Antony Gormley + The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi

“The way in which the work affects you somatically is strongest when things are off balance or standing on the wall, i.e. levers the room out of its repose, gives the idea is everything moving and nothing is fixed.” –Antony Gormley
In their talk about nothing, the artist and the monk discuss the relationship of body to space, the non-existent self, and the potential of art to involve the viewer in self-reflexive reverie.

Antony Gormley is a British sculptor whose work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal casts. From March to August of 2010, New York City played host to Gormley’s most recent installation of Event Horizon, a work consisting of 31 life-size casts of his body which were installed on top of buildings around Madison Square.
Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is the Founder and Director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Voluntarily entering into a Buddhist monastery at the age of 10, he studied traditional Indo-Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism and was ordained by His Holiness The Dalai Lama who is his spiritual mentor.