Is Antony Gormley already spouting pretension when he gets up in the morning? Does he go to the bathroom and contemplate “the voiding of excess material from his bodily chasm” as he sits on the loo? Does he sip his coffee and comment on how it makes him more aware of his position in space and time?
His new exhibition in White Cube’s vast Bermondsey gallery is, he tells us, a show “that allows forms and materials to work on us, releasing us from any expectations of what sculpture is and how it might act on us.” What he means is, he’s put 24 sculptures in 15 interconnected rooms – sorry, “chambers” – in a very uneven installation that is, in reality, a diffuse collection of works from all periods of his career, of wildly different style and quality.
What really connects them is that they are all being showcased by his dealer during the Frieze art fair season when London is full of the world’s richest collectors. But for Antony Gormley to admit he was trying to flog art would be as unlikely as Jeremy Corbyn listening to focus groups. This is lofty, serious art by a lofty, serious guy.
The trouble is, a lot of it is really bad. Gormley famously uses his own body as a mould and yet his art is utterly devoid of sensuality or sexuality. It has a cod-existentialist pseudo-angst that keeps reminding me of the 1950s British artist Reg Butler, although it is obvious Gormley would rather be thought of as a 21st-century Giacometti.
In his most recent phase, he has become the Giacometti of Lego. He builds up squared and right-angled figures out of rectangular blocks of metal that resemble the famous toy bricks, in what is presumably meant to be a comment on our alienation from our bodies in the digital age. Or something. The most hideous work here, Pose (2016), is a reclining nude built of metal blocks that simplistically travesties the art of Henry Moore. I have a horrible feeling this is Antony Gormley’s idea of a joke.
Even worse are his figures that try to be ethereal. Fit (2016), the work that gives his exhibition its name, looks like an early TV transmission device or a sci-fi design from the days of Dan Dare in its rectangular wiry maze. God, it’s dull. Here again Gormley seems rooted in the 1950s. He was born in 1950 after all.
He is stuck in a very British 20th-century version of modernism that lacks real freedom, caught as it is between the knowledge that abstraction is Modern and a reluctance to leave the human figure behind. He has thus spent a career churning out repetitive compromises between the depiction of the body and the abstraction of form. Gormley is repressed and confined as an artist, and the claustrophobia he often expresses is really the claustrophobia of creative failure.
His best work here dives into that mood of being stifled. Passage (2016) is a narrow steel corridor you can walk inside. When you get to the end and turn around, you look out of the darkness at a blocky outline of a human figure filled with light. This passage from light into darkness, from darkness into light resembles the strange effects you get inside neolithic barrows like Maeshowe in Orkney, or an Egyptian tomb. Yet what does the clumsy human outline add to that experience? It makes an otherwise good idea completely corny. Behold the human form – or rather the form of a cyberman. We’re back in the TV science fiction of Antony Gormley’s childhood.
More nostalgia for 20th-century Britain haunts the dismal concrete Block, which looks like a monument to brutalist architecture. It would make a good extension to the Southbank Centre. Yet the more abstract Gormley dares to be in this exhibition the more he invites comparison with much better sculptors. When he exhibits rusted red steel I just compare him with Richard Serra and laugh. When he fills a room with a large cubic structure I recall Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost and wish I was walking around that instead.
It’s all so self-pitying, this miasma of generalised humanist anguish. Cheer up man. There is even a Lego-period version of his famous Field for the British Isles. The formless clay Gorms have been replaced by little robots. Ah, yes. We are all little robots in a robot world. Makes you think.
• Antony Gormley: Fit is at White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 6 November.
