In any case, as stated, i’m no earthworks scholar. it can be elegant! though they are very different artists in form and function the film drove home for me how ineffective the gates really was as an outdoors site specific piece of art and had me imagining all the art that might have served central park better. it can be grand without being big and obvious. it can be surprising and thought provoking without being disruptive and gaudy. it can seem to grow right from its surroundings. it can be subtle and moving at the same time. site specific work can have a harmony and poetry that makes it almost magical. with all the words i’ve wasted trying to explain why i disliked the gates so much, a film like rivers and tidesmakes it plain to see. Unfortunately another thing it brought to mind was… oh boy… the gates. goldworthy’s work does not resist this eventuality but rather embraces it.
after all every artist’s work will disappear, whether physically or metaphorically, given enough time. it’s a very rich and poetic way of working. some of the works in the film collapsed before they were even completed underscoring their delicate, ephemeral, quality. in most cases they will eventually be transformedand ultimately, like all else, decay. all of these works are acted upon by the nature around them. small pools of water filled with flower petals or pigment. for example a stone mound on the shore which at high tide is totally submersed, only to reappear at low tide. It’s much the same with other works represented in the film. it’s as if the artists efforts are simply one more of the natural processes, compelling the ice into an extra form on it’s inevitable path back to liquid. it is shimmering and gorgeous in part because of its impermanence. when the sun rises to illuminate it the piece can do nothing other than melt and collapse. even as he is assembling an elegant icicle which seems to snake in and out of a stone outcropping, you are acutely aware of it’s ultimate fate. The ephemeral nature of earthwork in general and certainly goldworty’s work in particular, put me in mind of eastern philosophy. it’s what art might be were it nomadic, truly personal, and stripped of the suffocating culture which surrounds it. and then to see the art take shape right there and rest in the midst of some field or shore rather than in the all too familiar, antiseptic, white room. the processes of art removed from all the accumulated carbuncles of the studio. goldsworthy, walking into a stream, collecting iron rich rocks to pound into pigment, right there in the river… well it’s wonderful.
stacks of stones, a lattice of twigs, a pile of leaves. there is something so pure about work of this kind. the materials- stones, icicles, leaves, twigs, put me in mind of primitive art, or more pointedly what i imagine are the ancient root inclinations of art: to create, to re-order, to manipulate, to mold, to play. The work conjured up of many associations for me.
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