British sculptor Antony Gormley on Monday unveiled what he himself described as a ”disorienting” work consisting of a glass box that makes those who enter it disappear in a cloud of mist.
The Blind Light installation is the highlight of Gormley’s latest exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, and is expected to become as popular as the giant slides put up in the foyer of the Tate Modern gallery last year.
Visitors who step inside Gormley’s glass box, measuring 8,5m by 10m, are enveloped in a cloud of damp fog so dense they can see only a few centimetres in front of their faces.
Gormley described the disorienting work as a ”climatological and sociological experiment”.
Reactions from test groups have ranged from anxiety to euphoria.
Gormley said visitors may experience extreme emotions. ”On the one hand, you have lost all sense of location — left-right, front-back. You immediately are lost in space and that makes you anxious.
”But at the same time I think there is a sense of euphoria that you are almost free of the body whilst being returned to it in a new way,” he said. ”It’s a climatological experiment, but also a sociological one. I don’t know how people will react to art of this kind.”
He conceded that some may find the experience frightening or claustrophobic, as the chamber has only one small exit that is impossible to spot until you are centimetres away from it.
The artist, who won Britain’s coveted Turner Prize in 1994, is best known for his work titled Another Place, which consists of 100 cast-iron figures of naked men looking out to sea.
The life-size statues are now permanently embedded on a beach at Crosby, near Liverpool, north-west Britain, after touring Norway, Belgium and Germany. — Sapa-dpa