I finally caught Antony Gormley's Blind Light at London's Hayward Gallery. Britain's superstar sculptor showed new monumental works including one of the largest ever urban public art commissions, Event Horizon, 31 sculptural casts of the artist’s body. Like a game of where's Antony, on approaching the gallery across Waterloo Bridge, steel figures start popping into your periphery, scattered across building rooftops, some so far away they're just distant specks, yet all seem to be watching you.
Once inside we're faced with Space Station, a colossal steel mass weighing 22 tonnes, like a rusty piece of space junk hurtling through space. It's illuminated solely by the glow from Blind Light, a luminous glass room filled with dense mist. From the outside you watch as visitors disappear into the mist, reappearing as they comically feel their way along the glass walls. Once inside it's damp and spooky, we laugh nervously, the way you laugh in a ghost train. Voices of other visitors are suddenly distant, only seeing people when they almost walk into you.
Allotment 11 is 300 life-size concrete units derived from the dimensions of people aged between 18 months and 80 years. Wandering through the corridors of concrete boxes, we examine and lean on them, finding private alcoves to chat. As my friend kept pointing out, Gormley provided numerous opportunities for a first date kiss- in the mist, behind some concrete, on the rooftop statue spotting. Immersive in every sense, there was no precious distancing of the art from the viewer, rather an interesting spatial dynamic between the actual viewers. Rather than lesson the experience, the crowds heightened it, squeezing into spaces, avoiding others in the mist, bumping, peeking through square holes, confronting and interacting.