Long, 1

The Sea and the Sun: Agents of Temporality in the Work of Antony Gormley and Néle Azevedo Kelly Long University of Rochester May 6, 2013

Long, 2

“Like Newton, those who possess the inclination and the vision may play on the vast shores of the universe with the living seeds of future worlds. Who knows, through the course of unimaginable eons, how the great living web may vibrate slightly and give out a note from the hand that plucked it long ago?”1

-Loren Eiseley, Man, Time, and Prophecy INTRODUCTION

Shortly after its 2010 installation the locals of Lelystad began referring to Antony

Gormley’s 60-ton crouching Exposure sculpture as de poepende man—“the shitting man.” The

irreverent name paired nicely with that of the artist’s famous Angel of the North (1998), known

to its own set of locals as “the Gateshead Flasher.”2 Despite the jokes, Gormley remains as

earnest a figure as one might imagine, maintaining a dialogue around his work which sacrifices

accessibility for the sake of conceptual acuity. But he also enjoys a laugh when visitors dress his

more humanly-proportioned, figures in bathing suits and hard hats.3 Though lonely

embankments and long stretches of beach serve as sites for his outdoor sculptures, Gormley

maintains that they are public works, monumental in scale and, arguably, in function.

Across the sea, in the crowded city square of São Paulo, Brazil, Néle Azevedo made her

first Minimum Monument (or Melting Men) intervention in 2001. With the help of passersby,

she set hundreds of 10-centimeter-high ice figures out on a wide set of steps, allowing them to

melt and then evaporate in the heat of the sun. The project, repeated in dozens of cities since

its initial execution, may be read as a continuation and intensification of Azevedo’s earlier

single-figure, anti-monument interventions. She keeps her explanation of the work simple. “The 1 Loren Eiseley, Man, Time, and Prophecy. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. 30-31. 2 Charlotte Higgins, “Antony Gormley drops 60-tonne load for monumental sculpture,” The Guardian, August 27,

2010, accessed April 12, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/27/antony-gormley-exposure-sculpture. 3 John-Paul Flintoff, “Antony Gormley, the man who broke the mould,” The London Times, March 2, 2008, accessed

April 15, 2013. http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/arts/Visual_Arts/article81432.ece.

Long, 3

project,” she writes, “is a critical reading of the monument in contemporary cities. In a few-

minute action, the official canons of the monument are inverted: in the place of the hero, the

anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral process of the ice; in the place

of the monument scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies… It concentrates on small

sculptures of small men, the common men”.4 From such a description, one might suppose

Azevedo to be responding, directly, to a work like Gormley’s Exposure (and indeed she might

be). But the proven temporal limit of Minimum Monument rather beautifully matches the

projected temporal limit of de poepende man, who will become submerged by water from the

Markermeer rising, as the sea does, with global warming.

Though neither Gormley nor Azevedo seek to incorporate environmental activism into

their artistic production, the creations of both have been coopted by environmentalists as

visual representations of humanity’s fate under climate change. The short life-span of

Azevedo’s “Melting Men” constitutes the speedy fulfillment of the loss which, in Gormley’s

work, remains a hanging promise. But their shared conceit is a kind of temporal unfolding that

works through the viewer’s identification (or lack thereof) with the sculptural figure and its

space. With even less license than that taken by inspired environmentalists, we may trace lines

of spatiotemporal connectivity, north from São Paulo and west from Lelystad, to saline shores

of the Great Salt Lake…

If the key to Gormley’s and Azevedo’s outdoor works does lie in temporality, then the

shadow of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) must darken both. In the red waters off Rozel

Point, the black basalt earthwork has since faded to a dull pink, encrusted beneath almost half

4 “Nele Azevedo Interview,” by GreenMuze staff, GreenMuze.com, December 8, 2012,

http://www.greenmuze.com/art/interviews/641-nele-azevedo-interview.html

Long, 4

a century of salt deposition in that iconic spiral. It is a pattern we, as viewers, are compelled to

repeat, tracing the jetty’s curve with our feet or our eyes, and being absorbed by the work in

the process. We arrive at and become its center, and then trace its path back outward,

reentering the world beyond the earthwork. When we walk the spiral again the path has

changed, though we may not see it. As the slow fading of Spiral Jetty foretells our own

inevitable decline, it also enacts another, invisible temporal recuperation whose complexity

cannot be separated from observable effects of crystallization on black basalt.

A titan of the Earth/Land Art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, Smithson and his work

were easily mobilized by the nascent environmentalist movement of the same period. But that

movement did not have the tone of desperation it does today, with climate change

constituting, arguably, the foremost globalized crisis our time. In the face of this reality, I

believe, such works as Gormley’s Exposure and Azevedo’s Minimum Monument must and will

be coopted to visually represent a nightmarish inevitability. Their relationship to temporality

and, by extension, to questions of death and mortality, make them ideal points of meditation

for the viewer who understands, in either work, the nature of her own body under threat.

THE GOLDEN SPIKE For six days in April of 1970 Robert Smithson directed tractors and trucks as they hauled

over 6,000 tons of earth and black basalt into the Great Salt Lake. The deposition formed a

helix, or a nebula, like some cosmic signal meant for the sky. The work was Spiral Jetty, and it

would, arguably, come to iconize the earth or land art movement. It certainly came to stand for

Smithson’s oeuvre.

Long, 5

Spiral Jetty’s temporality is, in part, visible to the human eye. In the red algae and salt-

saturated water at Rozel Point, the earthwork’s black basalt undergoes a constant

transformation. Salt deposits crystalize on the jetty’s surface, which grows pale as the

underlying material is obscured. When submerged, the salt-path appears pink in the red water,

growing ever lighter as time allows for a thickening encrustation. Under a microscope, the salt

crystal itself is prone to a phenomenon known as “screw dislocation,” whereby “a slip or

misalignment in the normal sequence of molecular deposition perpetuates itself throughout

the crystal by causing a pattern of growth that spirals around the initial dislocation.”5

The result is a helix which may self-perpetuate indefinitely, forming a physical and

temporal pattern uncannily like that of the larger jetty. The salt molecules become the

microscopic, microcosmic mirror of the path to which they adhere, and the paradigmatic

substance of what Jennifer Roberts calls Smithson’s “crystalline model of time.” Such a model,

she writes, disregards “linear, progressive, or triumphalist models by imagining time as an

opaque encrustation around a fault or fracture. Here time has no connection to an animate

origin or center; it begins with a ‘dislocation’ and merely accumulates from without. Time does

not ‘pass’ or ‘fly;’ it builds up as a material sediment that remains on hand indefinitely.”6

More than the material index of time’s passage, Spiral Jetty is a work of reparation that

does its temporal work invisibly. The conceit of Jennifer Roberts’ 2011 book, Mirror Travels:

Robert Smithson and History, is the recuperation of Spiral Jetty’s ties to the ceremonial last

“piece” of the Transcontinental Railroad, driven into the soil just sixteen miles from Rozel Point

5 Roberts, Jennifer. Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 42.

When Smithson wrote about Spiral Jetty in the year before his death, he specifically described the earthwork as “advanc*ing+ around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screw.” 6Eugenie Tsai et al. Robert Smithson. Berkeley: University of California, 2004, 98.

Long, 6

on May 10, 1869. From Council Bluffs to San Francisco Bay, the railway was built by an

overwhelming force of (mostly Chinese) immigrant workers whose long labor has been

forgotten. The “Golden Spike,” as the final piece is known, condenses that work and obscures

it, like white salt crystals on black basalt. As the official visible “marker” of the railway’s

constructedness, it is an easy substitute for the registration of labor or of time itself. The jetty,

Roberts claims, “performs a centennial counter-reenactment here, reenacting not the timeless

and universal product of labor, the Golden Spike, but rather that which the Golden Spike model

of history must repress—the duration, extension, and materiality of that labor. The Jetty

provides a form of rescue of the time that went into the railroad’s construction…”7

By dredging up the seldom-remembered labor of immigrant workers, Smithson refuses

to let any dominant reality hold sway. He collapses time, capitalizing on the impossibility of

linear growth in crystal-formation in order to return to the hammering of the Golden Spike.

There he reverses an injustice made possible by the prevalence of a false “objective” reality: the

effortless “creation” of the Transcontinental Railroad through the hammering of a single spike

by a wealthy industrialist whose ceremonial action was probably the only contribution of

physical labor he made to the railway. The endless duration (and thus perpetual futurity) of

Spiral Jetty alters the way in which we visualize the events of the past, while the possibility of

historical flux fosters the shifting meaning of the jetty itself. Meaning rushes forward and falls

back again.

EXPOSURE

7 Roberts, 125.

Long, 7

In 2005, Antony Gormley won an international design competition in Flevoland, an area

of the central Netherlands whose reclamation from the inland Zuiderzee (“Southern Sea”) has

been in progress since the early twentieth century with the construction of a series of dykes

meant to keep the sea water at bay and return submerged polders to a state of productivity.8

Gormley’s reward was the commission of a new earthwork and, as always, the artist took his

cues from a devotion to notions of space that verges on religiosity. As Charlotte Higgins wrote

in her 2010 account of the final product, Exposure is “an object of mind-bending scale and

complexity” weighing 60 tons, consisting of 2,000 major components, and utilizing

approximately 5,400 metal bolts. “If this crouching man stood up,” she remarks, “he would be

over 100 meters tall; if an adult stands next to it, he or she may just be able to peek over its

feet.”9 Crouching at the edge of a Lelystad polder, the “brackish inland sea” and the “big,

lowland sky” form both its view and backdrop. “I wanted an object that couldn't be read

immediately,” Gormley explains. As one approaches it, he continues, “The nature of the object

changes. You can see it as a human form in the distance. It becomes more abstract the closer

you get to it. And finally it becomes a chaotic frame through which you can look at the sky…It is

a sublime situation.”10

From afar, the figure’s depth and scale confound human vision; the interlocking pylons

register as an uncanny, flat matrix, silhouetted against the sky and lacking proximate structures

by which a viewer might measure it. But even at a distance Exposure registers clearly as a

8 Mike Wade, “How Gormley’s latest work is very big news,” The London Times, June 7, 2010, accessed April 15,

2013. Infotrac Newsstand. http://go.galegroup.com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA228267175&v=2.1&u=nysl_ro_rochstru&it=r&p=STND&sw=w. 9 Higgins.

10 Ibid.

Long, 8

figure. At close range depth and scale also overwhelm, but their effect at the sculpture’s base is

to make the figure unreadable, immeasurable, and impossible to take in as any kind of totality.

De poepende man may, in fact, take in its viewer. “I think of him,” Gormley writes, “as a

constellation. You can think of these nodes as starbursts within the body. He is not struggling,

he is simply contemplating the horizon, contemplating space at large, but he is himself space at

large. It is not easily understood - you have to walk around it, walk underneath and even climb

it…I've climbed up to its testicles, but not much further.”11

Amid the iron pylons, a sense of Exposure, which was possible neither from afar nor

from the ground beneath the sculpture, crystalizes. Articulated space becomes something one

may enter and engage with, while the massiveness of the human figure diffuses into the sheer

complexity of atom-like, geometric joints. Gormley sees the work as the “porous” complement

of his more famous Angel of the North, which exists, he writes, as “an iconic mass in space”—

one that initiates an immediate confrontation.12 In contrast, the body of Exposure is “an open

space, an open space of possibility”13 that invites investigation, physical contact, and even

absorption. “It is less about confrontation,” Gormley explains, “and more about reverie.”14

But the potentiality of Exposure cannot be confined to either minor distance or the

work’s inner matrix. Like Spiral Jetty, Gormley’s titan stands (or crouches) in conversation with

not one but two proximate landmarks; not the ceremonial markers of a railway’s completion,

but a pair of earthworks as clearly invested in temporality as the jetty itself. Exposure shares

Lelystad with Robert Morris’s Observatory (1971), and Marinus Boezem’s The Green Cathedral

11 Wade. Emphasis mine. 12

Ibid. 13

Wade. 14

Higgins.

Long, 9

(De Groene Kathedraal, 1987). While Morris’s monumental work—a kind of “modern-day

Stonehenge”—uses carved, window-like slits to frame the position of celestial bodies on the

year’s four equinoxes and solstices, Boezem’s construction consists of almost 200 columnar

Italian Poplars, planted to mimic the architecture of the Reims Cathedral in France. While the

trees are expected to reach their peak growth in 2015 (and at that time match the 30 meter

height of their French counterpart), they are subject to normal patterns of growth and decay.

As the poplars die, Boezem has hypothesized that the beech trees surrounding the cathedral’s

clearing will fill in the empty spaces and create the transcendent structure once more. Despite

cyclical growth and decline, the work achieves a kind of immortality. As one writer suggests,

“The trees, which will never converge to roof the nave below, will eventually die and rot, giving

way to a vast field of trunks.” But, “As if to serve as a future manual for reconstruction,

Boezem’s work not only anticipates the ruinous fate that will meet all structures, but also

poignantly prepares the moment of rediscovery.”15

In 1997, Boezem opened the earthwork to change even further through the creation of

its negative reflection in a glade of beech trees north of the decade-old original. Like a song

sung in round, it seems to trail the principal utterance as a replication or a variation that

extends the work’s duration and, in so doing, alters it. Moreover, the artist’s willingness to

impose transformation on the work after allowing it to develop naturally for ten years suggests

a temporality which, beyond either cyclicality or unidirectionality, leaves room for new

variability and sudden reversal.

15 Samuel Medina, “The Primitive Cathedral,” Architizer, October 11, 2011, accessed April 23, 2013.

http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/31182/the-primitive-cathedral/#.UXbIvbWG3O4

Long, 10

ANOTHER WORK, ANOTHER PLACE

Exposure clearly bears conceptual resemblance to works earlier in Gormley’s career.

Another Place, for instance, also depends upon the changing depth of a body of water for the

realization of its spatial conceit (which registers, of course, on the human body). Originally

installed along the coast of Cuxhaven in lower Saxony16, the work consists of 100 cast-iron

figures, placed 50 to 200 meters apart along the line of the tide and up to one kilometer out

toward the horizon. The entire installation stretches along almost two kilometers of beach,

giving the impression of endless extension into the distance as an alternation of figure and

empty space. “Quite apart from all the logistical and technical efforts necessary for the creation

of Another Place,” writes Eckhard Schneider, “the work fascinates through the sudden

encounter of void and mass.

A hundred iron figures, which in a pile would look like useless material, develop a completely new significance when placed with regularity and apparent infinity in the characteristic landscape of the tidal shallows. The accumulation of these bodies, identifiable close up as ‘the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man’, is revealed in the ensemble of work and nature as a complex sculptural vehicle. By the introduction of the figures, this space—hitherto perceived as flat, consisting of sky, earth and water and marked by the horizon—is transformed into a vibrant depth. The viewer, as the hundred-and-first figure, becomes a part of the whole.17

It is the changing of the tides, which (coupled with the tremendous span of the installation)

produces Schneider’s sensation of “vibrant depth,” alternately submerging Gormley’s figures

and exposing them, naked on the sand. In their presence, the observer suddenly has a sense of

the breadth and strength of the ocean’s thrust and may gauge her own submersion in relation

16

The installation was moved to Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool, in 2007, where it will remain indefinitely. 17

Eckhard Schneider, “Mass and Empathy,” 2003, from Antony Gormley: Standing Matter at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris/Salzburg. Paris: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2003. 17.

Long, 11

to that of the cast-iron sentinels. They become a measure of all things, including the thing

which needs no measure: the ebb and flow of the tide, as faithful and fixed as the rising sun.

The figures of Another Place register a cyclical temporality which stands in stark contrast

to the unpredictable submersion/exposure patterns of Spiral Jetty, and the unidirectional

temporality of Exposure. The Markermeer lacks a tidal rhythm, and any rise in water level it

might undergo (as a result of glacial melt) will be, presumably, irreversible. While Gormley

might encourage visitors to gauge their own smallness in relation to the monumental figure of

the Lelystad giant, the realities of site and circumstance form an irresistible distraction. We

wish to measure global warming itself, and the infinitesimally slow rise of the water proves

frustrating, at odds with the rhetoric of crisis we know to be appropriate when talking about

climate change. We crave, perhaps, the crouching man’s speedier demise.

MINIMUM MONUMENT In 2009 Néle Azevedo partnered with the World Wildlife Fund to bring her Minimum

Monument project to Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt Square. Azevedo’s project, the WWF reasoned,

would provide an affective demonstration of global warming’s capacity to effect destruction on

earth and on its living inhabitants. And yet Azevedo claims that she is not a climate change

activist, arguing that the Berlin project, like Minimum Monument’s other manifestations, is “a

critical view” of “official historical monuments.” “As the reading and interpretation of an art

piece is open,” she remarks, “I'm glad it can also speak of urgent matters that threaten our

existence on this planet.”18

18

GreenMuze.

Long, 12

The Berlin intervention was timed to coincide with the release of the World Wildlife

Fund’s major report on Arctic warming (entitled “Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global

Implications”), which warned that sea levels worldwide were newly projected to rise over a

meter by 2100. But it also (perhaps coincidentally) occurred just a few months before the

United Nations’ December 2012 Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen,

where representatives from 191 nations met to set out a new and aggressive strategy for

dealing with the climate change crisis following the expiration of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.19

The Melting Men of Gendarmenmarkt Square numbered 1,000, and took approximately

30 minutes to melt in the balmy, late-summer weather of northern Germany. The intervention

was one of Azevedo’s largest, outdone (thus far) only by her 2010 work in Stavanger, Norway

(in which 1,300 figures were used), and by her 2012 work in Firenze, Italy (which used 1,200).

The artist tailors the scale of each installation to the public space in which it appears, but the

logistical magnitude of even her “smaller” interventions (which include anywhere from 300 to

500 pieces) force her to rely upon the help of other people. Through the voluntary participation

of passersby, each figure finds its place before the melting process has wholly disfigured them.

Since Azevedo might easily enlist friends or assistants to install the work, the pairing of each

stranger with a nameless, faceless “melting man” (or “melting woman”) seems significant; a

choice rather than a concession, just as each passerby is gifted with a choice (responsibility for

one disintegrating figure, responsibility for many, or responsibility for none at all). When the

installation involves over 1,000 pieces swift public participation becomes critical to its success.

19 “Warming Arctic’s Global Impacts Outstrip Predictions,” WWF Global, Semptember 2, 2010.

http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?173262/Warming-Arctics-global-impacts-outstrip-predictions. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December of 1997, and aimed at setting internationally binding emission reduction targets.

Long, 13

But while the stakes may be higher, so is the work’s potential affect: Only when there are more

sculptures, Azevedo argues, does the work truly reach “a monumental scale.”20

For the artist, hundreds of minute anonyms dispersed in the space of a city square

approximate the self-contained scale of the public monument. But they also undermine it,

constituting, simultaneously, its alternative and its critique. Unloaded from a freezer-truck and

put into the hands of strangers, the “monumental” object is endowed with a new and strange

mobility. The individual melting man finds its resting place only to dissolve in the heat of the

sun and flow again to ends unknown. The figure, Azevedo argues, “loses its static condition to

gain fluidity in the urban displacement and in the change of state of the water.”21 A change in

scale becomes a change in state, which has everything to do with temporality.

Born, clone-like, from molds, Azevedo’s ice figures seem doomed to die. But there is

something satisfying in the potentiality opened up by the near-magical confluence of material,

site, science, and guesswork. Beginning as water from a tap, the Melting Men are formed

through freezing and then sacrificed to the sun to fulfill their name. That same sun enacts

another change-of-state on the liquid figure, which is propelled into the air as vapor (the

ultimate dispersion). We cannot know when and where it will condense and become liquid

once more. Perhaps molecules from one melting man flow again through the tap and are

reused, unknowingly, in another of Azevedo’s installations.

Though the temporality of the isolated Minimum Monument installation seems to offer

the swifter foil of the unidirectional promise set out by Gormley’s Lelystad giant, its re-

performance offers an alternative, cyclical temporality where the fate of the human analog is

20

GreeMuse. 21

Ibid.

Long, 14

not finite, but, through the natural processes of melting, evaporation, and precipitation,

potentially and infinitely recuperative…rather like Smithson’s jetty, which performs an historical

intervention without limits. Even apart from the mass-scale of the Minimum Monument

installation, melting man may become Melting Men. Antony Gormley’s rather frequently-

quoted artist statement from 1985 seems to hold water here: “Each work is a place between

form and formlessness, a time between origin and becoming…In art there is no progress, only

art. Art is always for the future.”22

HUMAN FORM, HUMAN FATE For Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, as for Gormley’s Exposure and Azevedo’s Minimum

Monument project, human interaction with the work is inseparable from human labor. The

1970 earthwork surely recuperates the neglected and invisible labor of immigrant workers, but

also exists as the product of that labor and a vessel for it. The jetty’s infinite duration can be

traced only to phantasmal hands; it attempts to become the very essence of labor, self-

perpetuating after six initial days of unmistakable hard work. Labor is its own portal and

catalyst, referring to forgotten past toil, and catapulting it into the endless future. It is present,

and it does something, but, as with Exposure, our desire to measure its changeability (and not

merely to see it in any current state, knowing that it is different than one prior) is thwarted. The

slowness of its transformation and the microscopic scale of screw-dislocation make the labor of

Spiral Jetty a rather tricky one. Not futile, but somehow beyond us, even though we may stand

at its literal center.

22 Antony Gormley, “Artist’s Statement, 1985,” in Antony Gormley. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995. 118.

Long, 15

With Exposure, labor is indivisible from the troublesome figure of the virtuosic male

artist; Gormley himself, with over thirty years of sculptural production under his belt. Since the

early 1980s, the overwhelming majority of Gormley’s works have begun with his own body, cast

in plaster and imagined as a prototype whose potentiality is almost inexhaustible. Exposure is

no different, despite its monumental size. The “Crouching Man” began with an “extremely

uncomfortable” ninety minutes, in which Gormley assumed the pose he wished to

monumentalize while assistants covered his naked body with wet plaster.23 Once the mold was

complete, it was photographed, and then digitized.24 Gormley was then tasked with finding an

engineering firm that could translate the digital figure into forms that could be manufactured,

as well as the proper company to manufacture them. By one writer’s account, the search

extended “from Canada to Turkey and Ukraine to Finland.”25 As it happens, the Dutch

engineering company Royal Haskoning and the Scottish pylon manufacturer Had-Fab were

signed on for the rather unorthodox job, with the latter subsidizing the project by £120,000

when funding problems arose. "It has been a nitty-gritty piece of British pragmatism,” Gormley

writes, “and I am so chuffed with it I can't tell you. This is what people have managed to

achieve through sheer bloodymindedness. The Scots sweated blood over it and now they've

had to give it up to the flatlanders."26 And the Dutch “flatlanders” did their part as well. Once

the pylons were transported from their place of manufacture in East Lothian, Scotland, to the

work’s intended site at Lelystad, it would be another eight weeks of machine-assisted labor

before Exposure was deemed complete.

23

Higgins. 24

Digitzation of Gormley’s cast was made possible through software developed by Professor Roberto Cipolla of Cambridge University, and algorithms formulated by Sean Hanna of University College London. 25

Higgins. 26

Ibid.

Long, 16

Though it is certainly too simplistic to claim that Gormley is the beginning and end of the

sculpture with no role in between, his relation to the rather dispersed labor of Exposure’s

creation bears scrutiny. Like so many of the minimalists, Gormley has long partnered with

industrial manufacturers for the production of his installation components. The labor of the

machine and of the industrial worker joins the labor of virtuosic artist, though it is not “Royal

Haskoning” or “Had-Fab” that come to mind when one visits Exposure, let alone the names of

the individual engineers and plant workers who, respectively, designed and hand-cut each

metal pylon using paper templates. One might make the argument that the sculpture is

Gormley’s most extravagant display of ego to date, a fact that the artist acknowledges, but

refutes. "If this is a poorly veiled excuse for an act of extreme narcissism, well, that's your

opinion," says Gormley. "The fact is I have made my entire truth play in the world on the basis

that this is the body dealt with from the inside. I don't honestly see it as my body at all. It's just

the form I choose to be used."27 In another interview he claimed that, “This sculpture has many

heroes; and I am not one of them.”28 Whether or not Gormley’s makes his claim in earnest (or

as the careful posturing of an artist past his prime), it raises a vital question: In the many stages

of the work’s development, where do we, as viewers, belong?

Néle Azevedo also speaks of heroes in her work. The memory of Minimum Monument’s

installation, she writes, “is not reserved for great heroes *or+ for great monuments.”29 It

belongs, in a sense, to all who behold it, through direct participation, through direct

observation of the melting process, and through viral photographs of the project’s many

27

Wade. 28

Higgins. 29

GreenMuse.

Long, 17

incarnations, which circulate widely on the internet and probably had a hand in bringing

Azevedo to the attention of the World Wildlife Fund prior to 2010. Public attraction to

photographs of the “melting men,” in varying stages of deformation, grant the work an

extended lifespan beyond what it endowed through pure repetition. As Patricia C. Phillips

writes in her essay on “Temporality and Public Art,”

Immutability is valued by society. There is a desire for a steadfast art that expresses permanence through its own perpetualness. Simultaneously, society has a conflicting predilection for an art that is contemporary and timely, that responds to and reflects its temporal and circumstantial context. And then there is a self-contradicting longing that this fresh spontaneity be protected, made invulnerable to time, in order to assume its place as historical artifact and as concrete evidence of a period's passions and priorities.30

An ephemeral, public work like Azevedo’s is, then, never truly or wholly ephemeral. Its lifespan

is lengthened by its dramatic photographs (which show our figural proxies, languishing in the

sun) or by the memory of the individual who participates in the work, becoming, in effect, one

of its many authors. The same may certainly be said of Spiral Jetty or Exposure as photographs

of either earthwork, the indelible experience of walking Smithson’s basalt path, or the effort of

climbing Gormley’s iron pylons all seem to suggest a kind of personal affect which will far

outlast the state of the work at a particular moment in time. As Phillips claims, “The encounter

of public art is ultimately a private experience; perception outlasts actual experience.”31 This

seems especially true in the case of Minimum Monument, which marshals the figuration of a

doomed humanoid population, and the viewer/participant’s direct engagement with individuals

in that population in order to achieve its affective telos. The labor of the passerby is a labor

30 Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” Art Journal, Vol. 48, No. 4, Critical Issues in Public Art (Winter,

1989). http://www.jstor.org/stable/777018. 331. 31

Ibid, 335.

Long, 18

which, beyond merely allowing him or her to experience the work, creates the work, as well as

the conditions for its destruction.

As in Azevedo’s anti-monument intervention, the broad body of Gormley’s work

hinges upon the viewer’s ability to identify with the sculptural body or (perhaps more

accurately) with Gormley’s sculptural body. Though his work has long borne the critical

accusation of feeding the artist’s desire to produce his own monument in serial fashion,

Gormley holds steadfast to a conceptual foundation that centered upon the idea that the

utterly interior phenomenon of human consciousness holds within it a potential for exterior

realization. We are in the world, he suggests, and it is absolutely within us. “The sickness of

feeling separate from the world,” he writes, “is what is killing it.

We are earth above ground, clothed by space, seen by light. The distance inherent in sight has made us treat the ‘outside’ as different. The dominance of reason depends on the continued externalization of the world. The light of reason is balanced by the darkness of the body. The unknownness of the mind and the unknownness of the universe are the same. If we are to survive, we must balance outer action with an inner experience of matter. This is the great subjectivity and the great unity.32

In this context, the structural complexity of a sculptural body like Exposure, as well as dynamics

of its spatiotemporal situation, may be read as Gormley’s attempt to bridge the boundary

between self and world and to articulate, visually, something of their sameness. The figure’s

hollow spaces become more than just the physical representation of the indexical void the

viewer is meant to occupy. Because the body of Exposure is porous, the risen sea of some

future moment will also rush to occupy it, bringing elements of the exterior world into the inner

spaces of the monumental human form.

32 Antony Gormley, “Artist’s Writings: Antony Gormley, Being the World, 1989,” in Antony Gormley. London:

Phaidon Press Limited, 1995. 124.

Long, 19

The transformation of the work may also be its death; iron, after all, is predisposed to

rust and corrosion once it has been submerged, and will eventually disintegrate entirely. For

much of his earlier sculptural production Gormley favored lead, whose toxicity and heaviness

also carry associations of death or entombment. Eckhard Schneider has compared the artist’s

“statuesque, almost monolithic figures” to “Pompeian casts of victims of the great volcanic

eruption.”33 As with Azevedo’s figures, however, death as an unstoppable eventuality is rather

easily overturned in Gormley’s work, and made to enact, instead, a kind of immortality. As

Schneider suggests,

Each work owes its existence to the impression taken from the skin of a human being. The warm-blooded, mobile body becomes, as it were, 1:1 a cold, stiff sculpture. From an artistic point of view, this is the decisive ‘turning moment’ in Gormley’s work—the dramatic reversal of life and death, verse and reverse. The vitality of the body gradually exposed to decay is transformed into the deadness, but thus permanence, of an art form. The passage into the (f)rigidity of the art form enables the transcendence of the ‘eternal’.34

The cast sculptural index, as always already “dead”, can therefore never die. Like Smithson’s

jetty, it achieves endlessness, without need of re-creation. Though the sea may rise up and

swallow it, the figure of Exposure, through its static relation to Gormley’s aging body, becomes

immortal.

CONCLUSION

For Gormley’s Exposure, temporality exists in the long labor of the sculpture’s creation

but, more temptingly, in the unrealized promise of the human figure’s watery burial. We are

coerced into longing for its demise; for the rush of sea water through the empty space between

33

Schneider, 9. 34

Ibid.

Long, 20

the pylons…spaces we have, perhaps, once climbed through and occupied. As the fixed imprint

of the artist’s otherwise aging body, it has the ability to immortalize him, to make him the

monumental figure he so fervently rejects. But it does not immortalize its viewer, who waits to

measure, on her own body, the rising of the same sea that will engulf Exposure.

Such a measurement is harder to locate in Azevedo’s anti-monument, though it may

exist quite simply in our enthusiasm for the project and our affect once it is complete. In

Minimum Monument, the inevitable “death” of the figure (its temporal limitation) makes

collective labor necessary. That collective labor is enacted by people who may come to see

themselves in the very nondescript sculptures they set out in the sun, and thus doom to

disintegration. The project becomes a kind of masochistic ritual, whereby participation

amounts to the condemnation of one’s simulacrum,and therefore of oneself. It is easy to see

how the rhetoric of climate change (which seeks to inspire change at the individual level

through the demonstration of how the phenomenon is caused at the individual level) absorbs

the work which illustrates—tangibly and touchably—how we have brought all of this upon

ourselves.

In the context of the two contemporary works, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty remains a most

enigmatic creation. Like Robert Morris’s Observatory, it depends upon the passage of time, and

on the magnetism of its center. In the Morris work, the central circle is the only place from

which to accurately register the framing of the sun in the carved windows of the stone

enclosure; in Smithson’s, that center is a most unstable site which either absorbs or frustrates

the viewer’s desire for it, depending upon the path’s unpredictable patterns of

submersion/exposure. The changeable water level of the Great Salt Lake points to another

Long, 21

temporal variable; its salt encrustation which, even if the water were to rise up and never again

release the jetty, will continue to alter it. Perhaps, in some far-away future, when all of the

earth’s seas rise up, and mingle, and become one great salt-sea, deposition will continue, and

the jetty will change while, sixteen miles away, the Golden Spike simply sinks, performing no

longer. Even in a world without humanity, Spiral Jetty will perform, independent of

measurement, independent of the willing participant, and independent of the historical

narrative that enriches it. Though we may find ourselves compelled to travel the path of the

jetty, it does not need us. Just as we are attracted to it, we are expelled, conceptually, from it.

At the crux of human labor, its duration, and the body which performs it, Gormley’s and

Azevedo’s new earthworks allow us to measure and to elicit the expiration of a proxy, and

thereby measure and elicit the expiration of our own bodies. Where the fragile human body is,

in Smithson’s work, sacrificed to the natural and immortal processes which govern it, that same

body is, in Gormley’s and Azevedo’s production, enlarged and multiplied, respectively, and

reflected in both as our own. The result is a great and terrible mirror or a crystal glass. We peer

into it and wait to see our futures.

Long, 22

BIBLIOGRAPHY Eiseley, Loren. Man, Time, and Prophecy. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966 Flintoff, John-Paul. “Antony Gormley, the man who broke the mould,” The London Times,

March 2, 2008, accessed April 15, 2013. http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/arts/Visual_Arts/article81432.ece.

Gormley, Antony. “Artist’s Statement, 1985,” in Antony Gormley. London: Phaidon Press

Limited, 1995. Antony Gormley, “Artist’s Writings: Antony Gormley, Being the World, 1989,” in Antony

Gormley. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995. Higgins, Charlotte. “Antony Gormley drops 60-tonne load for monumental sculpture,” The

Guardian, August 27, 2010, accessed April 12, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/27/antony-gormley-exposure-sculpture. Charlotte Higgins, “Antony Gormley drops 60-tonne load for monumental sculpture,” The Guardian, August 27, 2010, accessed April 12, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/27/antony-gormley-exposure-sculpture.

Medina, Samuel. “The Primitive Cathedral,” Architizer, October 11, 2011, accessed April 23,

2013. http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/31182/the-primitive-cathedral/#.UXbIvbWG3O4

“Nele Azevedo Interview,” by GreenMuze staff, GreenMuze.com, December 8, 2012,

http://www.greenmuze.com/art/interviews/641-nele-azevedo-interview.html Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” Art Journal, Vol. 48, No. 4, Critical Issues in

Public Art (Winter, 1989). http://www.jstor.org/stable/777018. Roberts, Jennifer. Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2004. Schneider, Eckhard. “Mass and Empathy,” 2003, from Antony Gormley: Standing Matter at

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris/Salzburg. Paris: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2003. Tsai, Eugenie et al. Robert Smithson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Wade, Mike. “How Gormley’s latest work is very big news,” The London Times, June 7, 2010,

accessed April 15, 2013. Infotrac Newsstand. http://go.galegroup.com.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA228267175&v=2.1&u=nysl_ro_rochstru&it=r&p=STND&sw=w.

Long, 23

“Warming Arctic’s Global Impacts Outstrip Predictions,” WWF Global, Semptember 2, 2010. http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?173262/Warming-Arctics-global-impacts-outstrip-

predictions.