The artist says it’s legs bent at the knee. A student says it’s a giant penis. So who’s right? It doesn’t matter. This is abstract art – and it shouldn’t be condemned because of one interpretation out of many
If this is a penis, it’s a tragicomic one. Antony Gormley’s six metre tall cubistic sculpture Alert, which the artist describes as a kneeling figure, has been accused by students at Imperial College London of seeming to have a startling three-metre erection. But imagine being that man, with tiny legs and a colossally inconvenient horizontal arousal. Phallocratic? It would be more like a phallic farce, a depiction of masculinity collapsing under the weight of its own penis, disabled 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’s playing with architecture and anatomy. He certainly has not said it is meant to be phallic. He would be a better artist if he did put it out there. Tracey Emin’s colossal naked statue The Mother has been unveiled in Oslo this summer and there are no secrets for suspicious minds to detect: everything is on view, the stuff of our human fragility celebrated next to the Munch Museum. Emin seems explicit and brave, while Gormley has made his reputation with a kind of bland humanism that doesn’t frighten the middle class – or didn’t. His famous casts of his own body have barely noticeable members.
