30 September 2007 Written by Rachel Clements Print This Post  Email This Post

I barely noticed it last week, but something, on one of my regular bus journeys, felt wrong. This week, I put my finger on it. Anthony Gormley’s sculptures have disappeared from the skyline. Their removal, presumably, coincided with the end of the Blind Light exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, but I was out of London for most of August, and so the absence of the 31 life-sized casts of the artist’s body which made up the installation Event Horizon has only just come to my attention.

Over the spring, these figures, dotting the skyline of the Thames around the Southbank Centre, seem to have worked their way into my mental picture of the area, and now that they’re gone, I want them back. Partly, I think, the joy of the installation was in seeing people seeing the sculptures: the moment of almost I-spy, involving lots of pointing (and there’s one, and there’s one, and there’s one). There was also something immensely satisfying in being witness to an ongoing experience as, every time I was in the area, I saw more and more people stop to look up, count, and consider.

In the exhibition guide to Blind Light, Gormley is quoted as describing the exciting ways in which, when engaging with his work, ‘reflexivity becom[es] a shared activity’. And that’s part of it, I suppose. But actually, I have never yet crossed Waterloo Bridge and not seen people looking up from their papers on the bus, or pausing on the pavement to gaze along the river. The area encourages a sort of shared reflexivity already, installation or not. Something a little different was at stake, I think, in seeing people looking at the sculptures.

Gormley’s work takes the body – his body – as its base point; it abstracts from there. The Event Horizon sculptures, so clearly rooted in the human, seemed to me to function along that painful and poignant artistic line which highlights the gap between the collective experience and the individual one. Perched on the edge of buildings, the figures were obviously simultaneously isolated and part of a grander scheme; the same goes for the people looking at them.

Which is why, I think, my favourite sculptures were the two standing on the bridge itself. Bringing the whole installation into focus, they provided a sense of scale. And it was a person-sized scale. And somehow, stopping to look at those figures – and indeed, watching others do so too – for me, was strangely moving. Where the figures on the rooftops encouraged a gaze, a lifting of the eyes, the proximity of the sculptures on the bridge spoke to me of engagement and disengagement. The desire to photograph, to examine, and to touch those figures, to interact with something so immobile and so vacant, to read emotion into blank-faced cast iron, and then to expand that out to the figures in the distance, is both beautiful and terrible, a mark of connection and empathy, but one which travels one way only. Still, I was moved by those figures, even though they thought nothing of me.

Crossing Waterloo Bridge is still one of the most joyful London experiences. The view is no less spectacular now; sunrise over the Thames has lost none of its splendour. On the bus, the same number of people look up from their papers and out of the windows. It’s still beautiful, still consoling, still monumental. But I really do miss those statues.

Photographs by Rachel Clements.