STAND on Waterloo Bridge until August 19 and you will still have the disquieting company of a life size bronze statue of the naked Antony Gormley. Then, like one of those Where’s Wally books from a few years ago, your eyes will scan the horizons to find more. You realise that all along the skyline bronze men, still, precarious, enigmatic, perch precariously on roof tops. Poised, waiting as if in that moment before a high dive. It’s not surprising that when they were first erected, London police were inundated with worried calls that people were trying to kill themselves, about to jump to their deaths.
He’s a big man Antony Gormley, well over six feet, but although these men are cast in his own form, they have an androgynous, asexual feel: everyman and no man. The 31 that are scattered around the Hayward Gallery looking towards his Blind Light exhibition, are silent witness to the chaotic city. As commuters rush towards their long journeys home and tourists jostle for views of the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament, and the Thames, with its busy trade of boats, runs beneath, these figures remain motionless, watchful. Are they our guardians or strangers in our midst?
It was coincidence that I saw them on July 7, exactly two years after the bombings in the London tube, when 50 people died and 700 were injured. It was coincidence that on that day I had come from Edgware Road, oblivious of the threat of terrorism until I saw a woman, in a burqa, placing flowers for her lost son beneath a small unpretentious plaque by the turnstiles; adding to the small pile of teddies, photos and poignant mementos of normal lives lost doing normal things.
With the dismantling of the car bombs only a week earlier, terrorism remains in people’s minds in London. But this is a city steeped in a history of resistance: blitzed and burnt, it has always bounced back. Yes, it is decadent, yes, it is diverse, yes, it is dangerous, but it is defiantly tolerant. Only moments earlier outside Westminster I had caught on camera a whooping group of totally topless girls on a double decker bus publicising a new employment agency, while on the lawn beneath tented Afghan refugees staged an anti British protest against the war.
Back on the bridge I am asked by a group of giggling Malaysian students to photograph them by Gormley’s naked form against the backdrop of a newly whitened St Paul’s and the glass Gherkin. The girls are wearing headscarves: the boys neat white shirts and standard blue trousers. There is a lot of shy arranging of themselves around him with some debate about covering his genitalia. “Do you like him?” I ask one girl. “ He’s scary,” she replies.
Only after, do I remember that Islam does not condone human images, let alone nude ones. Certainly there were those in their country who would disapprove, who would try and control their innocent enjoyment of a sunny day and a silent brown man. When home, would they bravely flash their photo around their families and professors or feel ashamed and secretly send their digital memories to their friends on hotmail?
As I freeze-framed the young Muslims hugging the faceless figure of our common humanity, I thought of the bombers hidden amongst us. Unless we strive to see them clearly, as I strained to spot the final bare bodies on the buildings, to understand what fuels their hate, they will remain a mystery and we will always fear them too.
