Working With Time: Andy Goldsworthy

January 18, 2005

Richard's Viewing Log points to the Andy Goldsworthy exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art through February 20.  Goldsworthy is an artist who makes intricate and delicate constructions from natural, ephemeral materials, leaves, rocks twigs.  One memorable construction early in the documentary film Rivers and Tides is a man-high beehive shape that floats away with the tide. You can see some pictures at the museum website.

Dilys, who knows what she likes and is always interested in beauty justified for its own sake alone, replied in the comments to his post.

In Rivers and Tides, when Goldsworthy lies down in the village road during a gentle rain and makes a prone-human silhouette on the surface, the unexpected intentional freedom of it seems like he is a child. A long way from the Great Artist with his atelier, he travels with a crew but freezes his own hands weaving icicles. He seems to work because he must.

To my eye, his constructions equate to Tibetan sand paintings, which may or may not rise aesthetically to the category of installation art. The comments discussion  may provide a good example of art being in the eye of the beholder. A sagacious original at play able nonetheless to record the luscious and suggestive and transient visual constructions that he invents, probably justifies a visit downtown. Goldworthy's work/"art"/craft has changed my eyes forever towards a floating leaf or balanced twig, Japanese motif nailed to rocky gritty Scots Earth. Or Austin lakeside.

Perhaps Goldsworthy's oeuvre is not an easy match to some aspects of art-crit theory, which I am told disprivileges the sheer nondiscursive delight of the observer.

I love it.

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Let's hear it for the "sheer nondiscursive delight of the observer"!

When all the theory is forgotten, that is what will remain. That is why some TV commercials and rock posters and children's book illustrations and product labels will live longer than any contemporary art-world art.