and finally, let me go to a light-filled space

The British sculptor Anthony Gormley's exhibition at the Hayward Gallery ends tomorrow. I went to the exhibition in June when I was in London. If I was still in London now, I'd go again.

There is so much to say about the exhibition, I don't know where to start. It's the reason why I thought I would blog about it, from the time I was at the exhibition, and then I thought about it on and off after I got back to Singapore, but I just didn't know how to write about it.

Maybe I could begin today by describing what happened to me when I encountered one of the installations at the exhibition, the one called "Blind Light". It consists of a glass box, the size of a HDB living room. The glass cube has a doorway, the size of an average bedroom door. This is the only exit and entrance into the box. The box is filled on the inside with fog and white light. It is like a cloud that has been captured in the glass box and illuminated with relentlessly bright white light.

I approached it in 3 ways. First, I walked into the box, just half a metre past the doorway, and then I quickly walked out. When you are inside, you can't see anything, not even your own hands (not unless you held them right up to your eyes). I kept thinking, what if I walk into someone?

Next, I stood near the doorway outside the box and observed what other people did when they saw the installation. It was a weekday morning and the visitors were mostly tourists or old age pensioners. There were people who went in in pairs. There was a late middle-aged woman who said to her friend, "I think I'd better not go in, I'm wearing slippers and it looks wet in there." She changed her mind twice but did not go in in the end. There was an elderly couple who walked in holding hands.

Then I walked all around the box, following the hand of a person that was feeling its way around the box. All that was visible of the person from the outside was his/her hand. It was pink and fleshy.

Thirdly, I decided to go back inside the box and walk along its perimeter. I wanted to feel my way around the box and have someone outside see my hand. On my way to one of the glass walls, a drop of water fell onto my face. I almost jumped out of my skin. Because it was not possible to see anything, I felt strangely liberated. I also felt my ears pricking up at all the sounds around me. And I tried all the time to see something other than the whiteness and the nebulousness.

The most unexpected thing about this third part of my experience of "Blind Light": I smiled and I teared a little, and I wondered, "Is this what it will be like? Not being able to see in a space flooded with light and hearing lots of voices of people whose faces and bodies can't be seen?" I felt joyous, jubilant, as if something I had long intuited had been empirically confirmed.

This morning, in the artist's interview, I heard something that brought that morning's experience back in a flash. The interview was conducted some years back and Anthony Gormley was talking about a general misperception of his aesthetic:

"it's interesting because people have talked about the total lack of ecstasy in the work, and in fact I think it comes from a very profound sense of the ecstatic. I hope that the spaces that I make are deeply paradoxical. In one sense they are entirely about the human condition as a condition, but on another they're also about freedom. I think they are about the fact that if the body is completely still the mind is able to extend itself in ways that can only happen if the body is completely still, and that's what leads me to sculpture, because sculpture of all the art forms is the most still and the most silent..."




Interviews with Anthony Gormley can be found at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/gormley_transcript.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/gormleya1.shtml