+ + + + + + + +

I was visiting Louisiana on a perfect Sunday in July. An hour away from Copenhagen, its sculpture garden is one of the best places on earth. Works by Moore, Arp, and Noguchi shimmer among a landscape of grassy hills, and people rest under trees as ocean waves roll over the rocks below. 

This must have been my fourth visit here, and I was speeding through the exhibits so I could make my way outside. There was a section of small Scandinavian sculptures that I hadn’t seen before: some had smooth forms and others had elongated stone faces. 

I turned the corner into the next room and scanned the space from left to right. There was a figure in the near right corner made of weathered metal. It stood facing the center of the room, knees and torso slightly bent, arms tucked against the chest. The body was divided by welding lines, forming a loose grid on its surface. 

As I looked at it, I felt an afterimage of life. I finally read the panel and found that it was created by Antony Gormley, who was wrapped in gauze as the sculpture was cast around him.

A chill passed through my body. I was transposing myself into the shell in front of me, affected by a sense of morbid sympathy. As I looked at the clenched fists beneath the featureless face, I bathed in a haze of awe, fear, and excitement. The hole atop its head seemed to slowly exhale, saturating the room with dark air. This metal incense held my gaze for another minute until I looked away, dropping to one knee and scribbling thoughts in my notepad.

By placing himself within the sculpture, Gormley has preserved a life-threatening experience in a highly permanent physical form. A moment typically re-enacted through mental images confronts the viewer, invested with the strength of superhuman materials. Similar objects invested with human qualities are brought to mind: tombstones, shrines, figurines. Some of these are linked to a tangible experience, and others are not. The common ground is their power to suggest, which creates an internal reality. 

I imagine a world where at the moment of death, each body is frozen into an immovable object, similar to the ruins of Pompeii. Every day, we would have to navigate a maze of statues that has the density of an unkempt cornfield. Fortunately, reminders of mortality are usually not so explicit. 

On the other hand, any context where death is imagined is probably accurate. A scratch on a rock may be 1 year old or 200 years old, and I’m sure somebody has died on nearly every street corner I walk across. 

Monuments to life are an interesting phenomenon. One might see them as an attempt to concentrate something omnipresent into a discrete boundary. Gormley titled his sculpture Vent, which implies an opposite definition. Some objects may be intended to delimit death, but others are intended to amplify it. They demonstrate that it bleeds into the world from all sources by turning a typically faint essence into a potion that burns the throat like a shot of alcohol. 

Both interpretations of a monument are ultimately fantasies, depicting human control over a higher process. However, highlighting a futile effort allows us to better chart the limits of existence. It might be impossible to define what we are in a positive sense, but focusing on negatives can make the circle of possibilities smaller. 

─────────────────────────

Due to the deliberate organization of a depiction, it may be more comprehensible than the truth, although its impact is lessened. Your first kiss is something you cannot forget, but it is also so vivid that contemplating it on the spot is nearly impossible. A strong artistic depiction lies somewhere in between: it retains some of the power of reality and it alludes to the ideas of the creator, which lays out a path to understanding. The presence of intent is sensed, and the viewer pieces together elements to create a subjective sense of order. 

In the case of Vent, the title of the work suggests a flow moving in two directions: the viewer lends the sculpture a lifelike quality, and the sculpture emanates a sense of death. This creates a sense that the vessel is both full and hollow, a central incongruity that mirrors human experience. Walking through your grandmother’s house after her funeral, seeing things arranged exactly the way she left them. Driving past a vibrant cluster of ribbons and flowers on the highway. Looking into your dad’s eyes at the moment that life leaves his body. 

Like a penciled note on the pages of an old book, the border between unliving and living is intoxicatingly blurred. Seeing life in objects is a deliberate error in perception, arising from an inherent sense of sympathy. After all, honoring the dead is the least we can do: they managed to complete the herculean task of living. However, this sympathy also works in reverse, as we view the meeting of our own fate with trepidation and imagine how we will react once it finally overtakes us. 

Facing death is a surreal experience: we simultaneously hallucinate life and recoil at reality, we are callously self-concerned and beautifully considerate. Although Vent captures an external plight, its power lies in the ability to evoke memory and sympathy, creating an internal tension that is instructive, exhilarating and terrifying.

In an empty room, rusted metal, cold skin, and pungent air give way to a beating heart.