Robert Genn's Twice Weekly Letter
Insight and inspiration for your artistic career.

Dear Artist,

Think about ambiguity in your art. To be ambiguous means to give double--or more than one meaning. Ambiguity is one of the main reasons installation art attracts. Different perhaps than the "quality art" that most of us strive for, it's the "quality idea" that engages and bends the mind.

Antony Gormley is a British artist who deals in ambiguity. "Angel of the North," is a massive winged figure that overlooks the A1 motorway near Gateshead in the UK. Rising on the horizon like one of those ballsy bulls that formerly advertised brandy on the skylines of Spain, it's a modern day Otto Lilienthal about to take the leap. As the believable technology of possible flight, it feels like a tribute to the century in which man finally mastered the air. Then again, perhaps it's the Egyptian Goddess Isis overwinging her subjects. Or is it a hilltop crucifixion--man crucified by his own technology? To some others it's an ornament, like a car badge that happens to be made large, as "big" artists are wont to do these days. So you can get an idea what "Angel" looks like, we've illustrated it at the top of the current clickback.

Gormley raises the stakes on rural and urban installations by embracing enigma and looking for the potential of ambiguity. What are those bronze people doing standing on London rooftops or knee-deep in the Crosby tide looking wistfully out to sea?

"Angel" was completed in 1998. It's made of corten steel, weighs 200 tonnes and has 500 tonnes of concrete foundations. It's the largest outdoor monument in the UK. Gormley has asked himself, "Is it possible to make a work with a purpose in a time that demands doubt?" Without giving too much away, he says, "I wanted to make an object that would be a focus of hope at a painful time of transition for the people of the north-east, abandoned in the gap between the industrial and the information ages." Could anything be clearer?

Ambiguity need not be in your face. Ambiguity, particularly in the long term, may be most effective when subtle and hard-won for the viewer. Windows suggest eyes, trees reach for the sky and pray, rocks have relationships, rivers have ambition and disappointment, patterns of snow or sky have secondary patterns that tell another story beyond the obvious. People are birds and can fly.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "The entire landscape becomes a potential flight path for this human condor." (Waldemar Januszczak, critic)

Esoterica: People are drawn to mystery. The psyche demands a puzzle. Humankind is in love with ambiguity. Gormley's work stands, without a spotlight or a plinth, day and night, in wind, rain and shine, and has many friends. "It is a huge inspiration to me," says Gormley, "that the Angel is rarely alone in daylight hours, and as with much of my work, it is given a great deal through the presence of those who visit it."

If you would like to read more information related to the above letter please visit the Ambiguity Clickback


* SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES* : www.PaintersKeys.com