Tales of a Museum Guard part 2

Antony Gormley, Field, 35,000 terracotta figures, each 6 inches high

As a guard, you're constantly dealing with people as well as the art that you're watching over. Sometimes though, things just go wrong. A case in point was during the Antony Gormley show at the Modern in Fort Worth during the autumn of 1991. A family of brick makers in Mexico was commissioned by Gormley to make 35,000 handmade terracotta figurines to be used as an installation in various venues around the world. They were installed at the Modern in a lower level gallery space just eight steps down from the main floor, engulfing the entire space they stood in. A few days after the opening, a woman had visited the museum and was paying more attention to what was on the walls rather than where she was walking. As she stepped down the eight stairs to enter the gallery where the figurines were installed, she quickly found herself as one of them; another figure in a multitude of figures. The guard on duty had been slow to respond as she had descended into the terracotta abyss, too late to stop her as she blithely ambled down the wrong path altogether. As she was helped to her feet, embarrassed yet unhurt, she explained that she had thought the sea of orange was simply carpeting. So, as a museum guard, not only does one have to deal with the actions and attitudes of museum-goers, one also has to deal with their perceptual problems as well.