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Lot Essay
The lithe silhouette of Anthony Gormley’s Insider I recalls the tall, thin figurative sculptures of Alberto Giacometti. In fact, it was said of Giacometti of that if he ever made a portrait instead of a figure study that he would make the person’s head look like a blade of a knife. Gormley has literalized that idea in Insider I, whose long, lean body is topped with a concave disk that hints at the roundness of the head without representing it directly. While the Swiss Modernist elongated the human body as an existential response to the devastations of World War II, the British sculptor Gormley grapples with the metaphysical questions at the heart of consciousness. As the work’s title suggests, an “insider” is someone privy to information not available to others. In this case, that information is the person’s subjective experience specific to every individual. Gormley explores the body as a material container of the immaterial. In the
artist’s words, “An INSIDER is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is
a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body--attitudes and emotions embedded in posture
or hidden by gesture--to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate. The idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated
form the trace of the body and its passage through life. This has a direct relationship to pain. I see these reduced forms as antennae
for a particular kind of resilience that exists within all of us, that allows us to bear suffering but is itself created through painful experience. There is no judgment about this. Their bareness is not the nakedness that reveals the flesh; it is the result of having had the flesh taken away; a loss which is not sentimentalized, but accepted. The Insider tries to up the ante between being and
nothingness” (A. Gormley, INSIDERS, 1997 - 2003, https://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/258 [Accessed Oct. 10, 2016)].
Iron, a material quite the opposite of supple human flesh, has been used by Antony Gormley as a fixing the ephemeral human form. The artist “wanted them to endure in time and concentrate space. They are made in a durable and relatively permanent base element: iron. The earth has iron at its core and these are like the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body” (Ibid.). Gormley used the proportions of his own body, reduced by two-thirds, as the model for Insider I. By reducing his natural form so significantly, Gormley was able to achieve an abstraction tethered to reality, to create a shape that, as Gormley himself has written, is “a body that lies within all of us, the INSIDER suggests also that the most intimate is the most strange, that inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognize and constitutes a kind of ‘third man’, the INSIDER as alien witness” (Ibid.).
artist’s words, “An INSIDER is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is
a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body--attitudes and emotions embedded in posture
or hidden by gesture--to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate. The idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated
form the trace of the body and its passage through life. This has a direct relationship to pain. I see these reduced forms as antennae
for a particular kind of resilience that exists within all of us, that allows us to bear suffering but is itself created through painful experience. There is no judgment about this. Their bareness is not the nakedness that reveals the flesh; it is the result of having had the flesh taken away; a loss which is not sentimentalized, but accepted. The Insider tries to up the ante between being and
nothingness” (A. Gormley, INSIDERS, 1997 - 2003, https://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/258 [Accessed Oct. 10, 2016)].
Iron, a material quite the opposite of supple human flesh, has been used by Antony Gormley as a fixing the ephemeral human form. The artist “wanted them to endure in time and concentrate space. They are made in a durable and relatively permanent base element: iron. The earth has iron at its core and these are like the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body” (Ibid.). Gormley used the proportions of his own body, reduced by two-thirds, as the model for Insider I. By reducing his natural form so significantly, Gormley was able to achieve an abstraction tethered to reality, to create a shape that, as Gormley himself has written, is “a body that lies within all of us, the INSIDER suggests also that the most intimate is the most strange, that inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognize and constitutes a kind of ‘third man’, the INSIDER as alien witness” (Ibid.).