| Collaborating with Nature |
|
|
| Thursday, 17 February 2005 | |
|
Tag it:           It was fascinating to watch him work and listen to him talk about why he chooses to do things the way he does. The camera comes in close on his mashed and mangled fingernails as his hands grapple with rocks or scratch at a leaf with a thorn. (For the record, despite appearances, a friend met him by the National Gallery and shook his hand--which was "soft and chalky"). Recurring themes seem to be time, growth, change, and the idea of "flow" in nature. He talks a lot about rivers and water and the concept of "giving" his art back to nature, which then turns it into something else ("the thing that brings it to life also kills it"--in regard to the sunshine that illuminates the icicles he has painstakingly fused together into a flowing form, but which also melts it and causes it to collapse). When the tide pulls his work apart, he says it doesn't feel like destruction--he says he gave the work to the sea and the sea made it more. I have no idea how Andy Goldsworthy views the world--he didn't talk about that specifically--but the things he said and the way he worked seem to me to fit into my concept of the world and our place in it. The title of the coffeetable book that we own ("A Collaboration with Nature") suggests that people work (or should work) within the creation, not on a plane completely separate from it. This seems elementary, but in practice, if not in word, we often live as though the latter is true, with an image of humans "taming" nature, or controlling it. It strikes a chord with me because it seems a form of "co-creation" and parallels in some ways thoughts I've had on writing and on living creatively. Andy Goldsworthy talked a number of times in this video about the importance of "direct touch" in completing the work--whether it is scratching leaves with thorns, determining the quality of the leaves, "shaking hands" with the surroundings by handling it with bare hands, or "getting to know" the stones he is stacking through touch. (The stones keep collapsing, but each time he rebuilds and it gets higher in proportion to how well he knows the stones). The forms he makes grow out of the objects he handles instead of being imposed on them. Imagine if our technology benefited from such direct contact and intimate consideration of our surroundings. This concept of people's intimate role with the creation seems to be reaffirmed in a different way in another installation he did: a wall covered with local clay mixed with human hair. People are "bound up in" the work, in nature. That direct touch is something that is missing from a lot of our lives, at least in the city and suburbs. Goldsworthy talks as though he is possessed by his art--as though he needs it to survive, to know who he is. "Art is a form of nourishment," he says, and somehow while he's lying flat on the road with rain coming down on him, it seems like he's soaking it in like a plant. Then when he gets up to photograph the "shadow" left behind (the dry spot where he had been) the simplicity of the idea is beautiful, and powerful. "Art is very much about today," he says, but also about the past (the quality of the leaves today is dependent on the past season) and the future (the flow of time is moving in a certain direction). Too many of us don't stop to realize that today is important. So, see this documentary. Today. (Especially if you like art and/or nature.) {moscomment} |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
A political official cannot promote life...
1014 - [size=large][color=purple][b]hey[...
Starting in microstock - Denise,I usuall...
What's your favorite? - I was wondering ...
It's really annoying how people assume p...