Bodybuilding

This essay was written as a catalogue essay to accompany Antony Gormley's exhibition Expansion Field at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland in 2014 (published by Zentrum Paul Klee and Hatje Cantz). The question of how we speak about artworks connects to the question of how they speak to us: how can a thing—a hunk of inert, inanimate matter—make a claim on us, when does a mute object begin to call upon us, how does it activate our senses and feelings, and why does it provoke our sociability in the way it does? Why does a mute object make us want to talk so much, and how can a lifeless object induce the feeling that we ourselves are somehow more alive for being in its vicinity? Comay's essay connects these questions with an investigation of the basic ontology and logic of Gormley's sculpture: the question of imprint and reprint, where Gormley captures a singular pocket of lived time and space in a receptive medium which forms an infinitely repeatable mould.