IT’S A tale of art imitating life a little too well. Artist Antony Gormley, who is of Irish and German parentage, has found himself in hot water after his human sculptures, placed on high buildings around New York, prompted emergency calls from passersby who believed they were real people about to take their own lives.
The New York police department has confirmed it received 10 calls from people concerned at what they believed were suicide attempts.
The statues are part of Event Horizon, an installation that debuted in London in 2007 and transferred to New York at the end of last month. It features a total of 31 iron and glass fibre figures modelled from Gormley's own body, dotted around city streets and buildings.
The exhibition is mostly focused around the city’s Madison Square Park, but the presence of one of the statues on a ledge of the Empire State Building has caused particular uproar – not least because of the recent suicide of a 21-year-old Yale student at the building.
New York’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has come to the defence of Gormley, who won the Turner Prize in 1994. The mayor disagrees with those who are calling for the installation to be taken down.
“It’s a great exhibition,” he said. “It’s one of those things that gets publicity around the world, brings tourists to New York.”
The city's aggressive tabloid press have not been quite so generous. The New York Postcomplained the exhibition "stretches the bounds of common decency" and described its organisers as "bone-headed". The paper also lambasted Bloomberg for having "given his blessing to a public nuisance".
Gormley's history shows he neither shirks controversy nor shies away from it. One of his most acclaimed pieces is the huge Angel of the Northsculpture in Gateshead, England. A plan to create a 12-metre high sculpture of an ejaculating man in the US city of Seattle did not, however, come to fruition. Similarly a 46 metre "steel man" which was to be installed in the River Liffey was eventually shelved by the Dublin Docklands Authority due to a projected €1.6 million price tag.