Subject: Viridian Note 00033: Viridian Aesthetics: Andy Goldworthy Key concepts: Viridian aesthetics, Andy Goldsworthy Attention Conservation Notice: It's art criticism. Links: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues97/feb97/g olds.html http://www.artsednet.getty.edu/ArtsEdNet/Images/I/knotweed .html http://cgee.hamline.edu/see/Goldsworthy/see_an_andy.html Entries in the Viridian "Fungal Typography" Contest http://members.aol.com/stjude/ http://www.saunalahti.fi/~jtlin/viridian/ http://www.wenet.net/~scoville/Viridian/viridiantext.html (((See Note 00027 for instructions on this contest.))) Our newly-coined Viridian Motto: "Gimme Chevron" Bruce Sterling remarks: The difficult question of "what looks Viridian" is central to our interests. We now examine the work of British artist Andy Goldsworthy. Andy Goldworthy (1956 -- ) is a British artist resident in Scotland. His artwork occupies a rather ill- defined and unique area, uniting sculpture, performance art, gardening, nature studies, and photography. He has done installations in a museum context, large-scale landscape engineering, and sculptures. He also does posters and books. Most of his work, however, is site-specific. Goldsworthy wanders barehanded into some chosen site out- of-doors (including France, Australia, Japan, the USA and even the North Pole) and artfully rearranges whatever he finds at hand. Goldsworthy's "media" have included mud, sand, sticks, thorns, rocks, boulders, leaves, flowers, feathers, bones, reeds, bark, branches, snow, rain, ice, and his own spit. After assembling the temporary sculpture and waiting for proper lighting conditions, he carefully photographs the ensemble, and then leaves it to decay. ************************************* Why Andy Goldsworthy Is Not Viridian ************************************* He doesn't loudly and publicly complain about carbon dioxide. His work is not "transorganic;" it looks very pastoral and edenic, until you realize he's done something extremely remarkable to the landscape through rearranging stray flowers and twigs by using his hands and teeth. His art is biological rather than biomorphic (except for that memorable episode when he artfully stacked up those rusting steel plates in the deserted, weed-grown foundry). ******************************* Why Andy Goldsworth is Viridian ******************************* He has enormous artistic talent that commands awestruck attention. His feeling for coloration and graphic composition are especially impressive. Though his approach might sound odd or gimmicky in mere description, his work is always striking, often dramatic and sometimes majestic. His art doesn't appear "technological," but would be impossible without the mediation of cameras. Most of his work is temporary; the usual aim is photographic documentation of some crucial instant, not a permanent transformation of the landscape. His art embraces decay. He is particularly insistent about this. He datamines nature. He makes the invisible visible. He is very aware of historical process and refers to it repeatedly in his writings. He "walks through walls of knowledge guilds" by combining approaches of several art genres in a unique, historically rooted, but strangely timeless art practice. His work is biological, not logical. Through iterative actions, and an intuitive, interactive, hands-on approach, he creates a tableau that could not be pre-designed from a standing start. A Goldsworthy photograph displays human will, great persistence, great beauty, and intentionality, but not rational planning. The result does not resemble engineering, the imposition of human plans on raw materials. Instead, it resembles teleology: twigs and branches suddenly become dramatic actors, boulders find themselves clad in finery, pebbles somehow look the way that pebbles have "always wanted to look." Rational analysis can't follow him, but he is going to some very interesting and effective places: this is genuine and powerful art practice. His work is not confrontational, deconstructive or subversive. It is innovative and serene. In his books and writings, Goldworthy has many interesting things to say about his sensibility and approach. Andy Goldsworthy: "I am not playing the primitive. I use my hands because this is the best way to do most of my work. If I need tools then I will use them. Technology, travel and tools are part of my life and if needed should be part of my work also. A camera is used to document, an excavator to move earth, snowballs are carried cross country by articulated truck." Goldsworthy is not a decorative artist or nature sentimentalist: "It is easy to make a mess. I want my work to be taut and am not interested in making weak arrangements of nature in the pretence of being sensitive." He is interested in the interaction of human and nature, not in wildernesss per se: "Although I occasionally work in wildernesses, it is the areas where people live and work that draw me most. I do not need to be the first or only person in a place. That no-one has gone before me would be a reason for me not to go there and I usually feel such places are best left. I am drawn to wildness but do not have to be in a wilderness to find it." He makes the invisible visible: "I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue." He embraces decay: "Each work grows, stays, decays == integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an tensity about the work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit." This is an artist and an aesthetic of primary interest and importance to us. Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)