Jan 1, 2003
Field
With a day off and London on the doorstop, one of my goals was to head over to see Antony Gormley’s Field for the British Isles at the British Museum.
I managed to haul myself out of bed early and get down there for the gallery opening to miss the crowds, but before I go any further describing it, let me just make a tangential point.
I find it sad that I no longer feel that I can mention my future plans in specific detail, without worrying that this lays me open to potentially threatening situations or interactions with strangers – people who may think that they know me well enough to show up where I’m planning to be and say hello, or pick a fight, or worse.
A few years ago, I was happy (/naïve) to say “tonight we’re going to be in such-and-such a pub” or “I work in this street” or whatever. These days, I’m afraid that too much has happened, on and offline to allow that sort of casual conversation to feel safe any more. It seems that for every hundred genuinely nice people who understand and respect the concept of privacy, even in a public space, and the generally-held notion that what little they see online does not make an individual’s entire life fair game or public, there’s at least one person who unfortunately doesn’t, and who furthermore fails to accept that such behaviour makes them seem like a stalker, or bully, or threatening, or worse. They seem to think that if one little bit of you is in the public domain – a handful of words, published daily online – the rest of you ought to be as well.
That makes me sad.
But back to the exhibition.
I saw Field in the Tate in Liverpool in 1993, and was moved by it. All those little figures. All that clay, brought to life and sensitised by human touch, standing expectantly, staring. The way that Field is always laid out means that you can’s see the whole thing from one position – it’s necessary to change position to see the peripheries, and even then you’re unlikely to see the far front edges.
Field is presented in a room, 40,000 clay figures staring forwards and upwards, huddled to the very edge of the doorway, meaning that visitors can only peer in through the narrow gap. It’s impressive, partly through scale, and partly because the figures seem to resonate on a deeper level with people.
Like others, when I first saw the installation in Liverpool, I sat on a bench in the doorway, and looked out over the figures for an hour or so. Small, squat, roughly shaped by hands ranging from 7 to 70 at a community project in St Helens on Merseyside, all shades of brown and red, clustered together by hue, the figures gave the impression of standing in a …well, in a field, staring up, waiting.
So that’s how it must feel to be on stage at Glastonbury.
This time the experience was different, but equally compelling. It definitely paid off heading to the gallery for opening time on the first day of the exhibition, because I was the only person there for a long time.
Well, I say “only person”, but what I mean is “only person, if you don’t include the three bawdy security guards watching the doorway overlooking the installation.”
When I arrived, they were looking out over the figures, hands on hips, joking about them.
“It’s sort of like egyptian, innit?” said one.
“Nah,” chimed in another, “If that was made by the egyptians, the civilisation wouldn’t have lasted three weeks, let alone three thousand years”
The others laughed. This work of art seems to have been lost on the security guards paid to watch over it.
What I had really wanted to do was take some digital pictures of the installation, but a sign on the doorway pointed out sternly that photography was forbidden. A shame. So I did the next best thing. I sat in the doorway, pulled out my PDA and wrote to capture it – eighty thousand staring hollow eyes, the slight smell of dusty earth, the feeling of warmth and clouds passing caused by the different groups of shades, clustered together.
I wonder if there is an order to the 40,000 pieces; a grand plan to which they must be laid out every time. Have they been laid out from the back forwards, or in clumps? How are they stored? Individually, indexed by colour? Who oversees the setting out – the artist? And if not, what does that do to the artwork, given that he conceptualised (but not created or arranged) the piece?
As I’m thinking about this, one of the guards compares the colour of the figures to spit-roasted tandoori chicken, his dinner last night. The others laugh. Somehow this lacks the solemnity that the figures seem to demand. Standing. Waiting. Watching. Expecting.
I’d strongly recommend a visit if you have the opportunity and the inclination.
If you do go, make sure to pop over to exhibitions of Antony Gormley’s drawings, also at the British Museum. I found myself particularly stuck by one in particular, entitled Space. I’m trying to find an image of it online…watch this space.
