Antony Gormley: Artists must remain free of ideological control

From a speech by the sculptor at the Art Newspaper debate at London's Royal Academy

I think that my responsibility is to be an artist - to do what I can about what the last work I made tells me to do. My responsibility rests within my work. The morality comes from a daily practice of that work.

I think that my responsibility is to be an artist - to do what I can about what the last work I made tells me to do. My responsibility rests within my work. The morality comes from a daily practice of that work.

I'm concerned about whose morality I am supposed to be upholding when we start worrying about an artists's responsibility to anything wider than the very real responsibility of being an artist, which is - even more so since the great fights of the 20th century - a responsibility to be free of any ideological control.

So, my response to the world is to try to make my own. The relationship between what happens in the studio and what happens beyond its walls is one I don't want to fully understand. It's osmotic. What we do in recreating a world is the furthest from an illustration of the real world that you can get. To occupy that world fully is the only responsibility that we have.

There's been a strange osmosis since the election of this government, where artists are suddenly looked on as free social workers who can somehow massage the collective body, and I may well have been cast in that role. The fact is that something like the Angel of the North came about simply by me having made an angel once, and somebody having seen it, and thinking that they might like to make one permanently.

I'm not sure the Angel is really a monument, I'm not sure it upholds any definable moral values. I think its value is that it is simply an imaginative object in space at large, that might invite people to reflect upon their own condition, in the same way I might reflect on mine.