11/18/2023 0 Comments Andy goldsworthy sculpturesWe see this in his succession of leaf sculptures. Photo: Lenore Metrick.īut further explorations become more discursive, proportional to Goldsworthy’s familiarity with the material. Stone, view of the work during a controlled prairie burn at the Conard Environmental Research Area, Grinnell, Iowa. Much like the complete oneness of a sand dune or a stone, pieces such as stick stack (1980) and trench (1987) seem to preclude examination of part-to-part relationships, impelling acceptance as a single totality. In many of these pieces the whole is the sum of its parts. While his earliest works in any medium are complete artworks in themselves, they also function as building blocks, familiarizing Goldsworthy with a material’s properties and adding to his aesthetic vocabulary. Only the whole is intelligible to culture, not by virtue of its materials but through its participation as art. Independently the components do not exist as art: separate them and they revert entirely back to nature-leaves, grass, sticks, rocks. Goldsworthy’s interest in situating art on the cusp where nature becomes articulate through culture results in epigrammatic, non-discursive works. In this narrative, art becomes less a creative product and more an uncovering of nature the artist serves as a handmaiden to nature. Goldsworthy’s art appears to restore some kind of clairvoyance, allowing us to see clearly what has always been there. His work satisfies our expectation that such a perfect moment can be found and lived, endorsing our myth of direct and unmediated communication between nature and culture. Goldsworthy’s photographs allow us to sustain that privileged moment of suspension: a tension, an eternal hesitation, a step outside linear time. Through his photographs of sycamore leaves pinned together with pine needles hung from a tree (1988) we voyeuristically participate in the fragile line of light and lilting leaves before they are blown apart, upsetting the entire scheme. Lines of bright pink that drip down from shrubbery, as in the line of licked poppy petals (1984), or the beech trunk with its shock of green moss (1999) seem heightened extensions of a natural intensity, as if centrifugal force pulled them together for that instant, and we glimpse them just before they drip, collapse, or tumble over. But by erasing traces of his own hand he heightens the affinity between his constructions and their setting and conceals the history of his intervention. To create this effect, Goldsworthy selects elements of nature and arranges them until they just exceed the limit possible for natural organization and enter into an irrefutable human ordering. Although Goldsworthy gives himself more latitude, positioning the natural materials into more exceptional situations, in the first instant of their viewing his ephemeral pieces raise the possibility that nature alone produced these remarkable spectacles. Richard Long arranged stones into a circle, minimally intervening with nature. In Goldsworthy’s art nothing ever appears decrepit or gross. Yet while nature is messy, sloppy, dirty, random, arbitrary, and overabundant, Goldsworthy creates order: meticulously selecting materials, sequence, and ultimate form. His ephemeral sculptures rely on an abstraction that has become so acclimated that it no longer requires any effort of vision, and the viewer does not notice it as art. Because of its association with nature or, in the case of the cairns, pre-modern culture, Goldsworthy’s work tends to be seen as a visionary transmission direct from nature itself. It takes an effort to step back from Goldsworthy’s virtuoso performance and see beyond feats of technical skill, to realize that his art consists not in uncovering nature but in his ability to make artifice appear naturalized. While Goldsworthy is the first to clarify that he uses modern tools and machines, he as quickly emphasizes that when adhering chains of poppy petals or icicle spirals, he uses no glue: “spit” is his adhesive. And the backdrop for this work is nature-he situates his art on forest grounds or in trees or streams. Each piece features nature unadulterated: branches, stones, leaves, and snow. Photo: Courtesy Galerie Lelong and Haines Gallery.Īndy Goldsworthy’s work receives accolades for its lack of manufacture. East Coast Cairn/Made Between High Tides/No Collapses/Calm/New Rochelle, New York/November 2001, 2001. Three Cairns demonstrates several important aspects of Goldsworthy’s career.
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