Brick Man’s return

Movie stars don’t sit down for a proper interview these days. At film junkets journalists who want to talk to them are shuttled in and out like cattle.

A theatre which has a big star treading the boards may shove you from pillar to post before you secure a chat.

Fortunately, this almost never happens when the subject of the interview is an artist, when it’s assumed you need to spend a decent amount of time with them to get a proper insight into their work.

When Antony Gormley is the artist however, think again. We are back to bun fights and the media scrum.

The Press cuttings refer to him as “Britain’s most famous living sculptor”. It was only on arriving at Harewood House that I realised how much this reputation goes before him.

The hoped for in depth interview became a one-hour wait until the TV people had what they wanted and then a three-way share of the artist’s time with three other print journalists.

Antony Gormley draws lots of interest from lots of people. But you often find that the harder the gatekeepers guarding the star’s presence are to deal with, the friendlier your interviewee is once you actually get to them.

With the TV interviews out of the way, Antony Gormley makes his way to the table where our promised tête-a-tête has turned into a melee.

From the moment he arrives to the moment he is dragged away, he is bright, engaging and eloquent. He was back in Yorkshire, the county where he was schooled, at the invitation of Lord and Lady Harewood. The latter has a career as Diane Howse, artist and curator, and she had lured Gormley to Harewood with the fact that it is home to Jacob Epstein’s work Adam.

Earlier this year Harewood staged an exhibition, Finding Adam, which charted the part that the late Lord Harewood had played in rehabilitating the reputation of Epstein, beginning in 1961 when he took a collection of the artist’s work to the Edinburgh Festival.

Lady Harewood says: “We were wondering how you follow Epstein and we all said that there was only one artist – Antony Gormley. The problem of course, is that he is so busy and we had no idea if we would be able to get him to come here. I asked and he said yes.” Her husband, sitting on the terrace at the back of Harewood House, says his wife is “very persuasive”.

Antony Gormley wastes no time in confirming that he was delighted to bring his new work here and that a long-standing fascination with Epstein was a major reason behind him coming.

“I saw Elemental, Epstein’s work from the mid-30s, in a show called British Sculpture of the 20th Century that I happened to be in at the Whitechapel in 1981,” he says.

“At the time my work was more involved in nature – stones and trees, and seeing his work was such a revelation to me. He was interested in basic human emotions and how ideas of sex and death can get into an inanimate object. Before him sculpture was rather effete, academic salon sculpture. He put energy and animation into his work.”

For a great contemporary artist, a man who is fiercely bright and who is said not to suffer fools gladly, the person I meet is humble, modest and speaks with great passion about his subject and Epstein’s Adam which sits in the entrance hall at Harewood.

“It was perhaps five years ago and I came to see that sculpture. As far as I am concerned it’s a huge privilege to be in proximity to a work that I consider to be of the great pieces of 20th Century art.”

It’s significant that he’s back here at such a momentous time for Yorkshire’s visual arts.

We’ve recently had the opening of the Hepworth Wakefield, a stunning exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which continues to expand and the arrival of a new woman in charge of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

Having Gormley bring his new work to the county plants another flag to signal that this is the country’s capital of sculpture.

“It has been a good year for sculpture in Yorkshire and it is wonderful for us to play a part in that,” says Lord Harewood. “There aren’t many places in Europe where you get this kind of concentration of sculptural work.”

His wife agrees: “I genuinely do think something is happening in Yorkshire. There has been an upsurge in interest in culture and the arts. There have always been interesting things going on, but I think this year we have got much better at joining up the dots.”

Antony Gormley was schooled at Ampleforth College and, although London-born he speaks warmly and knowledgeably about the county.

“The Hepworth is the best building David Chipperfield has designed in this country. The museum has allowed Wakefield to re-examine its collection and made it yet another jewel in the crown of Yorkshire.

“What Peter Murray (director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park) has achieved is extraordinary, bringing some truly great work to the park. I was there for the David Nash exhibition and there were queues of children waiting to go inside his tree trunks and explore them.

“There is something about Yorkshire, something to do with the culture of mining and metal coming together with a very robust community spirit. It is something to do with the landscape, this combination of heavy metal and hewing holes deep into the earth.”

But Yorkshire has not been plain sailing for him. In 1986 he was one of 15 artists who submitted work for a new public sculpture in Leeds. The then 36-year-old artist caught the eye with a life-size maquette of a Brick Man modelled on his own body. The finished work would stand 120 feet tall at the Holbeck Triangle, a piece of waste land cut off by railway tracks leading into Leeds City station.

A trust had been formed to push the idea and selected Gormley’s work. Ove Arup were the structural engineers ear-marked to build it and it created quite a stir, attracting a good deal of favourable publicity to Leeds as a pioneer of innovative sculpture.

Or it did for a couple of years until the council decided it wasn’t a good idea after all and refused planning permission. One of their reasons was that a 12-storey sculpture on a piece of waste land would attract the regular attention vandals, which was probably true.

Gormley went off and within a few years created The Angel of The North on the outskirts of Gateshead. It was the North East and not Yorkshire which reaped the benefits of an iconic sculpture that still draws over a million visitors annually.

Does the artist have any antipathy towards Leeds or Yorkshire following the Brick Man debacle?

“No antipathy. We went on to make something somewhere else, a bit later. ” He looks over his glasses with a wry smile.

“It was a long time ago, it was 1984... 1988 was it? Hmm. It’s amazing what humans collectively can do. One minute you say you want something, the next you won’t give it planning permission. It was a sort of schizophrenia – but it happens sometimes. People are unpredictable, but Leeds has changed so much since the mid-Eighties. It feels a far more confident place now, with a great art gallery.”

He refers to “all those grey men who were in charge..” and it for a moment it feels like he’s about to get on a roll. It would be fascinating to hear more about Gormley’s take on this pivotal moment, the decision that many believe sent Leeds down a wrong path. But someone jumps in with another question and Gormley is back to the subject of the work he has created for Harewood which is called Two States.

He has always been obsessed with the human body, using his own form as the template for casts. With this new work he appears to be moving not so much away from using his own body, as beyond it.

“Over the past four and a half years I have been developing these new block works. They are an attempt to make a physical pixel, to describe how representation in our time is no longer to do with just our anatomy, but has been taken over by a visual language where information is transmitted by bits and bytes.

“I am considering it as something like pixelated cubism. I want people to think about what an extraordinary thing the body is. It’s a kind of persistent instability.

“These new works are the absolute opposite of a traditional statue. They are not about a known character, or a heroic figure, they are asking you to re-examine your idea of what a body is and how it persists in space and time.

“I think we are witnessing a very fundamental revolution of the human race – we spend more or out time looking at interpretive world in a computer screen and these new works look at what that means in terms of us as human beings.”

Gormley talks like this for some time. It is engrossing. I could have listened to him all day.

His speech tapers off and with an entirely unexpected sense of self-awareness, suddenly adds: “I’m sure plenty of people will see it and think ‘what have I come all the way here to for to look at two lumps of rusty metal?’

“I’m wittering on now. There’s a couple of steel lumps in the gallery here and people will either get something from them or they won’t.”

Antony Gormley’s exhibition is at Harewood House Terrace Gallery until October 30.