Broken Column
Apr 05.10 /
Decor, Design, Learn /
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Broken Column by Antony Gormley is an permanent exhibit in my town – Stavanger, Norway. There are 23 of these rusty men that make up the “Broken Column”. If you take a walk around town you are bound to bump into one of these, whether it be in front of the harbor or in a stair well in the parking garage (that one can fright you at night). The Municipality of Stavanger, Stavanger Art Society and Rogaland Art Museum commissioned Antony Gormley to install these back in 2003. The project started in 1999, and took 4 years to decide whether or not to install. All 23 statues are facing out to sea, if you were to stack them all up according to sea level they would all stand head to foot. The first statue stands at 41.41 meters above sea level and the last on is 1.23 meters below sea level (it is partially underwater on a rock beyond Natvigs Minde in Stavanger’s port basin). The statues are sandblasted iron and are cast of Antony Gormley’s body. Over the course of a year, you will see that people have put a hat, scarf or sweater on one of the statues – they have a great presence in the town!
From Antony Gormley:
How can you make a work that becomes a way of looking again at a city rather than
simply occupying it?
My solution was to repeatedly cast the same simple bodyform and put it around the
town, one on every contour the height of the sculpture.
So the whole of downtown Stavanger has been mapped in 1.95 meter contours. One
sculpture lies more or less anywhere on every contour line.
They are displaced vertebrae from an imagined column, the head of one connecting to
the foot of the other. They are all facing out to sea, 8 degrees west of true north, the
first one in the museum and the last in the sea.
These single-skin body forms are the simplest way to identify the space of the body
as a contained space, by wrapping the body as a single surface.
I think of them as uninscribed objects; they don’t memorialize anyone in particular.
Each one simply identifies a human space in space and shifts attention from the
intrinsic qualities of the sculptures to the context that contains them.
If you would like to see more photos of the Broken Column, Kalev Kevad has a great set of them here on flickr.
