Argyll – and those funding public art here, are becoming more interested in the potency of art installations, with that interest fuelled by Scotland’s first outdoor commercial sculpture gallery, Caol Ruadh at Colintraive on the Kyles of Bute. this summer, sculptor Rob Mulholland also installed two of the his reflective steel figures in the Taynish National Nature Reserves, one in marshy scrubland and one in just offshore in Loch Taynish.
it seems a good time to look at one of the most celebrated and popular major adventures in installation art in the United Kingdom – Anthony Gormley’s Another Place.
This is formed from 100 casts of the artists own body. each with a numbered bracelet. The installation was shown in locations in Cruxhaven in Germany, Stavanger in Norway and De Panne in Belgium, before being installed on the beach in Crosby in Merseyside, north of Liverpool.
The figures seem to wade in to the swell of the tide – and swim off.
After they were first installed, people not expecting them to be there were phoning 999 and reporting suicide attempts on the beach.
In fine weather they are simply joyful wild swimmers,
They were meant to move on to New York in November 2006. However, having achieved everything the South Sefton Development Trust had hoped in bringing them there – firing up the regeneration of the area with people from all over the place coming to Crosby to see them – and still coming to Crosby to see them, Crosby had other ideas and said ‘No chance’.
A doughty rearguard action saw the figures, locally know as ‘The Iron Men’, retained permanently at Crosby and now owned and managed by Sefton Council.
Crosby is one of the most unstructured urban sprawls imaginable but the beach at Crosby is wonderfully unpretentious – with a long and wide concrete promenade above stepped sea defences at the the top a vast area of flat sands with the fast advance and retreat of a tide from an expense of the Irish Sea before it, bounded by Anglesey, the Isle of Man and Cumbria.
Local people come to ride bikes along the miles of promenade, to jog, to walk, to walk their dogs on the beach, to fish, to have picnics – and to watch the Iron Men.
The immediate sea area in front of Crosby – and over to North Wales, is a favoured location for offshore wind farms and a major route into the Mersey to Liverpool Docks.
So the replicas of Anthony Gormley stand looking out to sea, in what he describes as ‘silent expectation’, making their individual relationships with this environment, relationships which change according to the weather, the light, the tide and the perspective.
Most of them are full height but some have been partly buried in the sand, their lower legs sunk in it; and some are half buried with only the torso visible.
And still they wait. For what? Another place? Their presence has made Chosby ‘another place’? But they look outward not inward – which could be seen as looking away from Crosby – towards another place. And the place they see in front them has been fashioned into another place by today’s technology. How do they see it – and in relation to themselves? What does their ‘silent expectation’ hope for from it?
There are times when the the natural elements seems to suspend the figures between earth and heaven, neither here nor there, just watching, just waiting as the light and the seasons and the tides come and go. They vanish, appear, form groups in the viewer’s eye, march outwards, populate the beach, blend with the warm blooded. Crosby sands will never be an empty or a lonely place again. Some find them disturbing. Everyone funds them mesmeric.
And as the tide and the marine environment claim the Iron Men as their own, they change them. Barnacles and sea vegetables have grown on them, changing their shapes and characters. The marine organisms have given some perky bottoms, others thick calves, thick curly hair [see last photograph below] knitted onesies for those who feel the chill [below] …
created diving suits [below] for the regularly submarine members of the one hundred and fishermen’s jumpers for others to wear …
giving one rather feminine knock knees [below] …
and another cloven hooves.
You may dress the figures – but must not litter, so don’t attempt to feed them. One woman knitted clothes for a couple of them – but the tides eventually dispensed with those garments.
More recently, someone has clothed one in a long sleeveless tie -die dress – and the gender transformation is unquestionable. This is a woman of the Masai – long limbed, slender, sinuous – yet underneath, it remains what Gormley described as ‘the industrially reproduced body of a middle aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet’.
One has to remember here that the Iron Men themselves are also manufactured things, which thickens the perspectives and the interpretations.
A red blouse and knee-length black pattered skirt on a second figure [above] creates a stouter, more robust character. Someone else has honoured one figure ‘below] with a hard-won Natterjack Seaside 10k Gold Medal, a second medal bearing a Star – and a sand facial, although exfoliation might be a tad ambitious.
The particular environment of Crosby beach has a hugely varied palette of colour and textures.
Its visually almost infinite expanse of corrugated sands catches water in the sand ribs gleaming in the low evening light, blurred in real and reflected cloudscapes …
with little surface streams winding their way to the sea …
and strands of rougher sands further out – together producing almost painterly images …
in which the still figures stand as punctuation marks.
They may be points of fixity against the flux in all of the elements that surround them, but they too are under change as complex as any of these. Age is maturing and defining them individually as it does to each of us.
Installation art becomes a creature of the universe beyond the control of its founding artist. Anthony Gormley will be as curious and as intrigued as any in the evolving independent existences of his one hundred other selves.
