Reputed to be one of the most outstanding and highly skilled sculptors of our time, Britain's Antony Gormley - who has throughout his 25+ year career explored the human form using his own body as a model - has strived to create blank figures representative of the everyday person which he then infuses with a distinctively transformative edge.
"I've never been interested in making statues," he told the Guardian back in 2005. "But I have been interested in questioning the nature of the space that a human being inhabits. What I try to show is the space where the body was, not to represent the body itself."
To look at his sculptures, which have ranged in material from terracotta and bronze to cast iron and wood, is to be drawn into a space where we question the human experience and feel a stirring of contradictory emotions. Are we imprisoned within our own bodies? Can we ever truly break free from society's often stifling expectations? How on earth did he find so much trash??
Not surprisingly, Gormley's highly celebrated public art installations have earned accolades and garnered him countless awards, perhaps because he infuses each piece he creates with the essence of his own existence.
"It is important to me that each of these works comes from a lived moment. It isn't an invention; it's not an attempt to make a significant abstract from; it is a testament to a lived moment that has been transformed from flesh and its mortality into another zone of time."
Of all the sculptures he has created, his most arresting one might have to be 2006's Waste Man, an 82 foot high wonder composed of 30 tons of salvaged household waste (such as toilet seats, keyboards, desks, beds, paintings, tables, and random pieces of garbage). Good God, that's a lot of junk.
Volunteers in Kent, England took a solid two months to locate all of the pieces that would ultimately be wedged into the artist's sculptural framework, a task which required an additional six weeks of construction and strategic placement to complete.
Ultimately, the towering figure was preserved via celluloid in Penny Woolcock's "The Margate Exodus," which retold the biblical tale of how Moses received a message from God.
Now, anyone with a working knowledge of that story knows that there are two key elements that make it work - namely, a burning bush and a burning man.
Gormley's statue did indeed provide fuel for what ended up being a raging 35 minute fire until the entire structure crumpled to the ground.
This naturally begs the question, did Gormley end up doing more harm than good to the environment? Using salvaged materials to create an object of artistic beauty is one thing -- there's a practical purpose to it -- but to undo everything by destroying it for the benefit of entertainment and dramatic effect? What a waste of perfectly good trash.
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