Tim Adams has a fascinating interview with Andy Goldsworthy in Sunday's Observer.
For example, in response to a question about his near-contemporary, Damien Hirst, Goldsworthy notes: "I enjoy the raw shock of Damien Hirst. But for me art has to be more than shock. I would rather subvert things, try to make people look at them differently."
Although I disagree with the implication that Hirst's work relies for its effectiveness on shock alone, I think that there is perhaps a clue to a more workable distinction between Goldsworthy and Hirst later in the interview.
When Hirst's bisected cows and dead sharks succeed beyond the level of shock, they do so because they serve as a visceral memento mori, calling to mind the mystery of life: cutting open a cow to get at its vitality simply snuffs out that which one sought to explain. The deeper impact of such pieces lies not in their depiction of something that we normally ignore, "the skull beneath the skin;" rather it lies in the way in which they make absence more palpable.
In contrast, Goldsworthy's work attempts not to make one mindful of the preciousness of life forces through the depiction of their absence, but to make one perceive sources of vitality that normally remain hidden. As he himself suggests later in the interview, his work seeks to reveal the ways in which "everything has the energy of its making inside it." He continues,
There is no doubt that the internal space of a rock or a tree is important to me. But when I get beneath the surface of things, these are not moments of mystery, they are moments of extraordinary clarity.
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