Antony Gormley: Being Human imagine...

From the age of six, it was a household rule

that after lunch you had to go upstairs and have a rest.

I would have to go to this room,

and the sun came pouring in there

and it was very, very warm.

And I would have to lie on this single bed,

not moving, with my eyes closed.

I would be in this highly...

so claustrophobic, red-hot space,

held in this tiny prison behind my eyes.

After a while, I got to grips with this space

and I learned how to dwell in it,

and this tight, claustrophobic,

oppressive, hot space

would become darker and cooler and bigger...

..until I was highly conscious

but floating in this infinite, deep, blue, dark infinity.

Antony Gormley is a sculptor.

For more than 40 years, his work has dealt with what it feels like

to inhabit a human body.

In tonight's Imagine...

we follow Antony Gormley through an extraordinary year,

as he grapples with past work...

Yes! Yes!

..and experiments with a new visual language.

I REALLY believe this -

that sculpture, in its crude materiality

can touch us

and liberate feelings that we wouldn't know that we had.

LOUD CLANG

In the late '70s, Gormley made a series of works

wrapping found objects in lead.

As the process evolved,

he set aside these other things

and began to make casts from his own body.

I am that object.

And that seems to me an enormous advantage.

It is so simple, really.

I mean, you cannot ever be inside another substance

as you are inside your own body.

I am simply here

using my own existence,

my own body,

as the model.

The subject,

the tool and the instrument.

But I'm not making pictures of it.

My work is about what it means to inhabit a human life.

When we close our eyes, we are in a space that has no edges,

that has no dimension,

that is immeasurable,

and is equivalent to the deep space of the cosmos.

CRACKLE OF ELECTRICITY

Gormley's work has evolved

to incorporate experimental techniques and materials.

But the primary source continues to be his own body.

Instead of plaster casts, Gormley now uses an infrared scanner.

Bespoke computer software allows him

to push the original shape further and further into abstraction.

Today I am joining Antony and his studio team

as they travel to see an exhibition

of his most recent work newly installed in Paris.

These last few years have been enormously productive.

Gormley now employs a team of assistants

working across two studios in London and in the north-east.

All of the work in the exhibition Second Body

has been produced in the last two years.

While some of the work may appear abstract,

its point of reference is always the human body.

In the 1st century BC, the Roman architect Vitruvius

defined the proportions of the ideal human body

in what came to be known as Vitruvian man.

Vitruvius says the head has to go into the body eight times.

That between the chin and the hairline is one hand's breadth.

One hand's breadth is exactly this.

This is putting space itself as the subject.

In the next room, a series of small ink drawings share a common idea

with the enormous steel structures of the room beyond.

These are funny drawings in a way,

because they demand a certain precision.

And they have to have a certain geometric accuracy.

So that you...

..you believe in the volumes.

I'm just thinking about the darkness that you can't see

inside those big cases.

I suppose I'm trying to evoke both how it's constructed...

..but, perhaps, also what it might feel like.

What these drawings are about is acknowledging the fact

that we have a direct apprehension of the darkness of the body.

What is that space that we inhabit when we close our eyes...

that is without dimension...

..without bounding condition...

..that seemingly allows us infinite extension?

LOUD CLANG

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950,

the youngest of seven children.

His parents were devout Catholics.

We were christened with the initials AMDG -

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam -

for the greater glory of God.

My name is Antony Mark David Gormley,

but they knew what they were doing.

So it was an inference not a, as it were...

-HE LAUGHS

-..dedication.

That was a big weight to stick around my neck.

Hey. Yeah.

Great expectations!

Then I went on to school

and, actually, you had to write that the top of your prep.

And in a Catholic school, no-one was in any doubt what that meant?

No. No. Absolutely not.

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam was just, you know, one of those...

You know, you breathed it, really.

After prep school,

Gormley was sent to board at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire

where he was taught by Benedictine monks.

Did you feel uncomfortable there, or did you somehow...?

No, I... I... I bought it all - hook, line and sinker.

Because that was the only world I knew.

And it was...absolutist.

Your father actually organised pilgrimages to Lourdes,

and you went there yourself as a volunteer.

Aged 17, I hitchhiked down to Lourdes, shrine of Bernadette

and Our Lady of Lourdes,

place of miracles.

Erm...

where I worked as a brancardier for...

probably two and a half weeks...

..carrying the sick,

working in the shrine,

undressing paraplegics,

putting them into rubber harnesses

and dipping them with full-body immersion

into the ice-cold water of the spring.

HE EXHALES HEAVILY

You know...

I mean, real, real suffering,

and the illusion and delusion

of the expected miracles.

It just makes you very angry, I'm afraid.

Well, I mean, thinking about it now, it's just like this...

..collective hallucination.

I think that sculpture inevitably talks about the big unknown,

of what lies on the other side of the horizon of life.

So, death.

The sculpture deals with death head-on.

We are born into the world alone

and we leave it alone and, in the end,

we don't know what the next stage -

having had a precious human life - is.

I think the truth is that...

And this is what every Catholic will say,

if you were brought up a Catholic

you may lose your Catholicism,

but the fact is it has marked you for life.

And the absolute need to replace its belief system

with something else

becomes your life's work.

This is Antony Gormley in India at the age of 23.

The Catholic faith that had dominated his childhood was gone.

In 1968, he went to Cambridge

to study archaeology, anthropology and art history.

I became aware of, as it were, the alternatives.

And right from the beginning, I wanted to experience

those alternatives.

After graduating, he set off on the hippie trail

travelling through Turkey, Syria and Afghanistan

until he found himself in India.

India was the beginning of everything

in terms of making sense of my life,

and finding a means of doing so.

You stayed there in India for two years,

studying meditation with a Buddhist teacher.

I found that Vipassana meditation

took me back to a place I'd already known as a child.

All of the historical, factual learning that I had been given

as a result of a classical education fell away.

I thought, "This is a path

"I could follow to the end.

"I could try to achieve enlightenment."

And I think at that point, I realised that this was

in some senses an escape,

and that it would be better to try

to come back to my own culture,

and...and bring into it whatever realisations I had had.

These experiences in India

had already planted the seed for his first sculpture.

I'm looking at Sleeping Place.

Where did that image come from?

At some point I had all my worldly goods removed.

I mean, they were nicked,

and I lived on the streets of Calcutta

for about two weeks without any money.

All the world would be... I mean, the shouting!

"Chai! Chai! Chai! Chai!"

Kind of, you know, people with luggage and the rickshaws

and the tuk-tuks all going...

And there would be this silent, still, dhoti-covered body.

You wouldn't know whether it was dead or alive at first sight.

The image of these...

..so vulnerable, and yet so pure shapes

that are a form of architecture.

Sleeping Place was a way

of just bringing that back,

..making that experience again as an object.

It talks about our need for shelter and security.

It, in a way, also talks about what Plato said...

..that we will never know what is inside another person's mind,

that there is, as it were, an infinity of possibility

that lies on the other side of that skin.

Antony returned to England in 1974

and enrolled in art college.

It was a time of great upheaval in British art.

Carl Andre's notorious bricks had caused an outcry

when they were bought by the Tate.

It's a pile of bricks!

Michelangelo said, I think,

"My sculptures consist in removing what is not the figure

"from the block of stone."

Erm...

perhaps I have just taken a block of stone and not removed anything.

In 1978, as a postgraduate student,

Gormley saw an exhibition of Carl Andre's work

at London's Whitechapel Gallery.

The exhibition was curated by a dynamic young gallery director,

Nicholas Serota -

fast becoming one of the most influential figures in British art.

Three years later, Serota gave Antony Gormley

the chance to use this same space

for his first solo show.

How did Antony present himself to you? How confident was he?

Did he know what he was doing?

What was he like?

He was someone who had proceeded actually quite slowly

through his 20s and into the early 30s,

gradually absorbing all these experiences of travelling in India,

of looking at sculpture,

of being at art school.

And slowly this force was growing within him

and within the space of a year or two,

he formed that body of work

we now recognise as being quintessentially Antony Gormley.

The centrepiece of that first exhibition is now on display

at Tate Britain.

It's made from 8,640 slices of Mother's Pride white bread.

I look at the bread and I think of the Bricks,

and I think of this sort of humanising of abstraction.

It is one of the first pieces that uses his whole body.

Here, in a negative form, obviously,

but...he ate the bread.

Oh, that's right. Of course!

He ate the bread to create the form of his body.

I mean, I think it was Antony's intention

that he should take the most basic form of bread

that was available in any supermarket.

He coated each of these pieces in paraffin wax

in an attempt to preserve it, but, of course,

there's a certain amount of mould has grown.

-I see what you mean about toothmarks and stuff.

-Yes.

Unfortunately, for Anthony there were problems he hadn't foreseen.

Bed was the first work of mine

that was ever sold.

But on the day that they exposed it

for the trustees to sign off the acquisition,

somebody noticed this movement on the surface,

and some conservator had

a close look at this

and declared that there was an infestation

of Indian bookworm,

and the source of the Indian bookworm was

my bed.

Which had become a breeding ground for these little creatures.

Anyway, it was immediately...

The room was isolated,

the work was de-acquisitioned and sent to Rentokil

where it spent - yeah - a lot of time

until all living life within it

had been extinguished.

Today, Gormley's bread bed

shares its space with works by Anish Kapoor and Richard Long.

But in the next room hang works by someone

whose role in his creative life was much more significant.

His wife, the artist Vicken Parsons.

She became a vital accomplice in the next stage of his work.

It's evidence of the necessary trust between two people.

We did total body encasement

which meant that you were essentially

bound,

gagged

and, er, imprisoned.

How are we going to get you out?

Along the gap between my thighs and my chest.

For the first 15 years, she was my primary assistant.

She did all of the body moulding,

and cut me out.

And I've got scars to prove it.

But I think there are a lot of myths that somehow

art is made by, usually lone, men on their own,

who are slightly, perhaps, difficult.

I just feel so lucky

and so blessed, really,

that I have such a strong supporter

and lover

and fellow artist.

And over the next ten years,

you made more than 80 of those figures in lead.

Lead is an extraordinary material.

It has this density, this opacity.

And then it has this extraordinary relationship with light

which is very like water.

It absorbs light, but also reflects it.

The common idea of alchemy

is that you can turn lead into gold.

But that's actually just a metaphor

for turning gross matter into imagination,

which is what art should do.

Gormley's work didn't shy away from the political realities

of the time.

In 1987, he made a site-specific installation

that engaged directly with the conflict in Northern Ireland.

He created three double-faced figures

to be positioned at key points along the city walls of Londonderry,

marking sites of division between the Protestant and Catholic communities.

The work was an attempt to use

the central image of Christianity - crucifixion -

by making these two body cases made out of ordinance quality steel -

in other words, capable of withstanding the impact

of high velocity bullets.

And if you put those two body cases together

you look through the open eyes of one

and out of the open eyes of the other.

And my idea was to find three points on these walls

that really made sense in terms of the tension

within that divided community.

As we installed the piece onto the Bogside site,

this crowd of youths came out the Bogside

and started yelling.

They started throwing stones.

They were spitting at the sculpture

as it was delivered off the lorry.

It was hoisted up, literally dripping with spit

and these stones were coming across...

And before long all the windows of the crane had been smashed.

The crane driver had run for his life.

And at this point,

a guy who was part of the installation team

ran like...like the wind,

like Finn McCool - he had a hammer

and he was just going like this.

And they just all stopped in their tracks.

I mean, it was a very...

extraordinary moment.

That night, the piece on the Fountains Estate

was burnt to a cinder.

They'd put tyres around its neck

so, in the morning, there was just this incredible image

of this entirely burnt figure.

With something that looked very like the crown of thorns,

but it was actually the wires from the inside of a tyre.

Here was this image of the central event of the Christian faith

that was equally relevant

to both communities

being used to objectify this extraordinary conflict.

At the end of the '80s, Gormley began a series of works

that led him to represent human experience in a totally new way.

This is really the first work in which

I did have collective participation.

And each time you've made Field,

you've used local people and local clay.

I just have to give them very simple instructions -

just take a ball of clay, form it in the hands,

place it apart from you, make it conscious,

give it eyes,

and now see how a form will arise.

And it will be YOUR form.

It will be unique to you.

What gets released when you give a common collective aim

to a group of people...

It is absolutely astonishing what happens.

It's magic.

The first time he made Field, there were 1,000 figures.

By the time he made Field for the British Isles in 1993,

the clay army stood 40,000 strong.

The single figure is one thing,

but it's the communal figure, the way it fills that space

which is so overwhelming, you know.

It's about, in a sense,

our right to a voice.

It is about giving a physical sense to those without a voice.

These are witnesses that have no mouths

but look at us dumbly and judge us.

We, the living.

What kind of world are you bequeathing to your children?

To your children's children?

I grew up properly in the late '60s,

in the time of demonstrations. It was when sit-ins happened.

We occupied the positions of power.

And that's the point of Field.

Field completely occupies the space of a museum to the point

where you can't get in.

And instead of in some way you having this pleasurable

cultural experience, you are confronted by this accusatory gaze.

Welcome back to the Tate Gallery in London, live,

where we are about to hear

who has won this year's £20,000 Turner Award.

-Congratulations...

-APPLAUSE

-..Mr Antony Gormley.

-CHEERS AND APPLAUSE

It's quite interesting what happens to artists

when they win the Turner Prize.

Some sort of have actually sunk into relative oblivion.

For some, it just reinforces whatever status

they have at the time.

I think Antony is one of those people you can say retrospectively,

having won the Turner Prize,

it really did kick-start his transition.

In literal terms,

he was able to do something bigger than he'd ever done before.

The Angel Of The North is my attempt at a Stonehenge, isn't it?

It's the attempt at marking a very particular place

and a very particular time, between near the end of coal mining,

the end of shipbuilding,

the end of the industrial power of the north-east...

..and the dawn of the information age

and making a totemic object for a community that had lost, in a way...

lost faith in its own future.

To use the same materials and the same purposefulness

with which you might make a railway bridge or a large boat,

but use it to make an imaginative object.

The motif of the angel

had been present in Gormley's work for some time.

They appear as hybrid creatures, impeded by their heavy wings.

But he'd never attempted anything on this scale before.

Not only was it the largest sculpture Gormley had ever made...

..at the time of its construction,

it would be the largest sculpture in Britain.

I want my work to have a life. I want my work to interact with life.

I want my work to be part of life.

My hackles raise when that phrase is used -

"Oh, you make public art."

As if that was some kind of second rate compromised,

qualified, pure art.

I absolutely turn that on its head.

In my view, all great art was made to touch all people.

And the privatisation of art is some aberration.

I think the real proof of art's effectiveness is the degree

to which it can touch people.

Shift the tectonic plates of an assumption about the world...

..or open a valve in their emotional constitution that perhaps

hadn't been opened before.

Its position, just off the A1 near Gateshead,

would make it one of the most viewed pieces of art in the world,

seen by an estimated 90,000 people every day.

I was concerned - is it going to work as a piece of sculpture?

Are its proportions going to work on this scale?

Obviously, what one's most worried about is that it just looks

like a small thing that's been made ten times bigger.

But I think the great thing is that it looks like it needs to be

the size that it is and that it works in the context.

In other words, I mean... Well, I'm thrilled.

I mean, it's amazing to me that the Angel Of The North is rarely alone.

You see it always with the silhouettes of people moving

underneath the bottom edge of the wings.

It hadn't always been popular with the local community.

And then one day, an Alan Shearer shirt finds its way on to the work.

What was your feeling about that?

That was just baptism, my old Christian way...

I think that was it being accepted.

I can remember going to the Newcastle Brewery's charity evening

when I was trying to get the Angel made and being booed off the stage.

"Get off, you wanker!" It was an amazing sign of a change of heart.

CROWD ROARS

For Gormley, the placement of his work is hugely important.

Today, he's travelling to Lundy Island, 12 miles off the coast

of Devon, to oversee the installation of a new work for the Landmark Trust.

First time I've ever been here.

Well, it's... It's perfect.

And to be on a day...

here on a day like this where this extraordinary prospect,

where we look back on to Wales, back up the Bristol Channel

and then out, out, out west towards America...

-It's glorious!

-Do you like it?

-Yeah, I love it. It's just...

It's just fantastic. What a sight.

Aren't I lucky? I love the texture. This is just great!

I think it needs to twist about... About 90.

Up again.

That's it. OK.

That's better, that's better.

So, have we got a spirit level somewhere?

Congratulations. That's exactly what I did.

That is bloody... Bloody impressive.

Don't fall over here, that's all I ask.

It's a long way down.

This bit of headland has been here hundreds of thousands of years.

And now, it's got this...

..foreign object on it.

It's got to have that sense of it

being, in a way,

an irritation, but then at the same time

it's got to own its place.

The other test of a well-sited work is...

during the time that it's there,

you can't think of the place without the object

or the object without the place.

The emotional impact of the work transforms

the environment in unexpected ways...

..from the seashore to the city skyline.

Event Horizon happened in London in 2007 and this was just

a couple of years after the terrorist attacks in London.

But there was a real sense of, of fear and of a kind of quiet

sort of endless everyday fear,

of people take off a rucksack on a bus and put it down

and everyone is suddenly noticing it.

That piece spoke to all of that fear as well.

Are these threatening?

Are they friendly? Are they alien creatures?

What are they?

And they were all facing back towards the Hayward building

which meant in a way that what Antony had done was

a kind of clever reversal, if you like,

of the typical relationship between the artwork and the viewer.

Blind Light was the name of the entire exhibition

but Blind Light was also the title of a work at the centre of a show.

The idea of Blind Light

was actually to make you into a disembodied intelligence.

You cross over this fully open threshold

and suddenly you are in space.

The light is substantial...

but shows you nothing.

Apart from itself and you are immersed in it.

You're no longer moving through space with determinism.

You are lost in space and light.

People would say to me,

"Oh, I now know what it's going to be like to be dead".

I'll just be like a thought in space.

But at that point, you also become an image to people outside.

But I like that idea,

particularly when people were pressing up against the glass.

It was almost as if they were calling in their gestures

for you to...to be there with them.

I think Blind Light was a jumping-off point

for many of the works that have come later based around rooms

and structures and journeys and paths through spaces.

I think also the engagement with the public

and the trust in the public to come to the work

and bring their own bodies and experiences to it

was revolutionised by that moment at the exhibition when it really

was a point where Antony moved further and further

away from the object in a space to our bodies as the objects

in the space.

These works begin and end with bodily experience.

They are often about a lived moment.

A space once occupied by a human body or a space into which

you then go as a body.

That's quite empowering because your own individual bodily

and then emotional and intellectual experience counts.

All sorts of ideas and associations, I find, start to reveal themselves

and of course when you talk to Antony about anything,

his mind, his imagination...it works, it pushes, it pushes.

He's never, I mean, he's the least complacent artist that I know.

Once you do that...

..suddenly the scale of all of this is infinitely changed.

And then, and then you can do this.

And...

and that changes.

HE GASPS

HE LAUGHS

This reminds me of something which is the relationship of...

of what you do to other art forms, to dance, for instance.

There is no other art form that is that direct.

To use life itself as your medium,

to use this intense moment of being.

-And to use the human body in ways that...

-Yeah.

Ways that are so expressive and so different.

DRUMMING MUSIC

For the past ten years, Gormley has collaborated with dancers

and choreographers from across the world.

Sometimes making frames and props to work with the dancers' bodies.

Or, for Akram Khan, creating a surrogate model

as a double for the body of a dancer.

One of his most recent collaborations was with the choreographer,

Hofesh Shechter.

I mean, the dancer occupies a space

just like your bodies occupy spaces, don't they?

The dancers' intelligence is about being in time, you know?

When Hofesh is doing his...

..his rehearsing, it's just incredible.

The, the, the...the embodied mathematics of the rhythm that he

is in a way inviting his dancers to inherit, it's so precise

but at the same time so intuitive.

What was amazing for me

with Antony is that feeling that we could fly together.

Like, I felt it was a first-time I felt I'm kind of comfortable

telling someone my, my dreams, my thoughts, my fantasies

unfolding the imagination together.

Antony was curious about the bodies of the dancers in a very,

almost mathematical kind of physical way...professor-like way.

The weight of the body and how... can you stand like that?

What he demanded from them was sometimes kind of impossible.

Not movement actually, but being.

Everyone, Antony to the front, please.

The fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square is the

most coveted spot in Britain for showcasing contemporary sculpture.

In 2009, Antony Gormley got his chance

and instead of making an object,

he divided the time into a grid of hours

and put the public on the platform.

One person per hour for 100 days.

To do whatever they wanted as long as it was legal.

There was one woman on the first day. It was just so, so fantastic.

I don't know how she'd done it,

but she got a kind of Cuban mariachi band to come and accompany her

And she was giving it...

And it was just wonderful what happened within the square.

And then those people that took it very conventionally,

that somehow, Trafalgar Square was a place of acknowledgement

of the fallen that had fought in the wars or in Afghanistan.

What other favourites did you have?

I know it's not fair to have favourites.

I think my favourite of all was the agoraphobic girl.

She got up there and she just formed herself into a ball.

You can see why I'm like that.

And she just sort of looked out at the world.

Like this.

For a whole hour and it was just...

she was so small on that great big plinth.

And somehow, quietly became the focus.

I mean, it was really unbelievably powerful. Beautiful.

And you're ready now, I think, to let go sometimes because you...

Yeah, I think...that's what One Another was.

It was a complete letting go.

It was just saying, let's think of our...less as objects

and more as a process.

Less as a noun, more as a verb.

As a transformative space where you can dream.

ELECTRONIC SOUND

Gormley hadn't moved away from making sculptures of the human body.

In 2012, his work Model was a figure made of steel rooms that the

viewer could walk inside.

From the toe up to the head.

What you seem to have done more and more with your later work

is to allow us to have that same experience that you have

when you were encased, you know?

To find our way through space

and to somehow experience the work in a very different way.

The show, Model, was the first time that I'd opened

the body as an experientiable architectural space.

When you end up in the headspace, you are in this very dark chamber.

You...you're almost in this position of being

the consciousness of this collective acoustic environment.

METAL BEING HAMMERED AND WORKED

For the summer of 2015, Gormley is creating a huge exhibition that will

set his new cast-iron block works alongside work of 20 years earlier.

Every aspect of a show requires careful planning.

It's much easier doing it with this scale of work.

HE GASPS

OK, there's our pile for Florence.

Gormley has been invited to make his new exhibition

in a 16th-century Medici fortress on the south side of Florence.

As well as its Renaissance history,

the fort was the setting of a landmark exhibition

for the most famous British sculptor of the 20th century.

In the summer of 1972, the mayor of Florence invited Henry Moore

to arrange an exhibition of his works in the buildings

and grounds of the 16th century Forte di Belvedere.

It was the largest exhibition of his work that there had ever been.

Writing to the mayor, he said,

"No better site for showing sculpture in the open air

"and in relationship to architecture and a town

"could be found anywhere in the world."

When you took on Florence and the fort, you were aware, of course,

who wouldn't be, that there was this extraordinary...?

1972, Henry Moore.

Was the fact that Henry Moore had done that,

was that an incentive for you to do it or did it put you off?

No, I think it was obviously an incentive and it was

obviously also an invitation to do something very different.

Florence is the birthplace of humanism.

The whole idea that man was the measure of all things.

That we were divine. That we were the masters of the universe.

Human is a reality check. When we strip away, in a way,

the illusions of progress,

what are we really?

Or what do we need to become...

in order to be truly human?

The Forte di Belvedere was built for Grand Duke Ferdinando de Medici

at the end of the 16th century.

It was designed to command a defensive position across the city,

but also to show off the power and status of the Medici family.

The Medici were an absolutely...

Lorenzo, in particular, was a highly scheming,

completely ruthless man,

who nevertheless had the first real art school for sculpture.

The beauties that have come down to us from the Renaissance

actually come out of a context of extreme pain.

For this new work in Florence, Anthony has chosen to use

figures that he made 20 years ago

for a site-specific work called Critical Mass,

built for an old tram depot in Vienna.

It was impossible to be in this building

without thinking about the transport, particularly of the Jews.

But that led me then to think about the mechanisation of death.

It's chilling.

It's chilling if one believes in human progress,

but actually we are still behaving in a very Palaeolithic way.

For Critical Mass, Gormley cast 12 different body positions.

He made five copies of each pose.

These figures are deliberately displayed at odd angles.

Upside down or leaning against the wall.

They are all without a plinth.

Each time Critical Mass is displayed,

Gormley arranges some of the figures in a pile.

I think of Critical Mass as my anti-monument

to the fallout of the 20th century.

Broadly speaking, the pile is history,

something that we can do little about,

other than bear witness to it.

But the pile is also bad history.

The pile is the foil to any illusion of idealism

that might be represented by the heroic statue.

On the opposite side of the battlement,

the arrangement of figures carries a sense of order and progression.

The breakthrough was realising

that the 12 positions of Critical Mass could be shown in a line

as an evolution of crouching,

ground, facing, foetal figures

to a body standing absolutely erect like a soldier,

ready to take orders but looking up at the sky.

I think it's just trying to look at those aspirations

for human perfectibility

and indeed the whole idea of progress.

You've got to see both sides,

you've got to have the illusion of progress.

You've got to have the truth of this pile of inert matter.

What Critical Mass began as was a meditation

on the ever greater ubiquity of war.

And in a way, the normalisation of war.

Well, things haven't changed much.

In fact, it's been a progress of the infiltration

of the theatre of war into civilian life

and now in certain parts of the world,

we don't know whether a child is just a child or a child and a bomb.

Here in Florence, Critical Mass is shown

alongside his most recent works,

whose block-like forms speak of technology and the digital age.

As you get closer, you see that the symmetry

that was present in Critical Mass

is now giving way to a kind of chaos.

Looking at them, I can't help but think of Sleeping Place,

made on his return from India more than 40 years ago.

This is the site that has become familiar to us,

the homeless in the front porch of the bank.

I mean, it's just about recognising

the exact opposite of Michelangelo's David.

This isn't to deny the beauty and aspiration of works like that,

but actually the need

to make us see,

to make us see what things really, really are,

and this isn't an illustration of it, it's actually,

hopefully just using these blocks to make us think about

what it feels like to be there, exposed.

Trying to find a place, in a way,

a place of intimacy in a world

that has somehow forgotten you.

BIRDSONG

..Uno.

CHEERING

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

One of the most powerful things in Antony's work is isolation.

There is a paradox in Antony's own life.

I mean, he's a very gregarious individual,

he's a very collaborative individual, but, erm, he can still

ruminate in his work...

on the ultimate isolation of all human beings.