Antony Gormley has been struck down by modesty. The artist who casts his own body religiously, and whose monumental works include not only the Angel of the North but a hotel room whose exterior is shaped like a squatting Lego figure, has been musing about his own place in history.
“It’s quite possible that my whole project is very flawed,” he speculates. “That, in the great frame of things, when contributions are weighed in the balance of usefulness to the human race, I may be found very wanting, but it’s too late for doubt now. Neither is there time for it.”
The trouble with this introspection is that it sounds so phoney. Gormley clearly does not doubt his own significance. His self-criticism is laced with narcissism. And that’s fair enough, maybe. If you are going to be an artist you need a big ego. It’s injudicious of Gormley to wonder about something that only the future can decide – but all artists fret secretly about the same thing.
One of the most fascinating things about art is its relationship with history. Most of the art we see is a relic – even to look at a work that won the Turner prize two years ago is to look at the past. Art is preserved by museums, private collections, or as a public monument, and all involve a sense of history – for the Tate to collect a work by a contemporary artist (as it collects Gormley) is, for example, to lay a bet on that artist’s historical importance. Many bets are bad, which why the Tate stores are so full of art that rarely sees the light. Some bets go truly sour, as when it found itself with a large collection of work by the disgraced artist Graham Ovenden.
It’s not only museums that lay bets on an artist’s place in history. Artists consciously see themselves as historical figures. One reason the National Gallery’s current exhibition Painters’ Paintings is so interesting is that it shows how artists imagine themselves as “greats” by collecting the art of previous greats: when Lucian Freud looked at the Cézanne he owned, or Matisse purchased a Gauguin, they were comparing themselves with these masters and therefore seeing themselves in the same grand tradition. Picasso and Matisse gave each other paintings in recognition of their equal heroic standing in modern art history – a status they were totally aware of in themselves and each other.
Artists, in other words, imagine their future place in the museum even as they make new art. How can you not? Gormley is silly to pretend a humility he does not need to have. For as he surely knows, he is guaranteed some kind of place in history. In one way art history is cruel: it selects only a few artists as heroes, like Picasso and Matisse. Yet in another way it is generous. Lots of artists occupy a historical half-light where they are remembered dimly. PhD students seek them out in the Tate stores, and exhibitions rake them up from time to time. “Rediscoveries” are constantly dragging “neglected” names into the limelight. Let’s resurrect Winifred Knights. Let’s exhume Christopher Wood.
British art is a particularly rich, if often very dusty, archive for this kind of rediscovery because it is full of these kinds of second-rank, “interesting” artists. There has never been a British Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Mondrian, Pollock, Magritte or Rothko. Quite frankly there has not been a British artist since the death of Turner in 1851 who even remotely resembled a genius.
As an artist, Gormley is glibly effective but ultimately shallow and easy on the brain: just compare his clumsy attempts to represent quantum reality with the way cubism captured Einsteinian space-time a century ago. Gormley, I think, is just another of Britain’s long line of so-so artists who are good enough to impress their time but lack true greatness. And that means we will remember him piously, just as we kid ourselves that Henry Moore is in Picasso’s league.
