Saturday 11^th July, 2009 saw the opening of the Antony Gormley solo in Bregenz, Austria. A physical monograph across four floors, spanning over 16 years of his career, it is his biggest retrospective in Europe to date. And, as I am currently living in the country, it was one that I refused to miss.

I sat opposite Peter Zumthor’s acclaimed Kunsthaus in the adjacent coffee house, trying to pass a few minutes before the doors opened. All the time watching Bregenz’s great and good assemble. There was hubbub, an eager anticipation and everyone was feeling a little more important than usual. When I could not wait a minute longer, I left my unfinished drink and crossed the square towards the hazy cube, a shower of shingles glowing golden in the evening sun like frozen sheets hacked from the Bodensee behind.

‘Body and Fruit’ (1991/93) occupies the foyer. Two bulbous lumps, which could originally have been a number of varieties of fruit and are now expanded beyond recognition to many times their natural size, hover a few centimetres over the Terrazzo floor. Their mass renders them planet like, but they are still immediately identifiable as fruit, perhaps even juicy despite their gross size and inedible material. This play with scale, quality of finish and absence of explicit purpose are hallmarks of the assembled work. But each is quietly purposeful.

Above is ‘Allotment II’ (1996), the spatial representation of 300 inhabitants of Malmö, whose “intimate measurements” were transferred into hollow concrete shells, each just big enough to hold the sitter. In his opening speech Antony talked of mnemonics, memories made physical and this work is just that. Like a photograph, it records an event. Surely an exciting, strange and memorable one for the subjects and as one walks around this can be felt. There is an atmosphere of a village fete, the cubes stand roughly on a grid but there seem to be family groups and more open spaces where visitors gather to talk. The overall composition is indiscernible; you can only glimpse islands in a united party. You can walk between them, stopping when you meet a giant or someone roughly your size and gaze into their vacant mouths, perhaps imagining the person whose body gave rise to the form, but you imagine them in a parallel space, far away and free, not imprisoned inside.

On the third level is ‘Clearing V’ (2009), a twelve kilometre looping coil of aluminium tubing. Unlike the previous installation, whose only clue in the stairwell was the gasp of the person in front of you, it reaches right into the landing at the top of the stair. You are forced to enter it, climbing over the limbs and ducking through the gaps. There was a warning that the dyed aluminium would rub off black onto your clothes if you brushed it but the gallery goers were risking their best. One woman was even crawling, perhaps having found herself trapped. This work is unapologetically artificial, no attempt is made to bring an aspect of ‘realism’ or naturalness. Nevertheless, a familiar parallel world is conjured, or at least room was left for one. I recalled rummaging through a thicket near my home in Cumbria which was maintained by one of the village elders, a farmer and a painter. It’s a dow spot or ‘enchanted spring’ a mixture of depthless bog and native trees woven between wild orchid hybrida. Despite appearances there is something common in spirit.

Many people were complaining of claustrophobia by now. The absence of vistas and the heady combination of art and architecture was intense, almost painfully so. But the final floor was something of a release. It is the most light, not having any concrete overhead and you feel you have worked your way through to the clouds.

‘Critical Mass II’ (1995) has found a fitting home here. As I walked around I pondered on what might be inferred from this arrangement of all but androgynous figures. Should I recognise statues as specific characters? I decided not but there is certainly allegory present, perhaps something about society. The installation is composed like a painting, a great one. Somewhere off centre a heap of stacked bodies lie. Others range off from it or hang solo, thinking, looking, rebelling or in some way stretching themselves. Some obey gravity others defy it by sitting on the walls, not by hanging. There is even a group in free fall, a squadron of dive bombers, noble and sleek. None of the body’s forms acknowledges its neighbours nor are they wrought with any expression. Any communication, in the conventional sense is therefore limited to the arrangement, the rest must be imagined. They are ridged and bear, I also noticed that their feet were cast flat soled, i.e. in contact with the floor, like Greek plasters casts, even when the figures are not standing. Many are repeated, but each is deployed in a new way gaining a new meaning from the circumstance.

On close inspection of the heap I imagined the figures self-aware, aware of their position and even that of their neighbours in relation to them. And if that position was uncomfortable they stoically bore it in a self-contained manner. Although they seemed to acknowledge each other to a limited degree, they remain unable to truly understand each other, they just focus on their own private experience. You want them to talk. However these anonymous figures are open for interpretation and as Antony said, we viewers are the ‘subject of the works’, which remain objects, essentially empty, it is ‘we’ who interpret them and who are altered or not. When you have had enough and the elevator doors close this room off to you, containing it, a single seated thinker faces you across the room and you can be sure he will not be moving.

The Antony Gormley Solo is running until October, so if you’ve been meaning to visit the Bregenz Kunsthaus, now is the perfect time to do so. You can fly into Zurich which is only a couple of ours west or a number of closer airports. Alternatively get on your old 125 and drive down the Rhine.
www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/

[View with PicLens]

27^th July cont.  Renzo Piano was the first ‘star’ architect I really had any appreciation for.  I had visited Potsdamer Platz and the Pompidou Centre before I became architecturally aware and was moved by neither.  What I really fell in love with were his workshop, set above the cliffs outside Genoa and accessed by a glass elevator, and also his ocean going yacht.  Both consummately detailed, appearing like a part of heaven on earth, and so when I’d completed my first year of studies I went in search of as many of his buildings as I could, I even stopped in Genoa and rang up the office, asking in borrowed Italian if I could visit the workshop.  “No,” came the answer in English.  But it won’t be the last time I try.

The Beyeler Foundation has a right to be held among his finest works, perhaps even first.  It sits majestically on a little rise surrounded on three sides by parkland and protected farmland and on the entrance façade by the main road through Riehen.  This front is bounded by a substantial wall of the same deep maroon, (Patagonian) porphyry, a stone prised by Imperial Rome and even the Greeks.  It is used as an applied finish and no lie is made of this.  Each regularly shaped oblong (50×25) is stacked directly over the previous.   Joints run unbroken across the entire length and height of the façade.  Yet it is not without a quality of stonelyness, the copings are dealt in chunky 8cm thick slabs spanning 3 blocks or 150cm, a key length in the arrangement of the plan.  Its texture and colour are quite memorising and combine with the landscaping to form a suitable shell for the rarefied and exotic collection within.  The entrance grades down to a little below street level, to the level of the pond.  A lily pond that laps outside the room built to house Monet’s most admired painting.  But when I visited it was hung in the first hall.  It had a wall to itself and there would have been little point putting anything else beside, infact for me there was almost no point in having anything else in the whole museum.  After an hour or so of staring into its galaxy of colours, which move perpetually across a curtain of deepest blue and purple, each area a dance of joyful abandon to rhythm, light and colour, I retreated to the garden for a pause before I could hope to make anything of Matisse, Picasso or even Cézanne.

Outside was glorious. The glass slates that levitate over the masonry appear to glow in the bright sun like the thinnest cut marble.   To the south cattle graze amongst cherry trees and the sound of their bells travels up to the ‘English Style Garden’.  Remind me to pay more attention to our gardens when I return for whatever inspired this must be truly fantastic.

Recuperated I returned and was very glad I did seeing much of the collection and also the Giacometti special, a huge assembly of Alberto’s most famous elongated figures but also and most interestingly a large collection of earlier works and also work by his family.  My favourites being a series of curious game like sculptures in wood, wrought iron and stone and some canvases of Alberto’s father, Giovanni, whose application of paint and staring self-portraits are incredibly intense and vital.

As I left there was a cacophony of sound erupting from loud speakers.  Across the road a rock festival was in full swing, fortunately and in credit to the buildings engineers there was never a hint of this inside.  And so I saddled up and headed for Austria crossing most of Switzerland in an obliterating rainstorm.

25^th July.  I arrived outside Köln before noon, the fat cigar-like twin towers of the cathedral were the first thing I saw from the autobahn and they still exert the same magnetic attraction for the modern pilgrim as they did for the medieval and nineteenth century gentlemen travellers.  And so, I made for the towers, circled the cathedral and crossed the river twice before I found Kolumba, “Köln’s most arrogant art gallery.”  I have read that it is both “beyond time” and conversely that it is like a ‘modern factory built from expensive bricks, abusing the prone church beneath it.’  If I had to agree with either it would certainly be the first.  It has the feel and look of something quite alien and unexpected although I intuit it might have come from the east.  Perhaps further east than Christianity even, like the three magi, floating into the city, mirage-like, from the desert.  This becomes clearer, more explicit in the garden courtyard where palms sit in sandy coloured gravel contained within stratified concrete walls reminiscent of adobe.

On the ground floor are a sequence of entrance spaces, toilets and the new hall over the excavations and old church.  There is much made of variations between light and dark, volume and surface.  A great pair of leather curtains, which are traditional in the area if not on this scale, purvey a peculiar scent and mark entrance into the excavation hall.  They not only exclude light from the neighbouring hall, which opens onto the courtyard garden, but also reduce air exchange as the preservation of the artefacts upstairs require a special atmosphere.  The punctured brickwork of the hall famously admits dappled sunlight but sounds from the street outside also bumble through.  Fortunately both lend to the completive atmosphere.  A wooden walk-way zigzags through the space deliberately.  The first turn points directly at a crucifix, a broken survivor of the blast which nearly levelled the church of St. Kolumba more than fifty years ago.  The remainder weaves a course around the chapel of “Madonna in the Ruins” and bridge the excavations which are dramatic, deep and sharply spot lit by the pendant lamps that hang from far above.  At the far end is the destination, brilliantly bright after the excavation hall, a former sacristy now open to the sky in which Richard Serra’s massive sculpture, ‘The Drowned and the Saved’ (1992) stands.  This intervention predates Zumthor’s new building and it is quietly left to its own devices, only an immaculately outfitted control terminal stands attentively in the corner. The sculpture itself is formed by two identical steel angles that meet imperfectly in the centre of their span.  Each is naturally imbalanced but they support each other, their self weights opposing but they have already started to slip – another and the whole collapse and both will drown.

After returning to the entrance hall, you leave this behind, turning a series of right angle bends you face a monumental staircase, a leitmotiv with Zumthor now.  Like an alpine path it is unrelenting and long, even for someone young, as I found.  It is narrow and there is only one banister, which is of course finished immaculately.  The ceiling is extremely high here; it matches the height of the room above.  As one emerges, almost certainly panting but also feeling small and self-contained a seat is thoughtfully provided.  In symphony, two works address compassionately the realities of solitude and sentience.  The reduced architecture and absence of views out prime you for a series of very hard hitting works one particularly harrowing and all asking spiritual and humanitarian questions if not always Christian.  The second floor, after another stair, offers something of a release.  A huge window greats you this time and there are several more, the space over the excavation hall is open and a series of rooms possess an incredible dimension of height. Three of these are coupled with slightly raised anti-rooms but the first, a reading room, is very different.  Here the wooden panelled walls offer the relief of texture.  The suite of bespoke leather arm chair’s inscrutable style triggers some form of déjà vu and the space becomes like a living memory.  I imagined I was in the drawing room of a zeppelin, flying high above the city but it was not much of a leap.  As light streams through a gigantic window and is gently diffused by trailing silk curtains, it is hard to think of a reason to leave.

But everything that goes up must come down and I left rather exhausted, on edge even, and rather surprised by the range of emotions and questions the building, artwork and curation had brought forth in me.  Perhaps I should not have been so surprised – they are Catholics after all.