The centrepiece of Antony Gormley’s current exhibition at The Hayward on Southbank is Blind Light.A prosaic description of the component parts of the work would be: “Fluorescent light, toughened low iron glass, ultrasonic humidifiers, aluminium, water.”
But I would rather describe it as a room filled with clouds...
Entering through the single entrance/exit, you are suddenly blind - plunged not into the unseeing dark normally associated with blindness, but into a blazing blur in which everything further than a few feet from your eyes vanishes into a disorientating fog of snow white brilliance.
Only when you grope your way to one of the walls, do you glimpse the outer world of the gallery and those who are observing your blind entrapment.
As you will see - and not see - in this second photo-essay, those outside the room find themselves gazing at opaque walls behind which shadows occasionally emerge and take on shape and peer out before being swirled back into radiant oblivion.
Antony Gormley’s art is always centred on the human form; here he exchanges the static sentinel figures of so many of his works for the living models of the gallery-goers - tenuously and fleetingly sculpted from vapour-clouds…
Click on images to enlarge
From tomorrow (6th August) until the exhibition ends on 19th August, The Hayward will be extending its opening hours to 10 am - 10 pm daily.
2 comments:
It looks like the army training where the instructors get the grunts in a room, crack some tear gas canisters and then make them take off their gas masks and find the way out...
Which can still be art.
Actually, being inside (especially for an claustrophobic-asthmatic like me) was rather like being on army fatigues in a fog...
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