New Yorkers don’t take anything lightly. Not their cawfee, or their cheesecake, or terrorism. Nothing. Being a New Yorker is serious business. Considering what they’ve been through, I’d say this is justified. Therefore, their reception of Antony Gormley’s life-size sculptures of figures atop buildings, was always going to be a little edgy, or rather,jumpy. And I mean “edgy” and “jumpy” in the most literal sense. Because, well, lets face it, they look alot like people standing on ledges, about to commit suicide. Anticipating slews of panicky 911 calls and screams of “Don’t jumppppppp!”, The New York Police Department issued a statement after the first of the 31 statues went up near Madison Square Park in Lower Manhattan. They felt it necessary in order to avert a spate of emergency calls similar to those made after the exhibition went on display in London in 2007. The 6ft (1.8m) iron and fibreglass sculptures are rendered from bodycasts of Gormley himself, and from a distance, look scarily lifelike. Of the 31 sculptures, 27 will be placed on rooftops and ledges and four will be placed at ground level. The installation is costing $400, 000, and the north-most statue will be placed on the 25th floor of the Empire State Building. Gormley, a former winner of the British Turner Prize, said: “I want to play with the city and people’s perceptions. My intention is to get the sculptures as close to the edge of the buildings as possible.” And later, “The installation connects the palpable, the percievable and the imaginable, creating a relational field in which the passer-by as well as the aware viewer is implied in a matrix of looking and being looked at.” One onlooker told the local television station WCBS: “You think it’s someone going to jump, someone standing on the edge. It’s kind of creepy.” Some New Yorkers are having a hard time getting past the potential moral panic that the installation could amount to. Malcolm Sparrow, a former law enforcement official, who now teachers at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, said he had not seen the figures, but thought they would cause problems. “If it’s modern art, I think it’s in poor taste for residents of New York City,” because of the “memory of people jumping off buildings,” he said, referring to people who leapt to their deaths from the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. “It will produce a whole slew of calls,” he said, and “is certainly going to be an enormous waste of police time.” I wonder if almost eight years after September 11, the loose semblances of the figures to the events of that day still hold emotional weight? Closer to home, the controversy over Gormley’s work reminds me of the outcry against the angry-looking sculpture (pictured below) erected on Cope Street in the Sydney suburb of Redfern. Controversial because, it is located on the same street where the young TJ Hickey was impaled on the fence posts near the commission towers during a police chase. Members of the community saw it as insensitive and evocative of past violence. Insensitive or not, the intention of a great deal of contemporary art is to get us talking. Whether our conclusions are negative or not, much of the artist’s job is done as soon as there is any dialogue at all. Gormley’s installation will be completed for an exhibition that officially begins on the 26th of march. The inert figures who gaze over the New York landscape are eerily beautiful, and for me, more an evocation of the sublime, than something to get angry about. Then again, I believe, the glass is always, half full.
