If this is a penis, it’s tragicomic. Antony Gormley’s six-metre-tall cubist sculpture Alert, which the artist describes as a kneeling figure, has been accused by students at Imperial College London of appearing to have an astonishing three-metre erection. But imagine it’s that man, with tiny legs and a colossally uncomfortable horizontal arousal. Phallocratic? It would rather be a phallic farce, a representation of masculinity collapsing under the weight of its own penis, incapacitated by its obsession with its own member.
Or not Alert is an arrangement of rectangular blocks to roughly form a human figure: an abstract work. Gormley says he is playing with architecture and anatomy. He certainly didn’t say it was phallic. I’d be a better artist if I let it out. Tracey Emin’s colossal nude statue, The Mother, was unveiled in Oslo this summer and there are no secrets for suspicious minds to detect: it’s all in plain sight, the stuff of our human frailty celebrated alongside of the Munch Museum. Emin seems explicit and brave, while Gormley has made a name for himself with a kind of gentle humanism that doesn’t scare the middle class, or not. His famous casts of his own body have barely perceptible limbs.
The new attack on Gormley for allegedly hiding a giant erection in plain sight could be the return of the repressed. He has always said that he believes in the “viewer’s part”: the meaning that the viewer brings to a work. The openness, or a critic might say banality, of his images leaves much to the viewer’s imagination.
He was mocked and accused of obscenity… the works that appeared in an earlier Gormley furore. Photo: Joe Giddens/PA
The sculpture is still in the design phase, and students who look at the blueprint and see a huge penis should also consider the fact that it might not be there. For this reason, and others, I feel compelled to defend Gormley. Alert has been given to Imperial College by venture capitalist Brahmal Vasudevan and his wife, Shanthi Kandiah, to decorate their new Dangoor Plaza in South Kensington. But student Alex Auyang, in a motion on the student union website, says it could “damage the university’s image and reputation” because of its potential “phallic interpretation”. This colossal male presence could be considered “exclusionary,” the motion says, given Imperial’s gender imbalance problem: only 41.8% of full-time students were women in 2020-2021.
Is the motion a joke? Auyang told the Times: “I think it’s pretty clear that the motion has a sense of humor behind it, but my points stand.” It is very important to make a position. The problem is that this act of attempted censorship, or ironic censorship, or whatever, is ultimately just another sad chapter in Britain’s flight from modern art. It seems that this ambitious artist can no longer express himself without being mocked or accused of obscenity. This row follows criticism of the bronze bollards on Gormley Street as abstract Willies or, when displayed horizontally on a beach, dog poo.
Gormley states that the bulge suggests the protruding legs of a crouching figure, bent at the knee. But that’s almost beside the point. This is not a realistic representation: it is a geometric extrapolation, a non-representational work. You know, modern art. The student’s complaint highlights a possible “interpretation,” then says it raises issues. But how can one find fault with a single interpretation of a work open to many?
Even if Gormley’s unconscious has unleashed a priapic dream, so be it. This is art for you’… the artist in his studio. Photograph: Manuel Vázquez/The Guardian
This latest outcry over public sculpture resembles the row over Maggi Hambling’s nude monument to Mary Wollstonecraft in 2020. Being a gay woman didn’t save Hambling from being accused of “insulting” the Georgian feminist by posing on a female body naked in public space. Now Gormley has been caught possibly, if you look at it that way, putting a phallus in public space.
I’m not a big fan of Gormley’s work, but you just can’t subject artists to that kind of suspicion and scrutiny and still expect them to do a good job. Powerful public art only happens when artists can pursue their own impulses. Even if Gormley’s unconscious has unleashed a priapic dream, so be it. That’s art for you.
Accusing a statue whose meaning is ambiguous of exclusion is as crazy as viewing Hambling’s nude as misogynistic. Imperial College already has a piece of public art: a statue of Queen Victoria, Empress of India, fully clothed with her head covered and no sexual innuendo in sight. Is this the kind of statue we want the most? I thought not. Gormley’s artwork is interesting to say the least and let’s face it – it’s not going to embarrass the university or oppress anyone.