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ANDY GOLDSWORTHY:
THE BEAUTY OF CREATION
Sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es’
Karl Marx
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A bright fringe of red shining leaves
on heavy boulders, a row of
leaves changing from greeny white over yellow to dark green, pebbles
concentrically arranged from big to small and from dark to light around
a black hole, icicles frozen together into a spiral: this is only a pick
at random from the meanwhile very popular creations of
Andy Goldsworthy.
(illlustrations: see
Andy Goldsworthy).
TECHNICAL BEAUTY
Goldsworthy’s creation is governed by the principle of the elementary.
Elementary is already his choice of the materials.
Andy
Goldsworthy processes ‘raw materials’ in the literal sense of the word:
materials as they are found in nature. That has certainly been, in
primeval times, the starting point of human production as such. But
gradually nature itself
came to be processed before
being subject to further manipulation. No longer the fleece of the sheep
is washed and cut: it is the wool that is sheared, combed, spun before
entering the fabric as a thread. The same goes for trees, that are sawn
up into planks before being transformed into a piece of furniture; for
the grain, that after having been submitted to cultural selection is
previously ground to flour before being baked into bread; for the clay
that is previously moulded into the shape of bricks and baked before
entering the masonry. Not so with Goldsworthy: his colours are not just
squeezed out of a tube.
He uses the very colours
found
just
like that in an autumn forest. They are all over the place. Just like
sticks, pebbles, plumes, icicles and all the other materials Goldsworthy
is using.
Found materials, thus, that deserve an equally elementary processing. In
most cases Andy
Goldsworthy restricts
himself to the selecting, displacing or rearranging of leaves, pebbles,
sticks and boulders. When he uses instruments at all, then equally
‘found’ instruments: the stick with which he scrapes the sand, the
thorns with which he
sticks the leaves together. More often, he lets nature work on its own,
without the intervention of any instrument: as when he lets icicles
freeze together. And also in these
cases, the forces of
nature are not previously isolated and boosted, as is the case with the
heath of the fire in an oven. Andy Goldsworthy rather lets his clay dry
in the sun. Sometimes the processing is negative: as when man-made structures
of sand are dismantled through the tide, or when a snowball collapses
when melting, or when the clay enveloping boulders bursts during the
process of drying.
And equally minimal is, finally, Andy
Golsdworthy's composition.
He replaces the variegated chaos of leaves in
the forest or pebbles on the beach with a progression from one colour to
another, from light to dark, from big to small. He replaces sticks
fallen at random on the ground with a circle, or a line. What is laying
down on the earth - the ultimate fate of everything susceptible to
gravity - Andy Goldsworthy piles up to cones, towers, or even arcs,
domes and eggs struggling against gravity. Sometimes the same effect is
obtained through a mere shift of the direction in which nature had
shaped its materials:
icicles pointing vertically in the skies or protruding horizontally from
a rock face – or turning around themselves in a spiral.
Thus contrasted as found versus created order,
Andy
Goldworthy’s creations profile themselves as artificial figures against
a natural background. But the new order is not unnatural as such, it is
so only in the given context. Lines, cracks, meanders, spirals,
concentric forms or chessboard patterns, star-shapes, spheres and eggs:
these are all compositions that can be found in nature, but applied to
other materials in other contexts. Andy Goldsworthy himself reminds us
of that when his composition explicitly refers to other natural
phenomena: as when he imposes the spiral-shape of the nautilus shell on
leaves.
Sometimes Andy Goldsworthy’s composition is so deceptively natural that
we might inadvertently pass it by. That
it has been photographed,
makes us suspect that there is something to be seen: a mere crack
running right through a whole series of pebbles. Until it dawns on us
that single pebbles may well crack, but possibly not an entire row! Only
then do we realise that the supposedly natural crack is in fact a
composition borrowed from nature and imposed upon a series of broken
pebbles.
In all cases, Andy Goldsworthy realises a maximal effect, precisely by
refraining from isolating his creations from their natural soil.
Precisely the untouched virginity of the environment makes the creation
visible as a disturbance. That is why nature is not only the provider of
raw materials, techniques and processing, but foremost the natural
biotope of Andy Goldsworthy’s creations. Transported into an artificial
environment, they would lose all their charms. Also in this sense do his
creations remain bound to nature by an indissoluble tie.
And that brings us to the meaning of such creation. Andy Goldsworthy is
not out at the mere production of a useful object, let alone an object
that should please man for its sole beauty. He wants rather to embody
the beauty of the act of creation in an exemplary intervention. That is
why the often irresistible charm of his work does not derive from the
final result, but from the beauty of its creation, the deed to which its
owes its existence and that remains visible in the end product. This
kind of creation strikes the all too often disturbed chord of harmony
with nature: man is allowed to intervene, to bend to his will, even to
disturb, but not to rape, let alone to saw off the branch of the tree on
which he is sitting. The technical beauty of Andy Goldsworthy’s work can
be read as a
tacit criticism on the
industrial and post-industrial way of production, which no longer
processes materials that have been found in nature, but materials that
have been submitted to an often endless series of transformations for
them to subdue without any resistance to the forces of nature unleashed
by man in super-instruments and machines. As when the laser cuts thick
steel plates without any resistance. Not
to mention the silent violence
with which,
in the digital dimension,
quantities measured in megas and gigas are digested in fractions of
seconds. Precisely the astounding ease with which every resistance is
eliminated beforehand results in the scaling-up that, already from the
pyramids onwards, foreshadows the ultimate tower of Babylon: it is the
awe-inspiring ugliness of many a architectural giga-project, that in its
monstrous proportions is knocked up in a few months or of the hideous
vehicles that in many a science fiction film are
launched in space. Andy Goldsworthy’s silent
criticism is all the more charming since it speaks through the work
itself and is not added to it through some
merely
external symbolism. No references to Indians, Zen or yin and yang come
to spoil or fun.
THE BEAUTY OF ELEMENTARY FORMS
We would do no justice to Andy Goldsworthy’s work
when
we would reduce it to an
embodiment of a harmonious relation to nature. Next to the pleasure in
technical beauty, there is the pleasure in the beauty of the forms that
are created through such harmonious creation. from way back, man has shown a
predilection for forms endowed
with a transparent structure: that is what is so
charming about straight, curved or broken lines, circles, crosses or
chessboards and geometrical patterns in two or three dimensions. As when
in the centre of a concentric form there appears a dark hole. Which
fascinates, not only because it reminds of the pupil of the eye that
already always stole
our attention, but also because,
of any hole, we want
to know what it hides – a curiousness that often is accompanied by fear
for whatever might show up: hence the aura of mystery hovering over Andy
Goldsworthy’s holes and concentric structures. Sometimes Andy
Goldsworthy soothes the anxious tension through filling it in: in the
hole an object in the form of a spiral is coiling like a caterpillar in
its cocoon, or a tree comes to protrude from
it, or a rocky point is poking out of it.
QUASI-MIMESIS*
The formal beauty of a concentric form as well as the
emotional freight of an encircled hole do not differ from the effect of
similar phenomena in nature. The only difference is to be found in the
maker: nature or man.
But in some of his works, Andy Goldsworthy is doing more than merely
creating a new reality
parallel to nature. Now and
then, it
is as if he tries to
imitate an already existing reality: as when a three-dimensional spiral
reminds of a nautilus shell. Or when concentrically woven sticks remind
us of a birds nest or an eye. Or when sticks with burned tops are
arranged in the shape of a cone,
and then remind us of a volcano. Or when a fringe of red shining leaves
on black boulders remind us
of burning rocks. Or when mandorlas remind us of eyes, mouths or
vaginas. Or when the crack in a row of broken pebbles remind us of the
cracks in dry clay. There are also more ambivalent cases where the
‘reminding of’ is rather a re-creation.
As when amidst some real rocks one single rock is enveloped in
weather-beaten branches, sun-bleached bones or pieces of bark.
Such ‘reminding of’ is mimesis* in statu nascendi. It differs from
completed mimesis*
in that we only are ‘reminded of’ something else. We never have the
impression of seeing something else as what there is to be seen. It was
not Andy Goldsworthy’s intention to evoke a birds nest, bur rather to
realise around the hole in the roots of a knotty tree the concentric
shape for which it seemed to ask.
Where such quasi-mimetic dimension joins technical beauty and its
critical-utopian dimension, as well as the formal beauty of the form and
its emotional freight, a tension is created between the multiple layers
of the work,
that cannot but contribute
to a deeper resonance of the whole.
SCULPTURE?
But it makes also clear why it is
rather
misleading to call Andy Goldsworthy a sculptor – be
it an ‘environmental sculptor’ or a ‘sculptor/photographer’.
Not that the materials prevent us to do so. It is not because Andy
Goldsworthy does not use traditional materials that he would not be a
sculptor: three-dimensional sculpture can be made in whatever material.
Whether one belongs to the tradition of Praxiteles, the master of the
Western portal at Chartres, Sluter, Michelangelo, Bernini, Rodin or
Moore – not the mention the countless masters from other cultures – does
not depend on the materials used, but on whether the intervention of the
artist transforms his material in something else: like the marble that,
under the hands of Michelangelo, is transformed into the flesh of a
body, or under the hands of Bernini in the mantle of Saint Theresa.
Everyone will agree that such is not Andy Goldsworthy’s intention, even
if some of his creations ‘remind of’ something else.
No: Andy Goldsworthy creates real things that do not at all pretend to
be something else. That is why he belongs in the world of all those who
transform nature into ‘humanised’ nature: from the cook, over the
designer of clothes and furniture, gardens and parks, automobiles and
machines, to the architects. To be more precise: Andy Goldsworthy
belongs to the tradition of garden architecture: from the geometrical
renaissance gardens, over the romantic English gardens, to the mystic
pebble-gardens of the Japanese, or their modern counter-parts: the
ecological landscape. Witness the ‘Sheepfolds Project’ in Cumbria,
where Andy Goldsworthy rebuilds in a more artistic fashion the walls
formerly built by shepherds. Or we can situate him in the tradition of
the more small-scale art of flower arranging (ikebana). But within this
group of ‘artists of design’ – designers to call them by their name – he
distinguishes himself – just like other giants like Panamarenko – in
that he does not contrive functional objects, but objects embodying the
mere pleasure of making – and a rather
sympathetic kind of making at that: creating in
harmony with nature.
That is why Andy Goldsworthy may justifiably be called the master – the
artist – of free creation. Which does not prevent that he is not a
master of ‘imitation’ – not an ‘artist’ (or 'sculptor’) in the
traditional, more limited meaning of the word. Which does not mean that
we should condescendingly look down on him. On the contrary: the
designer of the cathedral is no lesser god than Van Eyck. But the former
is a ‘master of design’ – a master in transforming nature into a product
that provides in human needs – the latter is a master in the
transformation of oil paint into a mere represented world. And, to
distinguish both kinds of master from each other (and from other masters
such as the masters in philosophy or in making love), it would be better
when we called the former ‘designers’ and the latter ‘artists’.
ROOTS
Which does not prevent that a thorough understanding
of Andy Goldsworthy’s work is only onceivable against the
background of the development of art in the twentieth century art. It
has no roots whatever in the history of design.
To begin with, there is a certain relation with the Duchamp’s ‘ready
mades’, or rather: with the ‘objets trouvés’ of surrealism. That is why
we talked about ‘found materials’, ‘found techniques’ and ‘found
processing’ in the above.
Next, Andy Goldsworthy’s work is unthinkable without the so called
‘land-art’ which flourished in the
seventies. As an offshoot of the happenings and the performances of the
sixties, this movement represented a particular version of the
‘dissolving of art into life’: the replacement of conjuring up an
imaginary world through real transformation of the real world – in this
case: nature. It suffices to refer to the works of Richard Long, who
equally limited himself to minimal interventions in the landscape and
whose works equally became popular through equally popular books. At the
roots of land-art lies the anti-capitalistic gesture of those who were
no longer prepared to submit to the logic of the market. It was their
intention to free art from the ‘art shops’: the galleries. One of the
places where art was to be accommodated was nature, where it would be
freely accessible to everyone – and where everyone could create it as
well. The descent from land-art equally explains why Andy Goldsworthy is
deliberately out at creating ephemeral works – exemplary in the use of
withering flowers or melting snow. The predilection for transience is
one of the variants of the mimetic taboo: the reluctance to make
enduring works of art – with the concomitant obligation to measure up to
the great masters, who, precisely because their works are enduring,
continue to project their castrating shadows far into the future. Both
strivings inherited from land-art were doomed to failure. It soon became
apparent that land-art was not accessible at all. And it surely would
have been a pity to deliver
such marvellous creations as Andy Goldsworthys
icicles to decay. That is why the anti-capitalistic and anti-mimetic
land-art was fixed on photographs or videos and sold at a bargain.
Albeit not in the gallery, but in the bookshop.
LOSS
The remarkable thing about all this is that of all places here, in the
very bastion of modern art, we stumble upon something that has
supposedly been utterly banned from it: unbroken beauty! It is only most
regrettable that this beauty must bloom on a corpse: that of the art of
sculpture.
©
Stefan
Beyst, June
2002
 
stefan beyst on art
* See 'Mimesis', 'Mimesis
and Art', 'Mimesis and Abstraction'.
BOOKS:
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: ‘Hand to Earth :
Andy Goldsworthy’, Henry Moore Centre, Leeds,
England, 1990.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: ‘Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature’,
Harry N. Abrams,
Inc., New York, 1990.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: ‘Stone’,
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1994.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: ‘Wood’,
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1995.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: ‘Wall’,
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1995.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: ‘Arch’,
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1999.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: 'Time',
Cameron Books, Moffat, Dumfriesshire Schotland 2000.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: ‘Midsummer Snowballs',
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 2001.
GOLDSWORTHY,
Andy: 'Passage',
Thames & Hudson,
2004.
CATALOGUE:
The Andy Goldsworthy
Digital Catalogue
For a more general approach:
'Mimesis and
abstraction'
Your
reaction (in English, German, French or Spanish):
beyst.stefan@gmail.com
see also:
the unforgettable poetry of
carlos
barbarito:
Light wing of faith
over the fire of the world.
and:
vladimir garcía
morales
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