Notes while watching Rivers and Tides
(DVD)
Goldsworthy is instructive – “if I don’t make a work I don’t know myself”.
On first hearing I thought he said “mould” for “know”. The mishearing is revealing. For Goldsworthy working with materials is also a process of self-fashioning and discovery. Speaking of the rock he’s struggling with on the beach in Nova Scotia: “it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone ... obviously I don’t understand it well enough.” It takes at least four attempts.
The camera in close-up shows his hands at work. Chipped and bruised fingernails, sticking plasters, fingers that are testament to the work.
One thinks of the smallness of human hands, of how soon they weary and of how little time is granted to their activity ... One asks about the owner of these hands. Who is this man? (1)
As Goldsworthy says of the strange landscape in which he finds himself “I am so out of touch with it” – that word “touch” – and as he sets to work “I have shook hands with the place” – that word “hands”. The obligation to refuse gloves (loss of ‘feel’ for the materials at hand at the risk of numbness from the cold). “You never shake someone’s hand with a glove”. In any case, “good art keeps you warm”.
Two axes at work. Horizontal: the physical space of the landscape (hillside, moor, forest, beach); vertical: the time of the making. He gets up early, keeps looking over his shoulder at the inevitable return of the tide, feels against his cheek slight breezes that will jeopardise the fabric of twigs.
Space is time. The landscape Goldsworthy walks across is sedimented meaning. Centuries of sheep farming have sculpted the moors. Goldsworthy is suspicious of stability, undermines idioms, nothing is “set in stone”. Stone is fluid. He pounds pebbles for their red iron pigment before moulding it into a ball that’s lobbed into the river. Particles disperse. Blood red veins marble the skin of the water.
Hence, it is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth only. Nay, it answers, ‘I am not earth – I am earth and air in one; part of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me: it is all my life – without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing ... but, because there is, according to my need and place in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and helpful in the circles of vitality’. (2)
Although Nature has no need of Goldsworthy, he needs Nature. He denies the “woolly” thinking of pastoralism preferring the “darker side”. The gaping mouth / hole / vagina in a tree trunk is a way to come to terms with underlying rhythms of change and loss. Here he runs out of words.
Much of Goldsworthy’s work is a way of fusing writing and drawing. His walls, ribbons and garlands are writhing lines of Blakean delight in energy. River meanders, serpent coils, twirls of micro-organisms, tendrils. String theories sounding through the universe.
From another angle he’s rooted in an English folk tradition. Ophelia gathering flowers to strew for rituals that seem to have been forgotten but continue to haunt buried in collective memory. Goldsworthy gives his works as “gifts” but on the understanding that they will be returned, otherwise:
Those are pearls that were his eyes;/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange (3)
The rock cone disappears to the eye beneath the waves only to allow a more profound sense of things to surface. The driftwood dome circles with the incoming tide becoming something ‘other’ rather than merely broken. The work initiates the unforeseen. “The very thing that brings the work to life is that which causes its death” – yet the unmaking shapes anew.
The work is not pre-existent, a conception awaiting execution. It emerges only in the hands-on engagement with landscape, materials, physical ‘know-how’ and improvisation. Even with the most resilient material there is an inherent fragility and risk. Goldsworthy takes a work to the “very edge of collapse”. From the start, the invigorating uncertainties of the open air were preferred to the stuffy studios of art college orthodoxy.
But what – exactly – is the work? The cones, for instance, left like “guardians”, markers confirming a connection with place. Wordsworth left poems on stones. Richard Skelton records in charged locations to return and leave his sounds to decompose.
I perceived decay had made progress ... – many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms. (4)
A poem, a song, a sculpture - just so many empty snail shells? Fashioned then abandoned. A leaving behind.
Yet the vital role of the photograph or film as documentation. Goldsworthy’s slide archive dates back to art school. It’s his way of understanding his work (the gap between the making and the “return of the images”). Also, one assumes, a way to quantify and assure gallery value. At what point does Land Art fall back into Sunday afternoon strolls? Impromptu stick tents for the kids, beachcombing, drawing in the sand? His wife’s question as he leaves the house and his mock pompous retort: “I am an intuitive artist ...”.
Economy of means: Goldsworthy lies prone in the falling rain. Is he thinking of a new work? Resting? A sequence spliced in from Tarkovsky's Mirror? He gets up and there it is – a shadow of himself left on the unmoistened ground. Another: he casts a huge snowball up into the air so the crystals form a cloud and disperse as a glittering mist. The camera does not simply record but becomes the medium – the possibility – for such work. I’m reminded of Anna Theresa de Keersmaker dancing a mandala in the forest. Art as choreography. One more: the stone wall running from the motorway to the river and then into the woods. The tracking bird’s eye view offers another dimension to the ground level work.
Another way of looking ... a cone standing immobile within the walls of the gallery. How different to the one being seen coming into being. The decisions, indecisions, chippings, refittings ... 'It' is a sum of its failures. Is. Is not.
Another way of looking ... a cone seen at a distance as against close up. Suddenly entirety gives way to discrete fragments and the spaces within. The whole is punctuated with holes. By extension, Goldsworthy’s works are so often not things-in-themselves but take place in participation with their surroundings. The stonewall circle, its ‘O’ reframing the undulating line of the horizon. The hollowed ‘O’s of intense red pigment depend upon the grey rocks and the mottlings of moss and fungi.
The camera in close-up shows his hands at work. Chipped and bruised fingernails, sticking plasters, fingers that are testament to the work.
One thinks of the smallness of human hands, of how soon they weary and of how little time is granted to their activity ... One asks about the owner of these hands. Who is this man? (1)
As Goldsworthy says of the strange landscape in which he finds himself “I am so out of touch with it” – that word “touch” – and as he sets to work “I have shook hands with the place” – that word “hands”. The obligation to refuse gloves (loss of ‘feel’ for the materials at hand at the risk of numbness from the cold). “You never shake someone’s hand with a glove”. In any case, “good art keeps you warm”.
Two axes at work. Horizontal: the physical space of the landscape (hillside, moor, forest, beach); vertical: the time of the making. He gets up early, keeps looking over his shoulder at the inevitable return of the tide, feels against his cheek slight breezes that will jeopardise the fabric of twigs.
Space is time. The landscape Goldsworthy walks across is sedimented meaning. Centuries of sheep farming have sculpted the moors. Goldsworthy is suspicious of stability, undermines idioms, nothing is “set in stone”. Stone is fluid. He pounds pebbles for their red iron pigment before moulding it into a ball that’s lobbed into the river. Particles disperse. Blood red veins marble the skin of the water.
Hence, it is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth only. Nay, it answers, ‘I am not earth – I am earth and air in one; part of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me: it is all my life – without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing ... but, because there is, according to my need and place in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and helpful in the circles of vitality’. (2)
Although Nature has no need of Goldsworthy, he needs Nature. He denies the “woolly” thinking of pastoralism preferring the “darker side”. The gaping mouth / hole / vagina in a tree trunk is a way to come to terms with underlying rhythms of change and loss. Here he runs out of words.
Much of Goldsworthy’s work is a way of fusing writing and drawing. His walls, ribbons and garlands are writhing lines of Blakean delight in energy. River meanders, serpent coils, twirls of micro-organisms, tendrils. String theories sounding through the universe.
From another angle he’s rooted in an English folk tradition. Ophelia gathering flowers to strew for rituals that seem to have been forgotten but continue to haunt buried in collective memory. Goldsworthy gives his works as “gifts” but on the understanding that they will be returned, otherwise:
Those are pearls that were his eyes;/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange (3)
The rock cone disappears to the eye beneath the waves only to allow a more profound sense of things to surface. The driftwood dome circles with the incoming tide becoming something ‘other’ rather than merely broken. The work initiates the unforeseen. “The very thing that brings the work to life is that which causes its death” – yet the unmaking shapes anew.
The work is not pre-existent, a conception awaiting execution. It emerges only in the hands-on engagement with landscape, materials, physical ‘know-how’ and improvisation. Even with the most resilient material there is an inherent fragility and risk. Goldsworthy takes a work to the “very edge of collapse”. From the start, the invigorating uncertainties of the open air were preferred to the stuffy studios of art college orthodoxy.
But what – exactly – is the work? The cones, for instance, left like “guardians”, markers confirming a connection with place. Wordsworth left poems on stones. Richard Skelton records in charged locations to return and leave his sounds to decompose.
I perceived decay had made progress ... – many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms. (4)
A poem, a song, a sculpture - just so many empty snail shells? Fashioned then abandoned. A leaving behind.
Yet the vital role of the photograph or film as documentation. Goldsworthy’s slide archive dates back to art school. It’s his way of understanding his work (the gap between the making and the “return of the images”). Also, one assumes, a way to quantify and assure gallery value. At what point does Land Art fall back into Sunday afternoon strolls? Impromptu stick tents for the kids, beachcombing, drawing in the sand? His wife’s question as he leaves the house and his mock pompous retort: “I am an intuitive artist ...”.
Economy of means: Goldsworthy lies prone in the falling rain. Is he thinking of a new work? Resting? A sequence spliced in from Tarkovsky's Mirror? He gets up and there it is – a shadow of himself left on the unmoistened ground. Another: he casts a huge snowball up into the air so the crystals form a cloud and disperse as a glittering mist. The camera does not simply record but becomes the medium – the possibility – for such work. I’m reminded of Anna Theresa de Keersmaker dancing a mandala in the forest. Art as choreography. One more: the stone wall running from the motorway to the river and then into the woods. The tracking bird’s eye view offers another dimension to the ground level work.
Another way of looking ... a cone standing immobile within the walls of the gallery. How different to the one being seen coming into being. The decisions, indecisions, chippings, refittings ... 'It' is a sum of its failures. Is. Is not.
Another way of looking ... a cone seen at a distance as against close up. Suddenly entirety gives way to discrete fragments and the spaces within. The whole is punctuated with holes. By extension, Goldsworthy’s works are so often not things-in-themselves but take place in participation with their surroundings. The stonewall circle, its ‘O’ reframing the undulating line of the horizon. The hollowed ‘O’s of intense red pigment depend upon the grey rocks and the mottlings of moss and fungi.
°°°
ice rock petal dust snow twig wool branch
sun wind tide
°°°
“The stone is speaking” (Goldsworthy)
“Clay is earth’s mouth” (Eileen Myles, quoting)
°°°
°°°
1. Rilke, The Rodin Book
2. Ruskin, The Work of Iron
3. Shakespeare, The Tempest
4. E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
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