Time was, the most important and perhaps the only desideratum of civic sculpture was that it should not be ambiguous. From a heroic imperial admiral to the Statue of Liberty, and on to the hammer-wielding Stakhanovite worker, such pieces allowed no doubt as to what they meant. Modernism, morally neutral and often hard to make sense of, overturned such certainties, so much so that for half a century monumental three-dimensional pieces almost ceased to be put up by local or regional authorities. Antony Gormley is one of the most prominent of those who have revived the practice.
Part of his appeal is the way in which his work again seeks social and moral significance, but with a marked difference compared to the old monumental sculptors. Meaning now comes not with a programmatic set of certainties, but rather with an insistence on the power of suggestion and ambivalence. By the manipulation of ambiguity, works such as "Another Place", which has just gone on display on Merseyside, can allow us to play interpretive games, adopting varied and different positions in relation to them.
Two outstandingly popular community-inspired works, which also represent the polar extremes of Gormley's output over the past 25 years, exemplify the development of this moral and perceptual playfulness in his work. Gateshead's "The Angel of the North" (1998) on monumental guard duty over the Great North Road looks at first glance like a post-industrial archangel Michael, crossed with that slightly jokey idea of the artist-as-aviator that so obsessed the Italian Futurists. While fusing the religious impulse with the methodology of heavy industry, it is also a statement of singularity, of the artist's self-exposure and, perhaps, his self-importance. The rigid wings welded to the shoulders of the figure - a representation of Gormley himself - do not enfold the landscape or participate in it. Instead they seem poised to soar above it.
At the other extreme is "Field for the British Isles" (1993) - since recreated in other countries - one of whose most attractive features is the collaborative method by which it was made. Gormley assembled teams of volunteers from all generations at St Helens, Merseyside, and invited them over a couple of days to form as many small snowman-shaped figures from clay as possible using just their hands, and a pencil to make the eye-holes. The 40,000 figures that resulted, after firing in brick kilns, are installed in a dense pack. The title of the piece, and the medium, point to a planted field, a landscape. But seen on the artist's insistence from a single viewpoint, the figures seem akin to a crowd in a stadium or city square, in which we may suppose them to have come either voluntarily or by force, either in celebration or in protest. In any case, with those countless eye-holes swivelling towards you, "Field" remains a representation of a human force-field of rare intensity.
"Another Place" occupies a conceptual space almost exactly halfway between these two Gormley classics. With it, the artist returns to Merseyside, this time sponsored by the South Sefton Development Trust, to provide an installation of a hundred cast-iron men on Crosby Beach. The life-size figures, cast like "The Angel" directly from the artist's own body (but in iron, not steel), have been planted across a large area of the beach, between the high- and low-tide marks. They stand in positions plotted on a chart and fixed by GPS, welded to 3m-deep piles driven deep into the sand to prevent their removal, and all staring out to sea on an identical compass bearing. For the next eighteen months they will be rhythmically submerged and revealed, eroded and encrusted, by the movements of the ocean.
In an article published over the weekend, Gormley has sought to tie his installation in with the G8 conference and the cause of African poverty. This looks at first sight a touch opportunistic, but the situation of "Another Place", and its power of suggestion, does give the idea currency. The hundred horizon-scanning figures are a community like the clay forms in "Field" but now no longer shoulder-to-shoulder but scattered, no longer facing but turning away, its members as lonely despite their community as the "Angel of the North". The direction in which they all gaze from their position close to the mouth of the Mersey estuary is towards the west, which in this case means not just the setting sun but also Ireland and America.
Gormley's tide-washed figures cannot fail to call to mind the tidal movements of people into and out of these shipping lanes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hundreds of thousands came this way in flight from the poverty of rural Ireland. Making landfall in Liverpool, they spread out into the Lancashire hinterland, providing labour for mills and factories, and they came back to beaches like Crosby during holidays. Looking at Gormley's figures, I imagined my own ancestors, who made that journey themselves, standing in that way up to their knees in the waves, staring back across the Irish Sea to where they were born.
But the human tide flowed in the other direction too, as the Mersey was one of the main jumping-off points for American emigration. Gormley's figures might just as well stand not for homesick immigrants but for aspirant New World emigrants.
The post-Romantic Victorians regarded art as a measure of its maker's moral worth, while 20th-century Marxists considered it valuable only insofar as it served the people. In both these cases it was taken as read that art had significance and meaning. The secret of Antony Gormley's popular success in this country is that he has managed the difficult trick of refreshing these venerable, hardly fashionable aesthetics, but in a spirit that plays up both with modernist ambivalence and monumental scale.
"Another Place: Antony Gormley" is at Crosby Beach until November 2006
