66. Antony Gormley: Art, religion, and the battle for culture

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1:42Welcome to The Restless Pony of Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And today we have with us Anthony Gormley. And Anthony Gormley is a sculptor. He's very, very central to British public art, British sculpture. He will be, I suspect, frustrated that he's often introduced as being associated with Angel of the North, which, of course, is in every child's textbook now. It's one of those images along with the London Eye, which is going to define our country. But he's in many different conversations. I mean, Alistair and I had breakfast with somebody this morning, a British Muslim, who was talking about just having seen Another Place, which is a collection of 100 cast iron sculptures of humans on a beach at Crosby, Merseyside.

2:29He has a career which we can get into a little bit and explore, but which really, I guess, took off in mid-1980s. He won the Turner Prize. He's a knight. He's one of the kind of celebrated figures of British art. But he's particularly interested in the body. He's got a lot to say about religion. He's got a lot to say about politics. And I think quite a lot to say about public art. So we're very, very lucky to have him. And of course, I was beginning with a slight apology that normally I think you're interviewed by art critics who would be much more knowledgeable about your corpus of work than either of us.

3:05But thank you for coming on. Well, thank you for having me. Can we go right back to the beginning born in 1950 hamster garden suburb german mother very catholic irish father and i just i'm fascinated by your relationship with faith and and religion with that sort of bringing i mean your full name is anthony mark david gormley so called i read because that has the same initials as ad maiorum de gloriam to the greater glory of god so we're talking we're talking quite a dad yeah that was a bit of a um yeah whatever ring around my neck uh yeah i absolutely extraordinary i suppose household routine of prayer get up in the morning you say your prayers by your bed then you go down and you have breakfast and there may be grace before breakfast but they'll certainly be grace before and after lunch and certainly before and after dinner age six or seven uh cycling down to temple fortune to to serve i can't remember whether it was father collinwood or uh father delaney but anyway uh whoever it was he he got quite gaga by uh the time i was doing it and i was age 10 and i would have to nudge him on a bit to keep going because otherwise we'd be there forever.

4:26But anyway, yeah, Catholicism was really, I think the rule of the carrot of heaven, the stick of hell was very high in, I guess, the moral kind of outline of my life's purpose. Also, in your description of your childhood, you also say that after church on a Sunday, your father would often take you to the British Museum or the National Gallery. And literally, as a sort of six, seven-year-old, He'd be wumbling around in Ashgat. Very, very young. And if you can imagine what that's like for a little toddler, you know, weedy little chap, looking up at those great bulls from the Palace of Sardom or the head of Ramses II, this thing made out of granite that is like 12 times the volume of an actual head.

5:14And I think that those experiences of looking at things from the deep past, that in terms of these sacred bulls or lions, these winged mythological figures, they're a kind of example of the imagination. That actually you don't have to stay with what you've got, you can transform it. And in terms of the heads of Amenhotep or Ramses, this is what we had to make in order to understand ourselves. You weren't thinking that age six. No, no, I wasn't. No, no, I was just dumbstruck. I was thinking these are things from a long, long time ago and they're still here and they make me feel small and they make me slightly scared.

5:59I'm the father of a six-year-old. In fact, sitting in front of you on your desk is three objects that my six-year-old just gave me. when I take him around the Victorian Albert Museum he can get a bit get a bit bored right he can be quite liable to say he'd rather be back home uh watching Pokemon um were you an unusual you must be quite an unusual child I mean you you didn't ever feel oh why is my dad dragging me around this museum and I'd rather be back watching her I don't know I just think that that room particularly the Egyptian room is so generous in the kind of offer you know you can look down on a middle kingdom tomb that has not queen of the night kind of carved in very very shallow relief in its bottom and she's quite a sexy woman she's got you know her breasts are kind of feeding the night and then there were in those days before they made the great court this wonderful ill passageway that had all of the grave goods of fantastic pharaonic afterlife accoutrements tiny scarabs and all kinds of things made of gold and lapis and it it was just uh it was a treasure house were you so you were the youngest of seven yeah were your six older siblings very similar to you or very different no we were all absolutely different and i have to explain that the you know my my mother um went to canada she was she might have ended up in an internment camp like my grandmother, Omi.

7:29And she had only been married with my father for five or six years. And then she went for a further six years. So all of the pre-war, the four of my siblings that were born pre-war, spent six years without a father in the Lake of Bays in the summer, north of Ontario. And the minute they got old enough, the minute they were 18 or so, they just went back to Canada. This was the promised land. This was where you somehow could be free. You could kind of do whatever you wanted. And so it was a strange thing, a big house that was built by my father that faced T9 on the Hampstead Golf Course. Looked like Bauhaus to the south and kind of Lutyens to the north.

8:18And very strange because it was painted in eggshell green and then textured sort of brown at dado level. It was made to last, but it was actually more like an institution than my school. So actually being sent to Yorkshire was just an unbelievable liberation. To go to a Catholic boarding school. Yeah, go to a plastic school was, you know, it was just absolute fantastic. I mean, somehow just the space, the fact that, you know, up there were the moors, down there was the valley, little beck flowing through it. There were forests and then all these significant others that helped me do stuff. Can I just bring you back for a moment to your father?

9:08Because obviously the impression maybe that listeners get is this extraordinary man with his kind of brown dado walls, taking his children either to church or to the National Gallery, seven children. But give us more of a sense of what he was like as the father and some of the more, I suppose, active, loving aspects of him. He was incredible because on the one hand he was a tyrant, on the other he was just incredibly good fun. He used to have annoying habits. He would put all his shaving foam on and then go around singing glory, glory, hallelujah while trying to give us a kiss to get us out of bed.

9:45With the shaving foam. With the shaving foam. And singing glory, glory, hallelujah because of the religious significance. Well, no, because it's a bloody, you know. So get out of bed, yeah. Yeah, like belting him. No, he was an incredible sailor. We had this boat called the Sea Track, which was an old clinker-built boat. And he just set out. We had as a kind of country place this old stable. So our main house had burnt down. And he would launch this boat, quite a big boat with big old red sails. And he'd say, come on, we're going to the NAB. The five of us or the six of us would get aboard. Anyway, no, he was the first or one of the first people to get the permission to produce penicillin.

10:29You know, I didn't see him that much because he was always off to India or Australia or Singapore or Hong Kong. It's hard not to be very admiratious of a man that, you know, fought in the First World War, married a German that made his own life. I mean, and at the same time, you know, he was brought up by Morris Brothers and he wanted absolute discipline. So we had to do, you know, first steps in Latin primer twice a week. And if you didn't get your declensions right, you got smacked. So there were times when, you know, I would be in tears in the study, having failed my Latin. How did your relationship with faith develop through your life?

11:11When did you lose it? I lost it in my first term at university. But I think the truth is, as I think all young boys who go into that kind of atmosphere, you know, I was thinking, do I have a vocation? Am I going to become a Benedictine? Because they were inspirational. I know that Ampleforth has fallen under a very dark cloud and for rightful reasons. But I had no experience of any sexual impropriety whatsoever. ever. And all I can tell you is that the support that I had, I want to tell you about the art room. The art room was in the oldest part of the school, 18th century building, right in the middle of it, and it was always open.

11:56So you could get down there before general assembly, as it were, in the morning and start something off. You could rush up there at 11 o 'clock and kind of see how it was going. Anyway, it was just fantastic. And the support that I was given by Father Martin Hague, my lay teacher, John Bunting, an incredible sculptor who actually embodied what, in a way, the vocational life of a sculptor was. Did you already know by then that you were an artist? Well, they were incredibly encouraging. Did you know? Father Peter. Yes. Well, I knew that I wanted to make things. That was so important to me that I realized very early on that making was a form of thinking, that making was a form of communicating.

12:39But maybe I implicitly trusted more than words. I know that we're exchanging words now, and I guess our listeners are listening through the agency of words. But in the end, I don't trust words as much as acts. And acts that are embodied into material mean the most to me. There's a paradox, isn't there? It's the whole thing. I mean, this is an incredibly disembodied form podcast. People will be listening to this as they run or they're doing their ironing. And yet you are somebody who's all about touching stuff and being in a particular place. This will be floating in people's ears in the United States at some weird time.

13:16And so this is the trouble of our time, isn't it? We're all distracted. We are not in the present moment. We are usually in two places at once. We are here, but we're also thinking about there or someone over there or something that somebody has told us to do. And I think that rooting in first-hand palpable experience is so important in a cyber age. We'll come back to your life in a second, but maybe this is a chance to introduce a little bit, listeners, to your sculpture. Because one of the things that's striking about it is that you're insisting on place. So, for example, the Angel of the North is made with people from that area and there's a real sense of its industrial heritage.

14:01In Field, for example, you're getting hundreds of people to make little clay images. In the work that you did inside Australia, you get, again, a sense of participating in other people's bodies. There's a sort of sense of teamwork. Tell us about these sculptures or try to bring them alive for the audience and explain the way in which they relate to touch and place. To start with the angel, since you're right, that's the thing that I'm most kind of associated with. Does it irritate you? We said it irritated you. No, no, no. I think I just always have to restate the fact that this was made through collective will and collective action.

14:34And that is what I feel so humbled by, but also so inspired by. Art comes out of life. It should go back into life. For me, I can just remember going around Hartlepool and Middlesbrough with the maquette in the back of a Luton van, opening up a kind of shutter at the back while there was a bunch of people in their brown coats or their overalls. And I'd say, how can we make this, mate? And it was just fantastic. This is a time when swan hunters had closed down. And one by one, all those amazing shipyards on the time that I grew up watching on the news. You know, again, a very similar kind of memory to seeing those Assyrian bulls, these massive things going down the slipway, bigger than the houses that were either side.

15:27And you see them in black and white kind of suddenly this thing that the size of a cathedral suddenly moves. Anyway, I had to find the people that had made that shape out of six millimeter ship plate and learned how to bend it. Find them and say, let's make something together that tells the world what you're capable of in a different form. This thing sticks its wings out and has to deal with 100 mile per hour winds. So it's a massive kind of problem for it not to blow over. There was a lot. I needed a lot of help. You know, I was molded with my arms out. I did have to have sticks because it takes about an hour, an hour and a half.

16:11You know, but that was my very kind of small beginning. I then took that design. We had to digitize it, which we did with the help of Newcastle University. they then like transferred it into a buildable thing where we use the ribs of a ship on the outside to be the form of this thing. But for me, this is, you know, this connects with the cathedrals. It connects that, you know, we live in a time when art has been institutionalized and commodified. and yet for most of its if we think from paleolithic times onwards for most of the 25 000 years that art has been part of our evolution it has been made usually in in community for community and this is a continuation where does your creative impulse come from do you ever do you ever know when you have a particular idea of something you want to do what's the feeling like how does it feel when you something new comes into your head well it's usually you know i usually i mean i haven't but it usually starts like sorry i'm opening a little book it's a it's a muji book that is the size of a passport and i've just got it out of my pocket it's a nice color passport not like the new ones it's true this is a red passport not a blue one um but anyway it'll start like this a little but this comes from what i'm doing in the studio so what's happening in the studio then gets translated into this and then i'm thinking how can i push it further so this is this is this is believe it or not a body but it's a body as a zone of energy we're making this but at the same time i'm trying to push it i'm trying to say how can we lose the body entirely or lose the body enough so that you don't know whether the energy field is created by the body or the body created by the energy field and that's what really i mean you know this yes We talked about my work as if it was always like 200 tons of the angel or the, yeah, I guess another place is about 60 tons of iron.

18:13And sometimes enormous, right? So the angel, I think, sets on 100 square meters of concrete plinths to stop it coming out. I'm sorry about that. I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed by how much concrete we had. What about the bigger picture idea, as it were, of your kind of obsession with the body and actually with your own body? Where does that idea come from that then informs so much of what you've done? The Ur story is being sent up for an enforced rest after lunch. And being a good Catholic boy, being told not to move, but not being able to sleep, and just having this experience of lying completely still and becoming aware of the space within the body.

19:00And it would start with this claustrophobic red kind of hot space but behind closed eyes. And as I got more familiar with it, because this was a repeated discipline, it became cooler and bigger until it became this space in which there was no objects, there was no edge, there was no bounding condition. It had infinite extension. And that experience as a very young child was then reinforced when I went to India and started studying meditation. That's a sort of strange connection between you and me and also Yuval Noah Harari, who we just interviewed, which is that we all meditate in the Vipassana tradition.

19:45And I'm about to go on another silent retreat next month. Good 10 days. Yeah. And Yuval has just come off a 40 day. Yeah. No, he's impressive. But it seems to lead in very, very different directions, doesn't it? I mean, obviously, at the moment at which you were talking, I can recognize what you're talking about. But for Yuval, the experience of meditation leads to him being interested in the disembodied or the sort of virtual, the way in which humans might escape their bodies entirely and become robots or artificial intelligence. With you, the same tradition has led to a desire to be really kind of ruse hit and material and there on a beach or there on a hillside.

20:25Yeah, good point. I think that the truth is that that experience of the darkness of the body, for me, was a reversal. You could say that all platonic but also Christian kind of cosmologies are towards the light, towards the light. Darkness is somehow evil and is full of repression and kind of motivations that we can't understand but leads to violence and despair. And I discovered in Vipassana completely the opposite, that within that darkness of the body is actually potential. In coming to terms, you could say, with the void within, suddenly I was released from all of this guilt, all of this, well, the original sin that Catholicism had landed me with.

21:13But it's interesting for me, I think of what I do, or certainly if we think of another place, these are industrially made fossils that simply indicate a place of human time. Just to remind people, another place are the statues on Crosby Beach, which over time are beginning to get barnacles and rust and adjust endlessly to the horizon. Yeah, and they spread. They're about 200 meters apart, so they're extremely isolated. And it's a big space, right? So there are three miles of coastline and about a kilometer out to sea. And when the sea comes in, they disappear, apart from the ones that are above the tide line, and the ones that are furthest out at high tide, because it's a tipped plane, eight meters below the surface.

22:02And this, I mean, for me, what is this? This is, yes, making art in the time of mechanical reproduction. So the works become a field. You can't say this is a singular, unique object. It's a field effect. And the viewer, the participator, is invited to be part of that field. You're part of the picture. Can I ask, I'm going to hand back to Alice for one second, but one thing that interests me is how often you work in iron, steel. No, it is iron. That's important. It might start as steel. So it starts as, you know, break disks and then it's melted down, reverts to the same condition of the core of this planet.

22:45But I'm interested in why the fact that you work less often in sort of silica based things, less often working with sandstone or sometimes with clay, not really with glass, which I would think is more sort of organic. Ethereal, perhaps. Well, I suppose steel is more, lacks that kind of transparency or porosity of these silica-based things. I mean, iron seems to be, you know, it conducts, it's metallic. I mean, it's got an edge which these sort of silica-based clays and glass sandstone lack. You're thinking about your turquoise mountain glasses. Well, at least I am. immediately you start thinking i think of these incredibly lucid blue glasses with tiny bubbles in i'm going to say something that may sound totally counterintuitive i think of my work as being about space not being about objects but how how can you activate space i i want to use the density of mass as a catalyst for making these fields in which your movement, your space-time experience is amplified.

23:57I can't think of a better way of doing it. I think of them, you know, as being 21st century industrial time equivalent of standing stones. They're an attempt to put human biological time in relation to sidereal planetary time. And I can't think of any way of doing it better. At the same time, you know, I am making works that have no body reference because it's the viewer's body that then becomes the subject of the work. And these are works like Breathing Room or Clearing. I don't know if either of you went to the Royal Academy show, but Clearing is 11 kilometers of endless, a singular line without beginning or end that is like a big scribble but it's in the room it's up against the ceiling it's down on the floor it's it's bouncing off the walls and it feels like the most crazy kind of well i call it a quantum drawing because it won't it won't persist within as it were the euclidean geometry of our chosen habitat what it is is an energy field and and you have to duck and dive in order to be so it's it's it's sort of like a trombly painting but you're in it what role does the art that you do have in the community where that art exists and given this is a politics podcast primarily how do you define the role of art within the political debate i think art is a fundamental human or the the making of things the making of images, the making of marks is a fundamental human need.

25:36It has been part of our survival, as I said earlier, from Paleolithic times. It is also a basic human right. The first thing to say is art should be on the curriculum. It is absolutely necessary, irrespective. I'm aware that I had a very privileged background, but I think you give any child from the age of two onwards, a sheet of paper and a way of making a mark, and they'll go. At a certain point, because of our culture, they become self-conscious about that, in a way, need to lead, even if it's just a trace. There's a sense in which I have affected some part of the world by that trace, that making of a mark.

26:18And I think that that is an absolute key in self-determination, in the building of a psyche, of a character, of a person, of a self. And without it, we are victims of a late capitalist world and we're all kind of racing one against the other as to what little kind of hole in this cliff face we can occupy. If Demis Hassibitz or Sam Altman are right, that AI is going to solve intelligence, is going to make energy free, we are all going to now become redundant. Well, we better all become artists. We better find a meaningful way of making sense. Recently you had in the country, this country, the Arts Council of England making rather strange noises, I thought, about the funding of the organizations which get their funding being told not to get too political.

27:20Now, what did you make of that? And what does that say about where we are culturally? It's an absolute disaster. I have no idea. The Arts Council was founded by Maynard Keynes with the idea of arm's length policy. There should be no – I mean, you know, we will end up with a guring of – I mean, it's just – State-sponsored propaganda. Yeah, we cannot allow art to become propaganda. Art schools are the reason that British art has become of international significance is because of the quality of our art schools. That is something that we inherited from the 60s. I ask myself, where does alternative thinking come from to businesses as usual?

28:08It will always come from, you know, usually people who are dyslexic who have had to find other ways of communicating. and where have the nests for those souls to grow been? Well, it has been art schools. We wouldn't have got the Beatles without art schools. And somehow there was a change in the late 70s and 80s when art schools started behaving like universities. Things that used to be about learning from the guy next door or being taught by an artist that was making his name or her name out in the international art world was replaced by a lot of administering art tutors anyway i mean i feel that art schools have now become extremely dependent on particularly southeast asian students that often don't have english as their first language there's no no problem in per se actually you have to be quite rich as you say the uk does have a pretty amazing reputation in arts and culture what i'm hearing is that you you worry that might be at risk if there's this kind of terrible government which has kind of consistently undermined the very thing that people you know when you think about what a culture's values are where do you go you go to its music its dance its theater and its art and yet this is the thing that has been consistently undermined in both in education and in the support of our institutions having said that i don't want to be totally negative we have maintained the absolute importance of keeping our museums free and open to everyone and i think that the art schools continue but i i am very very aware they're underfunded and they yeah it seems like they they depend for 30 of their funding on foreign students i've got this thing that i keep banging on about that i want if we do get a Labour government, that they have a sort of deliberate strategy of trying to brand the UK as a kind of cultural superpower.

30:12If you were tasked with trying to build the arguments and the policies and the programmes that might allow that to happen, what sort of advice would you feed in? Well, I just think that the 7.5 billion that the creative industry is bringing into the Treasury is not the argument that I would use. I would always use the intrinsic value of art and the fact that this is, you know, politicians come and go, but the art is in a way the trace that we leave of our hopes and our fears. And I would say, you know, I'm just very depressed by the fact that in terms of our government kind of hierarchy, it's always the cultural minister that is at the bottom rung.

30:55You'd elevate that? I would elevate that. I mean, you know, when you have Andre Malraux, you get something. When you get Jacques Lang, you have something absolutely extraordinary that happens. And Nadine Doris isn't quite Andre Malraux, is your suggestion? I think that's a way of putting it. Lucy Fraser is not Jacques Lang. Is this what we're hearing? Well, I mean, we had Greg Ari. We have had some great and inspirational arts ministers, and we need them again. I mean, I think to fulfill your ambition of Britain as a creative soft plow force in the world, I think we need a minister who really believes that.

31:36And hopefully, as a prime minister, the culture minister in waiting is a cellist. And that gives me hope. And I learned the other day that… The prime minister in waiting is a flautist. Yes. Yes, I heard about his time in the conservatoire. And that gave me hope. I have to say, I did feel maybe we're up for a change. Okay, Anthony, Rory, let's have a quick break. Imagine fast hydration. Combined with balanced energy. Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid IV's new energy multiplier, sugar-free. Unlike other energy drinks, you know, the ones that make you feel like you're glitching, It's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes, so you get the boost without the burnout.

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33:06Tell us a little bit about international politics and art. I mean, I notice you've done big exhibitions in Petersburg and I believe in Moscow. What do you feel looking back at exhibiting in sort of Putin's Russia? Well, I wouldn't do it now. I believe in the central role of art as a bridge across gender, race, language and political systems. So I had a show last year in China. I will do a show this year in China in spite of the fact that Xi Jinping's regime is horrendous. So why you would do China, but you wouldn't do Russia? Well, I think that everything that Putin represents and has done, I feel that his whole regime, in doing one, I would be supporting his regime, and I can't.

34:05Whereas you feel that with Xi, you can remain critical, but you can still do your art. The interesting thing is that the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party are pretty disinterested in art. And it is really interesting that actually some of the most groundbreaking art being made today is being made by Chinese artists. That's because they've always been somehow below the political kind of horizon in terms of the power of that nation. Yeah, I won't work in Saudi Arabia, for example, for similar reasons. inside a lot of money in that particular. Yeah, tell us a bit about money and art, because I guess that that is an interesting thing, which is that by the time you get to your stature, you can become very, very wealthy.

34:53And I suppose one could develop a taste for money that must, I mean, I don't want to push this particularly on you personally, but do you feel that for the really sort of famous celebrity artists and sculptures that money can be a complicated factor and that it can draw their art in directions in which they don't want to go? Yeah, there's absolutely no question. But I'm also worried about that as a model. I think that art is a vocation. You don't choose it, it chooses you. There has been, I think, one of the downsides of the YBA, the Damien Hirst kind of generation, was that now, if you haven't been approached by a gallery by the time you do your degree show at art school, you feel you've failed.