Antony Gormley What Do Artists Do All Day?

Sculpture, of its nature, is about changing the world

because it's about putting things into it that weren't there before.

And to that little bit of the world, the setting of the world is changed.

The reason that I use my own body is that I want to enquire into what

being a temporary inhabitant of this materialised space feels like.

You may think it's a fundamentally narcissistic, terrible project.

What on Earth am I doing?

But I hope that it's other things as well.

When people ask me, what is this place, on the one hand,

it's a community, it's a community of people that like making things.

Sometimes it's a bit like a hospital, sometimes it's a bit

like a play school, sometimes an institution for the mentally infirm.

It has to be a place that is in the world but somehow not of it.

The history of the body in sculpture...

..probably starts with the brothers Pisano in Pisa in the 14th century.

It's the history of putting the body to work, telling a story.

Political stories, stories about power.

I have no interest either in the idealised body

or in the body used as an actor in the narrative.

I'm interested in the body as a place, a place that we all live.

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

that seemingly allows us infinite extension?

It's the same as gazing out into the cosmos in the night sky.

Perfect.

All right.

The change that has happened very rapidly in the last,

really, nine months, is that we're now making scans directly from life.

Now it's much more immediate.

Instead of it taking one and a half hours to mould,

we can do it in a matter of minutes and get the information back,

and then build that into a working process.

Do you want the fist connected to the head?

Yeah, that would be fine.

-Maybe under the chin might be quite helpful, actually.

-Like that?

-Yeah.

-OK, let's do it.

-OK.

-OK?

-Yeah.

Yeah. These are not, in my view, self-portraits.

My body is just my raw material,

and we go to work with it as one would a piece of wood.

-This is the other one.

-It's come out nice.

It's nice.

-That's more...

-That's more introverted.

-But it gives a sense of the arms.

-I think that will work well in books.

Got a nice shiver about it, hasn't it?

-I mean, it really does have a shiver. So this is this pose.

-Yeah.

It does work, that one.

This is a similar issue, but I think it's really good.

This is odd. Er...

Just the hand position is just very difficult to get.

I couldn't really...

-Well, the funny thing is it looks like this.

-And it's not that at all.

But it's difficult to have a chest block

and have any description in hands and forearms and stuff.

You know, this is the machine that we use to catch the shadow,

to make the impression, to take the trace.

You know? This is the fingerprint that is actually a body print

that is captured by bits and bytes and zeros and ones.

We're using the ability of this technology to capture

a fugitive moment of lived time,

and use that shadow,

that dark space,

that, in a way, very impermanent thing

as the basis for

making something that is adamantine, that resists time, that has presence.

I don't know quite why I put on this apron,

but I've always put it on when I'm painting, drawing,

so I do it as a sort of ritual more than...

I mean, sometimes it can get messy, but this isn't messy work.

This is quiet work.

It's nice to be able to have a place where you can be still.

I lost my first studio in 1987 in the great wind.

A 30-foot high wall crushed it, and I lost about a year and a half's work.

So, this is the third studio I've made, and it's the best.

But each of them were an attempt, in a different way,

to create the space, the light and the silence necessary for making art.

I was brought up by monks,

and I think there is a part of me that is indelibly touched

or formed by that idea - s mixture of silent contemplation,

active work and then some kind of labour that is between the two.

This end of the building, I think is a necessary balance, I think,

to the pragmatism. I mean, we can hear it, can't we?

We can hear the grinders.

Yesterday we could hear the clinking as of church bells,

but actually, it was Jamie and his...

BUZZER

And we can hear the front door like that, going,

so we're not, as it were, totally isolated,

but on the whole, people know when I'm down this end that it's...

Here we go, see? It's quite private.

-Hey. Fantastic. How are you?

-Hello. I'm fine, Tony.

-You're looking so well.

-Yeah, really?

-Yeah, yeah. So nice to see you.

Sui is an old friend from... well, from...

He has been working in Beijing

and teaching in the academy there,

and he has similar concerns

about the body and about space.

You should see, I'm doing my own expansions. I want to show you.

I want to show you, because they're not strictly the same as yours.

Will you be coming back upstairs to have coffee?

Oh, yeah, maybe we'll have a coffee up there. That's fine.

-Have a walk around first.

-You leave that there. It's fine.

Pierre, can we show them the incremental expansion?

-The way it works?

-Yeah, the way it works.

-OK, as an example?

-Yeah, yeah.

Um...

So this was for me a meditation on the idea of cosmic expansion,

you know, the dimension of space itself is expanding,

so as a result of the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago,

the scale of space is increasing the whole time.

I like that idea, that if we make objects,

the context of this object is always infinitely expanding.

Here is a scan, then we translate it into this mesh,

and then that mesh is then translated

into this loose constellation of forms.

The centroid of each of these masses remains absolutely fixed,

even though their space, as it were, is expanding,

and that idea of the cosmological constant

or what has now become known as the Hubble constant,

the application of cosmological rules

to the intimate space of the body is what this is all about.

You will always end up finally with a cube,

like your dipping will always end up finally as a perfect sphere.

Sui Jianguo has been dipping a paintbrush in paint every day.

Every day, yeah.

As a ritual. Before he begins work, he dips this.

-And now it weighs how much?

-30 kilos.

13 kilos, and is the size of a head.

The colour is always different or..?

Colours, I try to stay,

but sometimes we have change.

I think the primary drive in the making of sculpture

is to inscribe on an indifferent universe

some indication that we were here,

and it's a futile attempt,

but it's what led to the making of the Pyramids,

the making of the moai on Rapa Nui, the making of Stonehenge.

We know that in the truth of geological time,

our lives are as dust...

We have consciousness and they have eternity, or something close

to what a rock has, the capability of enduring time longer than we do,

and they wait for us.

They wait for our feeling, our thought,

our freedom of movement, and our projection,

and that's what all great, I think,

I mean, sculpture that calls to us, that appeals to us.

I think the works in many ways are like nets or traps

that are waiting for us to be caught in them, with them.

We may say, wait away, boy, you're living in a delusional universe.

These are kind of boxes, exploding boxes,

so this is a 500 millimetre expansion of me standing,

-with my hands like this.

-Yeah.

This one is quite Chinese, I think.

This is, like, one of the Ming... you know the Ming tomb?

-The scholar, you know, with his long sleeves.

-Yeah.

But you have to imagine it's like a forest,

and that you can walk through.

Some are less expanded, like this one, and, and it's five rows of 12...

in this Renzo Piano building made for Paul Klee.

-Have we got the things?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Oh, let's have a look.

How do I open this? Oh, right.

So this is the model, this is exciting,

this is the model of the field. We modelled them in little chaps.

This is plaster - plaster with super glue?

Yeah, it's got some hardener on it.

I'm not sure what it is.

-Are you coming up?

-Yeah.

This space is unbelievable. I mean, it really is unbelievable.

-The scale range is crazy, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Is this true, this guy, or is he a bit big?

I think he's about a third too big, isn't he?

-He's a metre 95.

-Oh, is he?

-Yeah.

I immediately want to do some chess moves here.

They seem to be, er...great.

I'm so excited.

I mean, this is going to be absolutely amazing, isn't it?

I mean, in terms of...

In a way, it's more extreme than I imagined because of this.

I mean, the big ones are really extraordinary, aren't they?

It creates a space. It is very different.

So these are the few of our new...

So you have this opportunity of seeing it as a singular,

in a way, whole thing,

and then you can come in and move around it.

You can feel the beginning, little root hairs of possibility,

at the scan, at the computer, at the model stage,

but hopefully, it goes all the way through, then you kind of

have your big moment as you make the thing that you've been dreaming.

Suddenly, it's no longer an idea, it's a thing or place,

and you experience it yourself as the viewer.

I mean, I think that whole issue about whether you want to have

readable progressions, or whether you want to have...

I prefer this, where it's actually mixed.

Um...

So here is the man with the erection.

We had to do that just to have the full range of extensions.

If you have arms out, arms up...

Um... Yeah, this is the arms out.

Very, very exciting.

Took 40.

I'm just trying to get a feel. It's really...

You spend so much of your time, in a way, plotting,

but then the real proof of the pudding

is you've got to walk the walk,

and with something like this, it's terrifying.

You know, the Paul Klee Museum, you may think this is quite big,

but they are twice as high,

and this big arc of the ceiling, nothing is square. Um...

And I want to make... It's got to be tight, it's got to be hard.

Everything there is curved.

Even the planks in the floor are curved.

And this has got to be tough and dark and hermetic.

And, um... I've got to get it right.

They don't feel very, um, consistent, actually, but they are.

Almost as soon as they're made,

they take their place in the family of made things,

and they're not mine any more.

To be a real artist is quite a tough thing.

I mean, I think it's not something that you decide at the age of six.

I mean, you know, funny,

I'm frightened of that word "success" in a sense

cos I think it suggests a kind of contentment

or job well done,

now I can get my slippers and put the crumpets on or something.

And I don't think that's the way it works.

The first ten years were very, very hard, and very lonely,

and I delight in the fact that I work in company,

and I'm no longer in ill-lit, damp, ex-industrial spaces,

and I rejoice in it.

I just think it's absolutely the best thing that could have happened,

that I'm joined in my madness by others

that seem happy to be infected by it.

In a way, this is the lie to the accusation of self-indulgent

whatever, because I don't think they would identify

what we are doing as being to the greater glory of some individual

called Antony Gormley.

And I feel immense privilege, gratitude, joy

in the life of this studio.

It's wonderful.

It isn't a family but it's akin to the closeness that you feel

with individuals and the same degree, I hope, of trust and care.

We're here for such a short time.

And in the interests of making a true testimony to what it

feels like to be alive now at the beginning of the 21st century,

I am trying to make a true account.