How sculpture has shaped the world for thousands of years

Shaping the World is a book that grew out of conversations between Antony Gormley, a leading contemporary artist, and the writer and critic Martin Gayford. Its subtitle is Sculpture From Prehistory to Now – but the subject is even wider than that suggests. One of the authors’ basic contentions is that altering matter to give it meaning has been fundamental to human life for at least as long as language. As Gormley argues: “Sculpture is a form of physical thinking. That’s its nature. It’s like alchemy: it works by changing a lump of clay or stone into something utterly different. Its basic premise is rather like that old saying: matter matters most. In this virtual digital age, it remains a vital way of questioning the world that we have made and the earth we made it out of.”

Chronologically Shaping the World ranges from deep in the past until 2020, works by almost all cultures are included, and it deals with idioms as diverse as megalithic standing stones and performance art. The following discussion centres on two crucial themes. Firstly the power of a shaped object such as a stone carving to resist (and embody) time; secondly, the way in which even in contemporary art, sculpture still retains fetishistic power.

Antony Gormley 

Carving involves investing time into stone. Think of the colossal head and torso of Ramesses II in the British Museum (Shelley’s Ozymandias) – and of the enormous number of hours of frottage with copper and sand that were required to make this absolutely closed and perfect surface. Here we are today with our titanium-tipped tools and we can’t even begin to get that clarity of surface tension.

For me sculpture is an attempt to stop time. We are immersed in space, but also in time. And time itself shapes a sculpture. Sculpture, in its stillness, can somehow provide a hinge between the two. You can see all those hours of effort when you look at the carving of Ramesses.

Some of the figures in my work “Another Place” on Crosby Beach in Merseyside are already completely covered in barnacles. The whole work is installed over an area about one and three-quarter miles long and half a mile wide, with gaps where there is quicksand. We almost lost our equipment a couple of times while we were installing the piece.

At high tide the work disappears. It’s slowly integrating with the elements; it exists within the changing conditions of time and season. I don’t think the spectator needs to know it’s art.

And those barnacles are important, as are all the accidents to which sculpture is subject, because they are the result of its interaction with time.

Martin Gayford 

Whether the artist welcomes it or not, time has powerfully affected much of the art we see. Indeed, you can see it as a sort of inevitable collaborator, who almost always takes a hand. First a human being shapes a piece of rock or metal, then the centuries and millennia alter it again, through wind, frost, earthquakes and mishaps.

The marble figure of a river god, probably Ilissos, once reclined on the west pediment of the Parthenon in Athens. Nowadays he’s in the British Museum. His pose and musculature are still intact, though he’s lost his head, left hand, right arm and feet. But erosion has cut into his skin in places, so it looks more like lace than marble. He seems to be dissolving like a crumbling cliff, so you see through his outer layer into the interior. This makes him a very different figure from the one the ancient Athenians saw. Who knows, perhaps he’s now a more complex and intriguing work of art?

AG: We are allowed to look beneath the surface into its material substance and thereby sense our own vulnerability and jeopardy. Personally, I’d much rather have the rock revealing its grain than the highly finished surface of Greek and Roman figures, such as the “Hermes” by Praxiteles. To varying degrees, time always adds another interpretation, usually one that is contrary to grand design. I like the idea that natural processes can carry on working on a sculpture to its advantage.

MG: Having a portrait bust made is another way of challenging mortality. You may die, but your image will survive – so long as nothing comes along to destroy it. Paradoxically, though, what is being preserved for centuries may be a fleeting instant.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “character heads” – done from his own face seen in a looking-glass – were self-portraits of a soul who really was in torment. Messerschmidt started out as a successful, dull and presumably sane late baroque sculptor. He produced highly competent busts of prominent people in the Vienna of the Empress Maria Theresa, wearing periwigs. Then something went wrong. Rumours spread about his mental state and he failed to become professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts. After that he retreated into the provinces and worked on this series of carvings – originally, there were 170, of which 69 survive – in which his features were contorted into the wildest and most extreme expressions that were physiologically possible.

Messerschmidt explained that some of the heads represented “the supernatural senses of animals”. And two of them were intended to ward off an evil spirit, which visited him by night. It is as if all the fears and manic emotions that were suppressed by the orderly, Habsburg society in which he lived had suddenly been released. Messerschidt’s self-portraits make one wonder exactly what artists are preserving when they make works which will endure through time. In his case, it was anxieties and terrifying delusions. 

AG: Yes, Messerschmidt’s heads raise the question: at what point does the portrait shade into caricature? What makes a portrait expressive is that you essentialise, removing the aspects that would be distracting. Portraiture is not only to do with likeness, but also with deciding what matters: selecting which bits of the physiognomy you can use in order to bring out the characteristics of the person as you diagnose it. But these heads by Messerschmidt are more than just essentialised, aren’t they? They are acutely concentrated. I went to see them at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna the same day that I went to the Narrenturm, the old psychiatric hospital with displays of brutal experiments about how you treat TB or mental illness. I’m fascinated by them. They prompt some intriguing questions. It is as if he is attempting to make a taxonomy of internal states – beyond the communicative gestures of classical sculpture – that anticipate the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s work on hysteria and the beginnings of psychotherapy and analysis.

open image in gallery

One part of Messerschmidt’s project was therapy: to heal himself. The therapeutic urge is critical for art. I think one of its purposes is to replace certainty with doubt and succour with anxiety. I think my own work is rooted in anxiety. I was brought up in fear of God, school, father, failure: my anxiety has shifted, but not much. What is this work that I do? It has sometimes seemed like a kind of mad DIY ritual for one: trying to make a moment matter, to make a feeling in matter, an act of resistance against amnesia and the way that moments have of disappearing into oblivion.

MG: Fear is an underestimated element in the arts, and indeed a lot of what we now think of as art was intended to do something. The Terracotta Army wasn’t made to be admired; no living person would ever be expected to see it again after it was buried. It was there to defend the deceased emperor against a multitude of vengeful, angry ghosts he had killed in battle or executed.

The figures, known as nkisi nkondi, made by the Kongo peoples look alarmingly aggressive – like a St Sebastian shot full of ironmongery. In fact, they functioned like psychic batteries that soak up aggression and are then supposed to discharge it.

If somebody wanted a wrong righted, a piece of metal – an old blade, nails or screws – was stuck into the figure. Sometimes gunpowder might be exploded in front of it, to get its attention. Then the supplicant made a request: “Somebody has harmed me! Do them some damage!” The more effective the nkisi nkondi was, the more spikes – each standing for an angry grudge – were jammed into it, until the figure bristled like a hedgehog.

AG: There was an assumption by modernist critics such as Herbert Read and Roger Fry that 20th-century avant-garde art had not only been liberated from its duties of representation, but also, more importantly, from its totemic and fetishistic function. I don’t agree: I think we are as fetishistic as ever.

We’ve translated an engagement with fetishes and talismans into different modes, from cinema to altered body morphology, but we’ve got to realise that the delusions of modernism are indeed delusions. Body modification is a very deep trait within the human psyche in our own time, just think of Botox lip treatment, breast enlargement and reshaping, the recent obsession with plucking and reshaping the eyebrows, let alone the more extreme forms. And even ancient sculpture can dictate body morphology in living people.

The heads made during the Amarna Period in Egypt are the best mannequins the world has ever produced. The bust of Nefertiti is the most celebrated, but there are many others. In a sense they are generic, being the result of the artistic equivalent of good breeding, taking the best from everything and assimilating it into perfection: the tautness of the skin, the turn of the eyelid, the exquisiteness of the lips, a profound interest in symmetry. The Neues Museum in Berlin has the greatest collection of Amarna heads, and I spent a long time looking at them.

They are human form reinvented and reimagined – and the blueprint for the unachievable in body perfectibility.

They introduce the whole question of the mannequin. In the 1950s, the head of Nefertiti became the model for shop-window dummies. It’s remarkable how ubiquitous that look was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, it’s not just in cosmetic surgery that we have a lot in common with the Aztec people or the ancient Egyptians. I am fetishistic in my work. By using blood in drawings, for example – as I have – you render an image of the body in a substance that is already completely associated with it, which is the life river.

So, if you do a drawing of a body in blood it’s got more chance of being attended to.

I want to relink image with life, collapse the ideal into the real, literally allow the referent to be part of the subject. That is why I use blood and sperm – the substances mixed in Tibetan tantric practice in a bowl made from a human skull.

The red and white fluids represent the two lateral “nadis”, the principal energy channels in the body. White is the colour of the brain/testicle/central nervous system connection and red is the colour of blood, the life-giver in our bodies.

MG: Marc Quinn’s “Self” dramatises that point, in that it’s made of the artist’s own highly perishable organic material – his own blood. Consequently, it must be kept constantly refrigerated.

AG: Because of the degree to which “Self” is an object that depends on being permanently plugged in – a frozen moment made of life blood – it’s about a wish for continuity but also a certain uncertainty. “Self” is contemporary but it’s riding on pre-modern, totemic and fetishistic values. You smoke or preserve the head of an ancestor because you think that it will bring you power. You keep it in the men’s long house because it will guarantee continuity, the continued strength of the tribe.

‘Shaping the World: Sculpture from Pre-History to Now’ by Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford is out now (Thames and Hudson, £40 hardback)