Gormley Gor Blimey
I was lamenting my absence from Edinburgh this year in somewhat negative terms, omitting to mention how much I miss having lunch with Iain Crawford in the Scottish Arts Club, or bumping into Jim Haynes, or relishing the absolute highlight of any festival — the morning chamber concerts in the Queen’s Hall.
The upshot was a spur to catch the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward before it closes this coming Sunday; be there, or be square, or rather be a white cube.
You’ve seen all those male lifesize figures on top of the Shell Building, the Festival Hall, the National, all the nearby bridges and walkways; they only make sense when you penetrate the gallery itself.
Never was that brutalist, unlovely concrete place made more beautiful. The Gormley body shapes form painfully contorted caryatids clinging to walls, transform themselves into concrete slabs, like a high rise city scape version of the terra cotta army, or dangle perilously from the inner staircases.
The non-human installations include a fantastic, floating steel plate space station, and a room rendered porous like a colander stuck with endoscopic tubes you can look through either inside or outside the structure.
Best of all is the cloud-filled glass box you wander tentatively through, bumping into other lost souls, slipping on a water floor, asking the way to the Aldwych and wondering if you’ll ever find your way out again. The experience is strange and terrifying and far more sensational than the plodding “avant-garde-ism” of the Punchdrunk Faust at Wapping last year.
As you blunder around, or put your hand against the glass, or simply watch others standing still, wondering what to do, you too become part of a Gormley world of figures, but totally trapped, unlike the majestic, triumphant casts of the artist’s body communing with the real clouds and skies on the parapets and ledges outside. You gain a whole new perspective on the landscape, no kidding.
After Gormley, I zipped across town to catch the Photographing Britain exhibition at the Tate Britain. It all seemed terribly literal and obvious, except for that stunning moment when photography joins hands with modernism between the wars. The only true lens artists are Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton, with Bert Hardy and Roger Mayne pressing their claims.
But the last few rooms are full of so-what pictures of bleak Essex prefabs, punks moshing at concerts and deeply unattractive drug addicts. Who needs all that after a lifetime of new plays at the Bush?
What with the diversion of the Proms on the radio, the cricket on the television and the building work next door as our tiresome neighbours set about building another of those ghastly glass extensions on the unsuitable exterior of a Victorian terraced house — it’s like an Ayckbourn play superimposed on Arthur Wing Pinero — I begin to wonder if I need bother with the theatre ever again, let alone Edinburgh.
But I will, I promsiel. The regions — well, Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon — have issued a siren call and I shall sally forth anon before retiring for a vacation on the Adriatic coast with nary a puppet show, nor a stand-up comedian, I hope, within spitting distance of my beach lounger.
