Antony Gormley seeks volunteers for new project
Feb 27 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal
ANTONY Gormley is calling for volunteers again – and this time clingfilm and plaster are not involved.
The artist, famous as the creator of The Angel of the North, is seeking 2,400 people – including 103 from the North East – to spend an hour each on a plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.
The project, One & Other, will be the latest art work to occupy the plinth which was built in 1841 and originally intended for an equestrian statue of the then recently dead King William IV.
Due to lack of funds it lay empty until the Fourth Plinth Project was devised in 1999, turning the 25ft high block into a blank ‘canvas’ for leading contemporary artists. Often pilloried for using his own body as a model for his art, as he did with Gateshead’s Angel, Gormley turned the tables on his critics in 2002 with a work called Domain Field.
Commissioned by Baltic, Gateshead’s contemporary art factory, it involved about 200 volunteers undergoing the Gormley treatment – stripping off, being wrapped in clingfilm and then coated in quick-drying plaster.
The results were displayed at Baltic in 2003.
Now the artist is at it again, devising a project which – beyond the conception of it – hardly seems to involve him at all.
Instead it puts the onus firmly on the public to be more of an attraction at the heart of the capital than an absent monarch on a horse.
Launched in London yesterday, One & Other will run for 100 days from July 6 to October 14.
Thousands of people are expected to register their interest in the coming days. Then, in April, 2,400 of them will be selected randomly by computer for plinth duty.
