Model behaviour

One of the enduring fascinations for visitors and curators alike in museums and galleries is how artists work. We still have an overwhelming compulsion, I think, to see the act of artistic creativity as somehow magical, isolated, equivalent to divine inspiration. Both the body and the working space of the artist are therefore endlessly interesting, as tangible elements of the creative process. Four years ago, Compton Verney staged a brilliant exhibition called The Artist’s Studio which considered just these ideas, and how views of the artist in action have changed over time.

I was reminded of this at the end of last week, when I just managed to scoot into the White Cube in London Bridge to see Anthony Gormley’s exhibition Model before it closed. I hadn’t made it to the new White Cube before and was impressed by the space. Inside it is exactly what you would expect – a series of simple white boxes for the kinds of modern art display in which White Cube specialises. The outside, I thought, was impressively low-key by comparison, blending into Bermondsey Street, looking like it had been there for years, quite different from the stark intervention that its partner gallery makes in Mason’s Yard off St. James’s.

Model is Gormley’s latest project, and combines representations of his body and his mind, precisely to evoke the kinds of creative process which fascinate us. The bulk of the show is a series of cast bronze sculptures which build the human body out of box shapes. What has always given Gormley’s work rigor and integrity, I think, is the emphasis on mapping his own body as the core of every work. The examples in Model that did this were beautiful, but were accompanied by a lot of pieces that seemed not to relate to the body, and therefore sadly evoked merely piles of boxes. One room housed a special installation for the show, the title piece Model, where Gormley created a huge body, in the same steel-sheet-box style, which visitors could explore, entering through the foot. Again, I felt that the scaling up to huge proportions lost the connection with Gormley’s body and therefore made this simply an experience in negotiating a dark, metallic building.

What both most interested and most disappointed me was the ‘Model Room’ which was set up to convey the artistic process behind the exhibition, featuring a series of models and maquettes leading up to each piece. Many of these were beautiful, intricate and surprisingly vulnerable looking, given the hulking metal pieces they generated. The visual effect of the gallery was likewise immensely satisfying. But this was, I realised, because it portrayed a creative process developed in a simple white room, out of linear, perfectly-formed and sequentially developed models. It managed to divorce this both from Gormley’s thought-processes and from his physical, labouring body. I’d be very surprised if he actually works like this.