. We could say that until about two decades ago, the East replicated the West. Now that is no longer the case. The East has become genuine, original, and ambitious with its window display. It appears to me that with the TAG Art Museum and others alike, China has begun to put its stamp on the art world.
With these thoughts and more, I feel that an excerpt from Walt Whitman`s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” first published untitled in the anonymously published Leaves of Grass in 1855 will provide an apt conclusion to this blog article. If you read between the lines hereto and hereafter, then perhaps you can share in my perspective on all things big and small.
6
(…)
The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang?
Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you,
Each has his or her place in the procession.
(All is a procession,
The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)
8
(…)
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face.
Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body?
For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.
9
O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!
Excerpt from "I Sing The Body Electric" by Walt Whitman.
ENDNOTES
[i] For my interview with Galleria Continua founders, please consult May 2014 issue of Canvas Magazine; “A Great Continuum of Art: Galleria Continua”, p. 134. When I conducted this interview the gallery had three branches on two continents. Now, the gallery is one of the 20 most influential art gallery chains in the world, with eight gallery locations in San Gimignano and Rome in Italy, Les Moulins and Paris in France, Beijing (China), Habana (Cuba), São Paolo (Brazil), and Dubai (UAE).
[ii] In Ginsburgh, V. A. & Throsby, D., ed. (2006), “Handbooks in Economics 25: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture,” North-Holland (Elsevier), Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Nota bene: Please kindly note that this is not an affiliate marketing blog. Live the Questions Now is the work of one and the same woman – a human nonetheless – undertaken without any current or prospective financial gain of any kind, and intentionally published advertisement-free for your appreciation and enjoyment. Last but not least, all opinions shared here are subjective and personal.
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