Jonathan Jones writes in today’s Guardian on-line: “If One & Other is an image of British democratic life in our time, it is a pessimistic one….Warhol was not celebrating modern life when he said everyone would be famous for 15 minutes: he was delivering a cynical prophesy of a diffuse, shiftless world…For me, this is a monument to that prophesy’s fulfillment. When you see it from across the square, the work resembles one of Gormley’s casts of the isolated human figure, which strode across the London skyline in 2007. Sirens wail, echoing around the tiny living statue.”
Anyone reading this blog will know that I’ve written about One & Other before. But this article is a thoughtful reconsideration of Gormley’s strange master-work, and echoes themes I have touched on here. But I could not better Jones’s description of the challenge of public art which highlights “the eerie distance between the intimacy of standing in the crowd and the vast living history painting” which is the world around us.
Graham Hitchen 