"The wilderness rose up to it,/ And sprawled around, no longer wild."

Okay stones fans, I saw the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy, "Rivers and Tides: Working With Time," and I must admit that I was blown away. I've been a Goldsworthy fan at least since visiting the Storm King Art Center and seeing his installation there, but this film gives his work a quiet grace that transcends even that of the stone wall at Storm King.

There are, for example, Goldsworthy's cones. In the film we see him create a cone on the beach in New Brunswick, Canada, racing with the tide. Goldsworthy himself values the cones because of "the connection that the form has with a seed, very full and ripe," but the contrast between the ovoid regularity of the cone and the wildness of the Atlantic tides, and the way that the form reshaped the environment around it, reminded me even more of Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar:"

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Two striking types of work that I'd never seen before demonstrated the way that Goldsworthy plays with the ephemerality of his materials. I'd seen his use of iron-rich rock to create red-pigmented pools of water (as in "Red Pool, Scaur River, Dumfriesshire," 1994/5), but I hadn't seen him play with balls of pigment to create rivulets of red in running streams, as if the earth itself were bleeding. It was such a stark reminder of the fact that, as Goldsworthy himself put it, "stone itself is actually fluid -- and liquid ..."

The movie also contained amazing images of Goldsworthy's creating arresting, fleeting traces of the currents in a forest clearing by casting armfuls of snow into the wind. It was a striking and visceral example of the way in which, as Goldsworthy has put it, "ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of [his] art," and that "movement, change, light, growth, and decay are ... the energies that [he] tr[ies] to tap through [his] work." Well worth seeing.

Comments

[Jonathan]

That is interesting. It reminds how there is a 'conflict' between the static object of art and the environment which is ever changing, so that even stone is 'liquid' as you put it.

The irony is that although artists hope to create something permanent, 'the mountains will outlast us all'. Although constantly changing, they are, in the long term, much more permanent.

Goldsworthy's work is interesting in that he accepts this ephemerality instead of battling against it.

[Jinny]

Hi there, Not enought information Thanks Jinny