Antony Gormley

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety eight and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a sculptor. After a fairly conventional upbringing, he was born in London, went to a Catholic public school and then to Cambridge. He set off to travel the world. In India, he learned to focus on his own body through meditation, and once back in England, he began to develop the idea of body sculptures, using his own as the main model for his work. In 1994, he won the Turner Prize, and earlier this year, unveiled the piece which will unquestionably attract lasting public attention. Overlooking the motorway outside Gateshead, it's called the Angel of the North. Sixty-five feet high and with the wingspan of a jumbo jet, it's a permanent example of its creator's belief that art should have a place outside galleries and museums. He is Anthony Gormley. Indeed, I think, Anthony, your angel can claim to be the most viewed piece of sculpture in the world, can't I? I think somebody estimated 33 million a year pass by it.

Antony Gormley1:26

That sounds that sounds incredible. I think we'll have to wait and see. But it it's certainly more in one year than I could ever hope to reach doing gallery shows.

Presenter1:35

And that's a statistic that delights you, is it? That's what you like?

Antony Gormley1:39

I think it's terribly important to liberate art from the straitjacket of both the museum and the private gallery. I think both of them are very, very specialised spaces that in some way are almost like hospitals in the kind of support that they give for what they show. And I think it's very important to see whether art can survive as part of the fabric of the built world. And that's what the experiment of making the angel was all about.

Presenter2:07

But it's an uncomfortable

Antony Gormley2:07

Uh

Presenter2:09

if I may say so, um, piece of work, isn't it? It's an odd mixture of of of the body and and the aeroplane, really. These huge wings on the side that look very ungainly, this rather fine body, your body.

Antony Gormley2:22

Thank you, Sue.

Presenter2:23

In the middle there.

Antony Gormley2:26

But I think the

Antony Gormley2:27

I think that the point is that it's an angel that's lost its innocence. This is the image in a sense of those powers that formerly we attributed to divine or angelic forces that we have firmly within our own grasp. You know, we can fly. We can hear voices like in this medium of bodies that are absent. There is a sense in which the body has been extended probably more in the 20th century than in any other time by the technology that human beings have invented that has given us powers that would formerly have been considered godlike.

Antony Gormley3:05

Now this angel, I think, has those attributes, but by having wings has lost its arms, and has lost those faculties of humankind to make, and to embrace, and to be part of the fellowship of man.

Speaker 23:20

Yeah.

Antony Gormley3:21

And I think it it's asking very serious questions about our relationship with our tools, whether these are enablers or burdens. And I think it's an ambivalent image.

Presenter3:33

So but there's there's undoubtedly, and indeed you confirm it in what you say, awariness about the time in which we live, and perhaps awariness about the future.

Antony Gormley3:43

Well, I think we are all aware, uh that

Antony Gormley3:47

There are more people on this planet, that there are more wars between those people that live on the planet, that in some senses none of the benefits of technology seem to have solved the basic problems of human existence. And I think slowly we're realizing that actually we have to solve these things for ourselves. We're no longer God's children born to do His will, as I was taught as a child. but that somehow we have to be creative people, all of us, artists and non-artists alike, in making the future. And that that is a serious responsibility. And I hope that that's what this image is about. It's not about some divine messenger that is going to, in a sentimental way, give us comfort. It's actually about recognizing what it means to be human now.

Presenter4:42

Tell me about your first record.

Antony Gormley4:43

My first record is um from nineteen sixty eight, it's the White album of The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gum.

Antony Gormley4:52

For me this period is about me in a way escaping from the confines of of home.

Antony Gormley5:01

becoming aware of a wider world in which sex and drugs and rock and roll uh were all part of the blandishments of uh growing up. And I think it has the most fantastic surreal lyrics that obviously are to do with sex, but they're also to do with violence. There's also a wonderful moment in it.

Antony Gormley5:26

which describes

Antony Gormley5:28

The touch.

Antony Gormley5:30

like a velvet hand on a

Antony Gormley5:33

Window pane.

Antony Gormley5:35

In a sense this this

Antony Gormley5:37

Something about that that connects with sculpture for me.

Antony Gormley5:41

Something about touch.

Antony Gormley5:43

Something that invites touch, something that engages us physically.

Speaker 45:49

This is a warm gun on my children.

Speaker 45:54

When I hold you in my arms.

Speaker 45:59

And I feel my finger on your trigger.

Speaker 46:05

No, nobody can do me no harm because

Presenter6:15

The Beatles and Happiness is a Warm Gun from the White album.

Presenter6:19

Unlike the Angel of the North, Anthony Gormley, your work in the main is on a life-size scale, isn't it? Real scale in the real world. Lead or iron figures sitting or standing or hanging at impossible angles halfway up a wall. But it's always your body. The mould is taken from your body, which means that somebody else has to make the plastercast on you. Why does it have to be your body?

Antony Gormley6:43

Well, I think, you know, the traditional image of the sculptor, particularly the male sculptor, is somebody that uh makes an idealized female body, hopefully very sexy, at arm's length out of a lump of marble.

Antony Gormley6:58

And

Antony Gormley7:00

I think the problem with that is that it is all at arm's length. It's about making a resemblance often or an idealization. And I want to make my work about

Antony Gormley7:13

Life about the lived moment.

Antony Gormley7:15

And I want to make it from the inside rather than from the outside.

Presenter7:19

So the space inside the sculpture is as important to you as the space outside.

Antony Gormley7:24

Absolutely, and I think until recently all of the work was hollow. I mean it w they were I call them body cases, I don't call them figures, because in fact they're just a kind of very intimate architecture that represents not the body, but the space that the body occupies.

Presenter7:42

But how do you do it? You take off all your clothes?

Antony Gormley7:45

Take off all my clothes. I started covering myself in Vaseline, but that's very, very, very uh sticky and and unpleasant. So I very swiftly moved on to cling film as a as the best membrane to separate you from the plaster.

Presenter7:59

Actually, that's pretty uncomfortable, isn't it?

Antony Gormley8:01

Well, actually in the wintertime, in a cold studio, you're very, very thankful.

Presenter8:06

Because after the Kling film you have lots of plaster of Paris put on you, little bits of gauze and scrim and so on.

Antony Gormley8:10

Now

Presenter8:11

Eventually you are totally encased and you can only breathe through a tiny little orifice of of the mouth or the nose. What do you do? Put a straw up your nose or

Antony Gormley8:19

No, no, I don't like the strawberry no, I have I have used that. Um

Antony Gormley8:24

I usually do breathe out of my mouth and uh

Presenter8:27

But only just. I've seen pictures of you doing it. I mean, it's because you're pretty encased, literally.

Antony Gormley8:32

Well, the I think the point is that you have to

Antony Gormley8:35

I think, be in a certain frame of mind, and you have to be able to be extremely still and

Antony Gormley8:42

If you're concentrating very hard on being very still, you're you're not breathing very heavily. You don't need a lot of air at all.

Presenter8:48

So are you meditating inside there?

Antony Gormley8:50

Well, I think I think the the the process definitely comes out of my experience of meditation in India. And that certainly gave me my first experience of this idea of the space of the body. I mean when you close your eyes

Antony Gormley9:05

And you're awake.

Antony Gormley9:08

You are in a space and I remember having very powerful experiences as a child before sleep of that space behind the eyes, first of all being very, very contained, like a tiny compressed little match box of a space.

Antony Gormley9:27

And it would be very, very frightening and claustrophobic and then as I spent time in it it would open out and open out and somehow it would get cooler.

Antony Gormley9:37

and more and more like the night sky, but without stars, that went on and on and on. And in some senses I I I found that space again in meditation, and that's where I go when I am being moulded.

Speaker 49:53

Hmm.

Antony Gormley9:53

And I I do it with my wife, who's, you know, extremely adept and with whom I have a, you know, very profound trust. And uh, in a sense, she's responsible for, you know, ma giving me birth every time.

Presenter10:10

But eventually she has to cut you out of this case with a little saw. And can that be a bloody business?

Antony Gormley10:16

Yes, can. Actually, it was very funny. We

Antony Gormley10:19

We had been using you know fret saw blades because they seemed like uh a reasonable tool and then I was teaching in the Fine Arts Academy in Munich and this young student was making body casting and he said oh you must get one of these Swiss plaster saws, they're just the thing and uh we did use it and I I'm still carrying the scars today. I have a I have a seam line that runs almost all around me and I didn't feel the saw was so sharp that I didn't feel what was happening but that was the bloodiest moment that has ever occurred. You know the the occasional little bit of um bloodletting isn't a bad thing I don't think.

Presenter10:57

Tell me about record number two.

Antony Gormley10:59

Record number two is Hari Prasad Chaurasia playing Ragha Jai Jaivanti. This is just the most wonderful sound in the world and it reminds me of my time in Adya, which is in South India near to Madras. I stayed for three months in the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, which has a wonderful park, and in the middle of the park is a great banyan tree. And every evening a flute player would come and sit and play this kind of music.

Presenter11:59

Hari Prasad Charasia and Dilshad Khan playing Raga Jaijai Vanti. India then, Anthony, was where you decided to become a sculptor, was it?

Antony Gormley12:09

Yes, it was. I had a choice, it seemed to me, between

Antony Gormley12:14

carrying on with my Buddhist meditation and maybe entering a monastery and becoming a Buddhist monk.

Antony Gormley12:22

or returning to the West and becoming a sculptor.

Presenter12:27

Why why a sculptor more than any other kind of artist?

Antony Gormley12:33

the most challenging of of work. I mean, I think the

Antony Gormley12:38

I got quite good at drawing and, you know, making pictures of things, making representations of things.

Presenter12:43

What as a child?

Antony Gormley12:43

What as a child?

Antony Gormley12:45

Well, as a child and during my travels before I went to art school.

Presenter12:48

But did you sculpt at all?

Antony Gormley12:51

I remember at school, I remember at school taking an old uh carpentry chisel and trying to uh carve the cliff behind the house. Um I was at St Wilfrid's, which was sort of up on a hill and there was this big uh limestone cliff. And I I I started with this, you know, about a five foot high face.

Presenter13:12

You also buried things as a child, didn't you?

Antony Gormley13:15

Yeah, I did a lot of that.

Antony Gormley13:17

At a museum.

Antony Gormley13:18

when I was about six.

Antony Gormley13:20

my maternal grandfather gave me.

Antony Gormley13:23

a wonderful collection of Iron Age and Neolithic and Stone Age implements, halfted stone axes and that kind of thing. And that uh that the idea of getting things out of the ground that were

Antony Gormley13:39

connected very closely with people's lives and bodies.

Presenter13:43

Which is went why you went on to study archaeology, of course.

Antony Gormley13:45

Yeah, maybe. But th the idea that I could contribute to that and sort of make things that would, as it were, exist in a di different time frame to human life.

Antony Gormley13:56

And I think that's the really exciting thing about sculpture. It's an incredibly resistant and stupid thing to be doing at the end of the 20th century, which is, you know, as it were, speed technology and the speed of electronic communication is the thing that gets us all so excited. And here is sculpture that in some senses goes at geological time and is, you know, in a way resisting all of that.

Presenter14:18

But this is wonderfully still, like that's the whole point, isn't it?

Antony Gormley14:21

Yeah, I mean I think if you think of what the primal gesture of sculpture is, which is in a sense the standing stone, taking something that was that's lying on the surface of the earth and by this simple gesture of standing it vertical, it becomes a marker in time, in space. It says here we are, we exist and this is in a way a proof of our existence.

Antony Gormley14:48

And against this we can measure our existence. Well, all of those things I think are at the heart, uh the the the essential condition of sculpture, which is what I get very, very excited about.

Presenter15:01

Tell me about your next tripodance, number three.

Antony Gormley15:03

My next record is uh Lou Reed, Walking on the Wild Side. This record uh reminds me of Andy Warhol, of The Velvet Underground, of in a way my first tastes of New York, of the merging of boundaries, of transsexuality, of I guess

Antony Gormley15:27

All of the

Antony Gormley15:29

Puritan moral values that in some senses cripples America being countered by this fantastic, iconoclastic spirit.

Speaker 415:42

Holler came from Miami, FL A.

Speaker 415:47

Hitchhiked away across USA.

Speaker 415:52

Plucked her eyebrows on the way Shaved her legs and then he was a she She says hey babe, take a walk on the wild side

Speaker 416:01

Said hey honey, take a walk on the wild side

Presenter16:10

Blue Read and Walk on the Wild Side. So Cambridge, India.

Presenter16:16

Decide not to be Buddhist monk, come back here, art school, and you begin to work. You begin to Now a lot of that early work, it seemed to me, the body was very absent. There were kind of well you describe them, sheets draped over figures.

Antony Gormley16:31

Yeah, I got one of the first pieces that I got involved with on coming back from India was trying to recreate the experience of early morning in Calcutta railway station, where you know every five yards there's somebody sleeping under a dhoti uh where they've used their uh the cloth that normally they would use round their waists as as a kind of tent. And it's very, very powerful somehow that.

Antony Gormley17:02

Abstraction.

Antony Gormley17:04

This is the minimum space that one person needs to occupy. It looks like a very fine shell.

Antony Gormley17:12

And you know this is where

Antony Gormley17:15

Somebody lives.

Antony Gormley17:16

In a way you don't know.

Antony Gormley17:18

It's a bit like Shroda's cat. You don't know whether they're alive or dead actually. And that's a very real thing in India.

Presenter17:23

Hmm.

Presenter17:26

So you soaked a sheet in in plaster and set it

Antony Gormley17:29

and placed it not over myself but over I I got various of my friends to uh lie on the floor and and took actually old hospital sheets, immersed them in plaster and just placed them over their bodies. And they were the very first body sculptures that I made, but they were they were very patently, evidently like empty shells.

Presenter17:50

Yes, but as I say, the body wasn't on view. And neither was it in another of your pieces of work, which I think people well may recall, called BED, which is a kind of

Presenter18:03

double mattress made out of w what six thousand slices of stale old mother's pride.

Antony Gormley18:09

Yes, it was about six hundred loaves that we got, so I don't know what the yes it is about six thousand. No, it'll be more than that. It'd be it would be six hundred times I think there's twenty three slices in the uh average medium sliced mother's pride loaf.

Presenter18:24

Mm-hmm.

Antony Gormley18:25

Um

Presenter18:25

But you laid them out and formed this beautiful bed.

Antony Gormley18:28

Yes, it was about the size of a double bed, and over about four months I ate my own volume out of that pile of

Presenter18:34

You personally ate it.

Antony Gormley18:36

Yes, it it

Antony Gormley18:38

I wouldn't advise anybody else to do it unless they want you to recreate this experiment.

Presenter18:44

No butter, no jam.

Antony Gormley18:46

I'd worked it out very carefully. There was a drawing on the wall and I knew how many slices I had to eat each day. In the process of this, obviously this very highly factory produced and synthetic foodstuff actually became mouldy and so it did begin another form of organic existence. And each slice became like a field because it had these wonderful kind of patterns of green mould.

Presenter19:15

Next record.

Antony Gormley19:17

The next record is uh

Antony Gormley19:19

Iwao Yonitani playing uh Tokachi Umauta, which is um

Antony Gormley19:26

Well, it's a shakuhachi, uh flute.

Antony Gormley19:31

And the first time I came across this instrument uh played live was uh when I was walking across Weno Park and I saw this white dressed figure with a basket over it uh its head, with a with a flute coming out of it, and it was somebody playing the shakahachi.

Antony Gormley19:53

And I think there's nothing

Antony Gormley19:55

quite like it, this minor key, this haunting, misty, immediately or in this misty Japanese rocky landscape.

Antony Gormley20:06

Immersed in an elemental world.

Presenter20:40

Iwao Yanitani playing Takachi Umatu

Presenter20:43

And then, Anthony Gormley, after 1981, your work, it seems to me, changed radically because the human body became present. It was no longer an imprint.

Presenter20:54

Was there a reason for that radical change?

Antony Gormley20:58

Well, I'd been uh you know using my body

Antony Gormley21:02

In implied ways, um I I'd made bed and then I made room which was actually my own clothes.

Speaker 221:06

Yeah.

Antony Gormley21:10

peeled off me and made into an enclosure that was about twenty foot square that looked a bit like a boxing ring. Um and it seemed very obvious that the next step was to actually use my body directly, both as material, as tool and as subject.

Presenter21:27

But I've seen it suggested that it coincided with your uh you and Vican producing your first baby, and I wondered if there was something in that that

Antony Gormley21:35

That's an intriguing idea that Ivo and the body Casis arrive at the same time.

Presenter21:41

Well it's it's it's just the uh perhaps it's a a heightened sense of the of the vulnerability, if you like, of the human form.

Antony Gormley21:49

Everybody has remarked on the similarity between my work and the figures in Pompeii and Herculaneum. I think there is a sense in which those works come out of the results of a natural disaster. And in a sense, I think that the abiding concern of my work is to make forms that in some way warn or provide some kind of talisman against the potential of a humanly created disaster. So that idea of mortality is very linked to what I conceive of as their reason for being.

Presenter22:33

What do your children say about your work?

Antony Gormley22:33

Uh

Antony Gormley22:37

They're very, very

Antony Gormley22:39

uh open-minded I mean uh in

Antony Gormley22:41

The way that only children can be, and they're completely unawed by it. I can remember Guy when he was seven.

Antony Gormley22:49

coming into the studio when I'd just made Iron Man, which is a piece in the centre of Birmingham, which is twenty two foot high, and I was r you know, rather pleased with myself. I thought this was a um an impressive bit of work. He came into the studio and he said, Daddy,

Antony Gormley23:03

Head's too big.

Antony Gormley23:04

And he just climbed straight up the uh straight up the scaffolding and got somebody to give him a saw and started kind of and he was quite ab he was absolutely right. There was no question about it. He's al he's always been like that.

Presenter23:16

It's probably good for you.

Antony Gormley23:17

Yeah.

Presenter23:18

Record number five.

Antony Gormley23:20

Record number five is

Antony Gormley23:22

The wonderful Gilberto Gilles, with his version of Stevie Wonders, I just called to say I love you. I've been lucky enough to spend some very, very happy times in Brazil, both in in the Amazon making field and in Rio. And uh I just think it's one of those blessed places on the face of this earth.

Speaker 423:49

Where my car

Speaker 423:53

They are the walls.

Speaker 423:57

Neyun sinal du Cell, near Magedon.

Speaker 424:07

Name my

Speaker 424:11

It's pain

Presenter24:11

See ya.

Presenter24:14

Gilberto Gilles with his Portuguese version of Stevie Wonders I Just Called to Say I Love You.

Presenter24:19

You mentioned Field just now, which is one of the works, the series of works for which you won the Turner Prize in eighty four. L let's describe first of all how you did it, Field. Just describe me, because you've done it in various parts of the world now, haven't you?

Antony Gormley24:33

Yes, I mean field uh necessitates getting fifty tons of clay and uh anything up to two hundred people and uh sitting down and remaking the population of the world, um but in hand-sized uh body surrogates.

Presenter24:47

Those people making them.

Antony Gormley24:47

Those people

Antony Gormley24:48

Yeah, and uh

Presenter24:50

What directions do you give them when you?

Antony Gormley24:51

There's only three rules. One is that they should be hand-sized, the other is that they should stand up, and the third is that they should have eyes that that look in in one direction.

Presenter25:00

So they squeeze these things in their hands.

Antony Gormley25:02

And everybody finds their own way to make it. And when it's made, we then completely occupy a gallery to the complete exclusion of the audience. So you can't get into the building or you can't get into the bit of the building that this occupation is taking place in. And you look through the door, and unwittingly you have become the subject of the art.

Presenter25:17

You can only pierce through the door.

Speaker 225:18

Bunk.

Presenter25:28

Because all those vacant eyes are looking at you.

Antony Gormley25:28

Because all

Presenter25:31

And how does he

Presenter25:32

How does it differ though? Because you've done it in Australia, Brazil, St Helens in Lancashire, Sweden, the Amazon.

Antony Gormley25:38

Yeah.

Presenter25:39

Are they different?

Antony Gormley25:40

It's very, very dangerous, this, I think. But I mean, there's no question that the British field looks like animated root vegetables. The Swedish field looks like tortured monk scream kind of figures. They're very, very psychotic. And then the Mexican field, which was actually all made by blood-related people. This one family, Donna Pascuala, had had 22 children and 18 of them worked on field with their wives and children. Has the greatest consistency of form and the forms are incredibly

Antony Gormley26:17

Uh pure.

Presenter26:19

Record number six.

Antony Gormley26:21

is Martin Hayes. I'm playing Brown Coffin, which is a traditional jig, but played by somebody who became a very accomplished jazz musician. And that lilting, wonderful plungency of the Irish very Celtic feeling, is slightly, slightly modified by a kind of modernist jazz idiom.

Presenter27:19

Martin Hayes playing the brown coffin accompanied by Randall Bays on the guitar. And now, Anthony Gormley, you're taking on the Royal Academy, because you want to take over the courtyard in the front there, to coincide with the Summer Exhibition. What do you want to do in it?

Antony Gormley27:33

Well, I made a piece uh three years ago called Critical Mass. It's

Antony Gormley27:38

Twelve sculptures that have been cast five times each, and actually they describe a kind of evolution. The smallest one is very, very crouched and looks at the ground, and the tallest one is actually standing and looking at the sky. But none of them are going to be presented in the way that they were moulded. They will be l uh either hanging upside down from the façade of the building or lying as if after a massacre in the central reservation of the courtyard.

Antony Gormley28:10

And the idea is really very simple. I think that the Academy with its royal prefix represents in a way a kind of hierarchy of Western values. With its celebration of cultural heroes, there's a frieze of Michelangelo, Cellini, I don't know, Rembrandt, that is over the front doors of the Academy.

Antony Gormley28:36

And I thought this was a very apposite place to think about the victims of the twentieth century. And I think there are very strong references in this work to Rwanda, to Cambodia, um, to the more recent conflicts of Bosnia.

Presenter28:50

And again your work will be outside the gallery, not inside it. And again you will have this procession of people going in the you know, Middle England will pass by for the summer exhibition.

Antony Gormley28:54

And again

Antony Gormley29:01

Yes, I hope it'll give them something to think about. Um and uh I think it's a perfect it's a it's a it's a perfect uh context. I think it is a perfect context. Um

Presenter29:05

I think it's perfect.

Antony Gormley29:13

for uh making a work.

Antony Gormley29:17

But I think

Antony Gormley29:19

talks about in some senses what lies or what what what is the price for the elevation of the body.

Presenter29:28

Pickwood number seven.

Antony Gormley29:30

Record number seven is this extraordinary um

Antony Gormley29:36

A bit of music by Chris Isaacs called Wicked Game. Now I first heard this at the Chisholm Hale Gallery when I went to see an installation by Pippolotti Rist, who's a Swiss artist who makes videos. And the video projection was of this fantastic blue undersea world with shafts of sunlight and Pippolotti herself swimming about with pink teacups coming from one side or the other and ever since I saw that video I can't hear this music without thinking of that watery world.

Speaker 430:14

The world was on fire and no one could save me but you.

Speaker 430:22

Strange world design will make foolish people

Speaker 430:34

I wanna fall in love

Presenter30:42

Chris Isaacs and Wicked Game. Well now, Anthony, could you hack it on a desert island?

Antony Gormley30:48

Oh yeah.

Antony Gormley30:50

I'm looking at the forgotten about that.

Presenter30:50

Forgotten about that, Bent. Are you?

Antony Gormley30:53

I think

Antony Gormley30:55

I I I was lying in my bath this morning and thinking about this island. I've got a very clear picture of it. It's about five miles long and uh three miles wide.

Antony Gormley31:04

It has a quite a rocky mountain at one end that has grassy bits on it, and uh I thought I'd probably spend summer nights on the grassy bit, um, because I might get a bit fed up with the sound of the breaking surf down by the sea.

Antony Gormley31:20

I don't think I would be desperate to

Antony Gormley31:24

Try and reinvent civilization.

Antony Gormley31:27

I think that I would want to

Antony Gormley31:29

try and find a way of living that was uh in tune with whatever was possible there. And I hope that there are you know enough breadfruit trees or um yeah, w what I really like is uh mango, papaya, guava and banana, and I would be uh really very happy.

Presenter31:51

Last record.

Antony Gormley31:52

My last record is um David Bowie uh and uh his wonderful song Starman. From a very small boy I've always been really moved by that head at the Museum of Mankind and the f the the fact that it is an example of those heads that stare up into the sky, in some way witnessing the fact that human life

Antony Gormley32:17

is not the only life.

Speaker 432:23

Waiting in the sky, he's told us not to blow it,'cause he knows it's all worthwhile. Let the children lose it.

Speaker 432:34

Children Museum belongs to Children's Boogie.

Presenter32:50

David Bowie and Starman. If you could only take one of the eight records, Anthony, which one would you take?

Antony Gormley32:56

I think I'd I'd have Harry Prasad,'cause uh he'd he'd keep me company.

Presenter33:01

What about your book?

Antony Gormley33:04

Well, I've had Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope um sitting on my shelves waiting for me to have the time to read it, and it's three volumes, and it is uh a study of Utopia, its failure, but our continuing need of it.

Presenter33:20

And your luxury.

Antony Gormley33:21

I'm going to spend my time with the fishes, so I would like uh I'd I'd like a snorkel and mask, please. Can I have both?

Presenter33:28

You can.

Antony Gormley33:29

Thank you.

Presenter33:30

Anthony Gormley, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Antony Gormley33:33

Thank you.

Speaker 233:42

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.