In 1997, in Cuxhaven, Germany, the British sculptor Antony Gormley installed ANOTHER PLACE, a sculpture comprised of 100 life-sized iron figures, along the coast between the North Sea and the mouth of the Elbe River. The figures were spread 2.5 kilometers down the coast and a kilometer out to sea, facing the horizon and becoming submerged with the tides each day in September and October of that year.
The figures, “corpographs,” were cast from 17 molds of Gormley’s own body, each cast again five or six times, standing over six feet tall and weighing 1,430 pounds.
After Cuxhaven, ANOTHER PLACE traveled to Stavanger, Norway, and De Panne Beach, Belgium. In 2007 it was permanently installed in Merseyside, north of Liverpool, England. There the figures are spread across 3.2 kilometers on Crosby Beach and a kilometer out to sea, all facing the horizon, twelve degrees south of west.
From 1997 to 2013, Gormley cast another 100 sculptures for ANOTHER TIME, a series of figures sited individually around the world. Appearing in a range of outdoor environments, from cold waterfronts to urban rooftops, each work has a different orientation and is relatively isolated.
“ANOTHER TIME asks where the human being sits within the scheme of things. Each work is necessarily isolated, and is an attempt to bear witness to what it is like to be alive and alone in space and time.”
One of the 100 works, ANOTHER TIME XXI, has been positioned on Fulsam Rock in Margate, England, in partnership with the Turner Contemporary since last August. There it always becomes submerged at high tide, and is visible again about three hours before low tide, where it can be seen from the museum’s first floor balcony and from the shoreline behind the building.
ANOTHER TIME XXI will remain in Margate though November 30, 2018, by which time it will have seen stormy seas, snow, and some 650 tides with its gaze toward some point on the northern horizon.
November 9, 2018, update: Turner Contemporary announced that ANOTHER TIME XXI will remain in place until November 2020.