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Beauty
in the Brand:
The work
of Andy Goldsworthy as challenge to radical relativism
Andy Goldsworthy’s
work is known across the developed world for its delicate rendering
of the ephemeral beauty of the natural environment, brought to
an enthusiastic public via stunning photography and beautiful
picture books. This is the first section of the second Fourth
Door essay on some of the wider issues, elements and contexts
of Goldsworthy’s work. The full essay will appear in the
issue
7 of the forthcoming Fourth Door Review.
by Oliver
Lowenstein.
In
the comments book to Andy Goldsworthy's Time exhibition at the
Barbican in the high summer of 2000, one visitor had written Goldsworthy's
work 'has a beautiful meditation to it'. Repeatedly it is this
word 'beautiful' which is associated in the public mind with what
Goldsworthy makes. In other quarters, including some of the arts’
world fraternity, the aesthetic category of 'beauty' has long
been suspect, and partially in consequence, one suspects, because
his audience relates to the work as 'beautiful', Goldsworthy has
come unstuck with some in the theory and book-led knockabout of
art criticism. Unsurprisingly, he neither repudiates beauty, nor
sees it as irrelevant to the present day.
"Nature
is intensely beautiful,” he says, “and at the same
time very unnerving, and at times deeply frightening. You feel
it if you've ever stood in a wood that has been blown down after
a strong wind, a volcano, or any of these incredible acts of nature.
You feel it as soon as you go out to the land, where everywhere
you go things are dead, decaying, fallen down, growing, alive.
There's this incredible vigour and energy and life. And it's sometimes
very difficult to deal with. I would hope that I don't have a
kind of romantic view of nature. I do feel the beauty of it, for
sure. But it's a beauty that's underwritten by extreme feelings.”
"There
is a feeling at times that people want me to represent something
for them, that part of themselves, they associate with nature,
and with beauty. They get quite upset if I go outside those parameters.
Of the reactions to the melted stones (at the Barbican), some
people found it too violent. People are often looking for fairly
superficial ways of understanding the work. For instance, I was
about to give a lecture and while I was waiting there were two
people behind me talking. One was trying to describe to the other
what it is I do and he was saying, 'He uses 100% natural materials,
and never uses any tools.' And I thought Oh, Christ' Yes, I do
use the land, but I also use tools...and there are reasons for
that. It's not some sort of rule for the sake of a rule. The reason
I don't use tools for a lot of the works is the freedom it gives
me - the sensation of touch, and I need that. I need that shock.
The hand with ice or stone. But I've also made sculptures with
huge machinery, and I've made large earthworks. And I'm very happy
to do so in the right circumstances. Usually in my lectures, I
put in an image of a JCB doing one of my sculptures, and you can
hear the 'Oh dear!' in the audience."
David Nash describes Goldsworthy as a bridge between the public
and the art worlds more astringent practitioners, Donald Judd,
Richard Serra, and looking further back, Constantin Brancusi.
But he is also a bridge between environmental art and the big
art world. Despite his forerunners, he is not represented in that
hanger cathedral to late twentieth century modernism, the Tate
Modern. This is an absence, which has bewildered many, though
Goldsworthy himself says he isn't bothered by it. In addition
the perception of Land Art as radically at odds with the collision
between theory-heavy post modernism and the Thatcherite fashion-frenzy
of 'eighties and 'nineties Britart, has meant that his work is
assumed to be at odds with the rampant materialism of the times.
Some
autumns ago I happened to visit the oldest of the sculpture parks,
Grizedale, in the Lake District. For many years it was at the
leading edge of what may be called, for want of a phrase, the
mid-period emergence of British Land Art. David Nash's work was
present, and Chris Drury's, as was early commissioned work by
Andy Goldsworthy. But during the nineties this by now established
Land Art pathway was felt to be outdated. Audiences were dwindling.
The proprietors, the Forestry Commission, felt radical action
was needed. Grizedale required a relaunch and as part of its relaunch
it would need to be rebranded with the busy work of a completely
new image templated over the decaying leaf fall of the old.
In
1999 the Forestry Commission brought in a young new Director,
and things began to change indeed. Out with the old and in with
the new. One of the most high profile casualties, in part surely
because he is so high profile, was Andy Goldsworthy. The Directors'
media demolition job of Goldsworthys' 'Taking A Wall for A Walk'.
guaranteed considerable attention to the centre. Grizedale land
art was turning into a media event. And this, rural based art
as media event, became part of a new ethos to be adapted, in tune
with the urban art school post-post modernism and irony, in the
hope that it would pull in the punters.
The
revolution has been continuing at Grisdale. And what has been
happening appears in many respects to represent the extension
of the aesthetic of eighties art as shock by another name into
the deep rural. At the heart of its aesthetic is a perspective
which doesn't give credence, and isn't interested in the experience
of a 'living' natural world. By contrast the land artists were
a reflection of a culture re-discovering the living qualities
of the more than human world, and of the immediacy of being in
the world. Land Art seemed interested in beauty, and another notion
often ignored in the art lexicon, delicacy, which in the metropolitan
urban melting pots seem irrelevant. That said, the trauma unfolded
by the destruction of the Two Towers on September 11th 2001, may
have brought people to re-evaluating the place of beauty and indeed,
delicacy, in balance with the avant-nihilism which is so much
part and parcel of current art actions out on the streets.
One interpretation of this contrats is Goldsworthy’s work
gives credence to beauty, whereas the post modern radical relativism
cannot be doing with such credence, making it difficult, if not
impossible, to talk about the beautiful in the world before us.
In the usual aesthetic conventions the beautiful has been reduced
to a subset of the Enlightenment Sublime. Originating with the
eighteenth century philosopher Kant, but gaining ground in the
last twenty years or so, nature has been sidelined into part of
the experience of the Sublime rather than an independent category
of experience. Yet at the same moment, if we were asked how in
a hundred years time, looking back on this time of terrorism,
of September 11th and of the Gulf War part 2, would people find
themselves beauty loving, or beauty neutral? And from the perspective
of the present, in a hundred years time, will people be beauty
loving? My suspicion is that people would find themselves answering
with beauty to any such questions.
“Life
and being alive is a form of beauty” Goldsworthy says. “This
is our, and my, time. And yes...there is a beauty.” Goldsworthy
ponders for a while. “I think beauty contains a sense of
truth, and that is really the difficulty, there is something in
the sensibility of beauty that actually isn't a real beauty at
all but is just prettiness and decoration. These are very, very
difficult areas. I fly very close to the wind at times, and there
are occasions when I fail, and the piece veers towards decorativeness.
I fight that all the time, but I take on difficult subject matters.
Flowers, petals, leaves. Snow and ice. These are subjects that
have been layered with sentimentality for so long that we can't
see these things any more. It is a very brave thing to do to take
them on and to work with, a sunset (for instance)! Everyday the
sun rises and sets and at times it is this fantastically spectacular,
deeply disturbing event, that happens. This blood red sun happens.
And yet that's reduced in our consciousness to a pretty sunset.
Because a lot of artists have just gone and pandered to the prettiness
of it. I think the challenge is to forget and to see the thing
as it is and work with it. It’s like wool. In the last few
years I have been working with wool. It is an incredibly difficult
material to work with, given people's associations of wool with
sheep, pastoral landscape. And yet the whole landscape around
here is made because of sheep. Scotland is depopulated because
of sheep. The political and social impact of sheep is so profound
on the British landscape. We still look at them, and our perception
of them is that they are woolly and pastoral and cute. But if
you've ever listened to a sheep eating, the way they tear at the
ground, they're continuously rip, rip, ripping. It's a very brutal
animal in its own way. Yet the perception is that it's cute. I
feel this obligation to try and work with the sheep and with wool.
I noticed that when the sheep feed from containers or saltlicks
and the farmer moves the saltlicks round they leave incredible
abstract shapes on the land. So I lay canvas down, put the food
container on the middle and then they come and eat. And that made
a painting. That makes connections to the way the British landscape
has been worked by farmers in Scotland, worked by sheep. I feel
an obligation to do these works. I'd get a much easier ride if
I stuck with stone and wood and metal. These subjects have been
layered with sentimentality for so long that we can't see these
things any more. The territory of flowers is hard. But I have
to work with them, because I would have an incomplete understanding
of nature, and the land, if I didn't work with them.”
“Sometimes
I think that we're so frightened of nature and so frightened of
death, that we like to play with it and look at it. It's a way
of us trying to avoid it if we can look up its arsehole. And if
we've done that we're okay, we can handle that. But in fact it’s
still there. Nature is that, it's death. Our nature is that we
will die. And if I feel that every time I go to work, then the
work comes to life, I bring it to life, and then it dies. Every
day there is this great sense of loss.
“Loss
is something that we have problems dealing with. I mean I lose
things, I lose my work everyday. We lose our youth as we grow,
we' all losing our parents, losing people we know, we're losing
all the time. There's a deep sense of loss (very quietly) It’s
what I'm dealing with in my work. And I’m not doing it out
of a sense of anti-art bravado. It hurts me to see these things
die, fall down, collapse, decay. But then I see the beauty in
that, the sense in that. A lot of the recent work is actually
about the decay, the changes actually making the work stronger
and so it develops into something else.”
Part
of the anti-art credo has been the uptake of non-natural, at times
‘ugly’ materials. It provides a potential new breadth
which formally was not available. Goldsworthy says he relates
to this new palette of materials to some extent. But the reason
he’s drawn to work the way he does with materials is completely
other. “It is to find these layers in a place. There's a
journey you can make from the leaf into the place, to the tree
to the growth. Whereas you cannot make that journey if you come
across something that has been dumped there or it hasn't got that
resonance with the place. It's not the materials so much that
I'm interested in as the connections to the whole, and to the
whole place. And the life of the materials. In an urban situation
it's much more difficult to understand all those connections and
where things have come from. But I do make attempts to deal with
that. Picking up catalogues and ordering any material, whether
it's wood or clay or stone, is not the same as going to the clay
pit and digging the ground. Or finding a tree. There's that connection
that feeds the ideas.”
Goldsworthy
is not sure whether the urban environment allows only a limited
exposure to that experience of a hands-on connection with the
materials which have a wider context with the whole or not. “I
think there's possibilities everywhere to find some sense and
I think the best works I've made on, for instance, pavements are
the ones where I've lain in the rain and left a shadow. The feeling
of the human imprint on the pavement, the walking of people's
lives passing through and the wearing down of the paving. The
human presence is ingrained into the pavement when I lie on it
and leave a shadow. And then the shadow dries up or gets rained
over, and I think that articulates a way of understanding something
of the nature of the urban place. But the idea of going to a garbage
dump and starting to re-arranging garbage would be hard to do,
I think. And maybe it's something I haven't come round to understanding
yet. Maybe I could.”
The
full interview essay will appear in Fourth
Door Review 7, forthcoming autumn 2004. The essay will
appear alongside an interview with Thomas Riedelheimer, director
of the award winning documentary on Goldsworthy and his work,
Rivers and Tides.
The
first part of the interview essay appears in Fourth
Door Review 6 and focuses on, amongst other material,
on the relationship between Goldsworthy’s work, new media
and performance art.
Further pieces on Andy Goldsworthy by Oliver Lowenstein
www.resurgence.org
Resurgence magazine (issue 207, july/aug 2001)
www.sculpture.org.
Sculpture magazine vol 22, no 5, june 2003
see also www.hainesgallery.com
www.micheal-hugh-williams.com
www.eyestorm.com
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