Andy Goldsworthy is an artist at one with nature
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For a guy who got rejected by a couple of art schools and told by one technician he'd never make it as a photographer, British artist Andy Goldsworthy has done alright.
The introspective artist has recently been the subject of the acclaimed documentary feature film "Rivers and Tides;" his work has been shown and collected across Europe, the United States and Japan; and he's got more internationally distributed coffee-table art books than any other artist under 50 I can think of.
The books, movie and Goldsworthy's skill as a photographer are all important parts of the equation, because much of the artwork he so painstakingly constructs will never find its way into galleries or museums. Goldsworthy is a rare breed of artist who uses nature as both palette and canvas. Rather than retiring to his studio to work, he spends days walking the countryside looking for the right opportunity to employ stones, leaves, mud, twigs, snow, even raindrops, in mind-tingling ways.
"The feel of a leaf, the crack of a stone, the flow of a river — these aren't just sounds and materials, they're life, and all the time there is a deepening relationship with the earth through making," Goldsworthy has said. Much of what he makes lasts little longer than the time it takes to photograph it.
A show of those photographs, "Mountain and Coast Autumn into Winter," has been traveling to smaller museums around the U.S. for the past two years and will open Saturday at Tacoma Art Museum. The images are of pieces Goldsworthy created in Japan in 1987 along with four sculptures — one a six-foot circle of pine sticks — that will be reconstructed at the Tacoma Museum according to the artist's instructions. Goldsworthy, who is based in Scotland, will not come to Tacoma for the exhibition.
Born July 25, 1956, in Cheshire, England, Goldsworthy got acquainted with performance and environmental art in the early '70s, reading about Christo, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Joseph Beuys, all making art that was temporary or changeable. British artist Richard Long had already established himself as a walking artist who roamed the countryside putting together sculptures of mud, sticks and stones. But Goldsworthy quickly distinguished himself from the others with the wondrous delicacy of his imagery, the dogged obsessiveness of his process, and, not least, the captivating photographs that resulted.
Earth art, like performance and installation art, was at first considered a giant step away from the commercialized realm of galleries and auction houses. Projects such as Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" on Utah's Great Salt Lake or Walter de Maria's "Lightning Field," a grid of 400 stainless steel poles planted in a square mile of high desert in southwestern New Mexico, cost a lot to build and promised no returns. Goldsworthy's work is something of a hybrid, combining an element of performance and installation that uses a natural environment as both medium and stage.
Yet, unlike other performance and installation artists whose work is ephemeral — and sometimes too arcane to engage the general public — Goldsworthy gets to have his cake and eat it too.
The easy-to-love color photographs he makes of his short-lived, noncommercial artworks have turned out to be highly marketable. His books are enormously appealing (although I wish there were fewer of them — they've gotten repetitive). And as his fame grows, the demand by museums and collectors for more permanent work has increased.
His first commission for a "permanent" sculpture came in 1984, and Goldsworthy has since made numerous lasting outdoor and indoor works for major museums and sculpture parks. One of his most extensive projects is in the United States. In 1997-98, Goldsworthy plotted and supervised construction of a 2,278-foot-long stone wall that snakes through fields and forestland at Storm King Art Center, an hour north of New York City.
These days, instead of tramping the Scottish countryside to find inspiration, Goldsworthy spends much of his time jetting around the world, meeting with curators, planning, building and supervising installations. Instead of simply gathering materials where he's working, he might be arranging for granite from Scotland to be transported by helicopter, ship and truck to New York, as he did recently for a piece commissioned for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (On display until Oct. 31.)
But in Tacoma, the photographs in "Mountain and Coast Autumn into Winter" will all be of classic — that is, ephemeral — Goldsworthy pieces, made from materials he found during his forays through the Japanese countryside. He twined concentric circles of bluish fern fronds stripped in half and pinned to the ground with twigs. He wove a circle of red and green Japanese maple leaves and floated it among the rocks at a stream's edge. He shaped sheaves of damp bamboo into spires and balanced round stones in fragile columns in the rain. He carved blocks of frozen snow into luminous orbs, backlit by the sun. Then, when each dazzling visual moment was achieved, Goldsworthy shot a photograph.
It's hard to think of Goldsworthy as riding the crest of a late 20th-century art movement. In a sense, what he is doing is bringing art back to its source, a place of wonder and beauty as well as destruction and decay. As the high-stakes art world grows increasingly cynical and profit-driven (think Jeff Koons and $104 million Picassos), the simplicity and sincerity of Goldsworthy's images ring a chord that's genuine and true.
"When I began working outside, I had to establish instincts and feelings for Nature. I splashed in water, covered myself in mud, went barefoot and woke with the dawn."
Seeing him in "Rivers and Tides" as he struggles and fails, obsesses, adapts and changes, working for the sheer exhilaration of the process and the brief thrill of achievement, may help people think about contemporary art in a different way. It's easy to relate to Goldsworthy's work — and that's a good thing.
Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com
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