Beyond appearances

‘Hello, anybody here?’ The gate into Antony Gormley’s studio had slid mysteriously open as I approached, but there was no one behind it — just a courtyard, a row of trees and two metal figures.

‘Hello, hello?’ I walked across the yard up to a vast warehouse, and peered in through the double doors. Still no living people — instead, what looked like a group of aliens hovering silently in mid-air: life-size figures made of looped orbits of wire suspended from the ceiling, others, radiating metal spikes, dangling below; a brace of life-casts hanging by the neck but looking, nonetheless, pretty calm.

In fact, the whole room was tremendously peaceful. So much so that, at a loss for what else to do, I hung out with the aliens, waiting, and wondering as I waited whether perhaps this meditative stillness was what Gormley’s work was all about.

Which — as I discovered after an hour’s tutorial with the sculptor in his studio — it’s not really. It’s just not as simple as that.

‘Yes, it’s true that I spent a lot of time in India, doing Buddhist meditation, but I’m not trying to recreate that experience,’ said Gormley, sitting opposite me, looking hip in a white V-neck T-shirt and sipping green tea. ‘Meditating was useful, though, because it helped me realise that, though I’d done a lot of drawing and painting, I didn’t know a damn thing about art.’

You mean, you didn’t know the history of art?

‘No, no, no! Learning about the history of art teaches you nothing about how to be an artist!’ Gormley leant back in his chair. ‘History of art is about iconography and connoisseurship and categories and provenance. It’s just detective work.