Goldsworthy On Ice
Change, Decay, and John Ruskin
It may be strange to think that the work of a contemporary sculptor/photographer who emerged from the land art movement can be seen as part of a new wave of neo-Romanticism, one that John Ruskin would be proud of and even surprised by. But this is exactly what the work of Andy Goldsworthy manages to accomplish. His work at once conjures up images of natural perfection and infinitude, while never insisting to be anything more than ephemera. But the very nascent nature of work proposed by Ruskin may leave Goldsworthy's work on ice, in danger of abandoning its theory for its production.
Perhaps it is Goldsworthy's site-specific stone arch-work that deserves the first attention, since it is here that we may draw our strongest comparisons to the aesthetic philosophy of John Ruskin. It is, after all, Ruskin's piece "The Nature of Gothic" within his Stones of Venice that we may find our strongest evidentiary support for the claim. Goldsworthy's most relevant piece is his Locharbriggs sandstone arch, for which we can be grateful that he produced a short diary during its construction. It is with this work that Goldsworthy professes his anti-heroic heroism, seeing it "released from the quarry, unconfined by a building...a sense of energy and movement - 'here stone leapt up from the plain earth'." The arch is "heavy and strong, expressing permanence, but it is in fact about change, movement and journey." Here we can find much in common with Ruskin, who saw architecture as the most virtuous expression of art, "expressive of some great truths commonly belonging to the whole race."
In the movement of the arch, then, we may even recall Jean-Arthur Rimbaud's "movement of races and continents." Goldsworthy may seem only to be moving a mere arch; in fact, it is the movement of one solid expression of virtue. Here an arch becomes much more than just an arch. We begin to see Goldsworthy's work as an index of truth and virtue in a reflective and re-interpretive new wave naturalism. Goldsworthy's architecture may, in its post-modernity, be an even more all-inclusive expression of truth than Ruskin may have ever imagined possible, relying on a unifying Nature as his basis, which is what we all may call our own. Ruskin hoped architecture would finally convey "the confession of Imperfection, and the confession of Desire of Change." In his mastery with - not of - time and nature, Goldsworthy maintains these core concepts.
Goldsworthy's art-making process relies much on a moment-to-moment re-evaluation of his work. While working on his arch, he realizes that the imperfections built into the process are better than a rigorous insistence on final perfection:
We tried chiseling away some excess stone. The resulting marks have confirmed my feeling that the raw, extracted stone with its drilled and cleaved sides is the more honest and effective surface - telling the story of the arch. The chiseling seems decorative and unnecessary.
This echoes Ruskin beautifully. Ruskin wrote that, "no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect." In fact, he went on to make broader strokes, saying that "no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art." Here we see perfect unity between the work of Goldsworthy and the philosophy of Ruskin. Goldsworthy finds that the extra work that would have gone into "perfecting" the arch would have been worthless. Ruskin would always "choose rough work than smooth work." And here Goldsworthy seems to value truth above all else, leaving the raw stone intact as "more honest."
It can be drawn from this that the entire philosophies of Ruskin and Goldsworthy seem to be relative equals. Ruskin's belief is, "that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent." But perhaps here Goldsworthy gets closer to these truths than Ruskin's Gothic architects may have been able. Working as a naturalist rather than a devout Christian, Goldsworthy spends much of his time in the outdoors, each day gaining a closer understanding of time and natural progression. He writes:
I was always interested in seeing work change and decay, but usually as a spectator. Lately the challenge has been not simply to wait for things to decay, but to make change an integral part of a work's purpose so that, if anything, it becomes stronger and more complete as it falls apart and disappears. I need to make works that anticipate, but do not attempt to predict or control, the future. In order to understand time, I must work with the past, present, and future.
It is Goldsworthy's attempts to understand nature on its own terms that bring a greater, naturalistic liberalism to the forefront of his work. For - while Plato may take issue with this - it is the man inside the cave who knows more of stone than the man outside. The caver discovers that even stone is impermanent, subject to the passing of time and passage of water.
Ruskin's architects, though easy to admit imperfection, still saw in the work a final product that did not admit its impermanence. Even the most sturdy cathedrals will one day be transformed. Here Goldsworthy begins to more deeply comprehend this impermanence which Ruskin before only touched on. After carrying away the remnants of a site-specific sculpture he writes:
There is something interesting about carrying away the dust. No longer a stone, it is closer to air.
Air may indeed be more changeful, but stone has much in common with it than it may seem at first glance. Both are susceptible to wind, as anyone who has seen the natural wind-formed arches in the American southwest can attest.
Critics may argue that Goldsworthy's ephemera actually strays from achieving a state of virtuous imperfection. It may seem that, in the quest for the perfect (sellable) photography of a work, Goldsworthy becomes more of a designer than an artist, as writes Stefan Beyst. Beyst continues, writing:
It soon became apparent that land-art was not accessible at all. And it surely would have been a pity to deliver such marvelous creations as Andy Goldsworthy's icicles to decay. That is why the anti-capitalistic and anti-mimetic land-art was fixed on photographs or videos and sold at a bargain.
An emphasis on mimesis and reproduction in the theory of Goldsworthy's work here misses the point. His work is not meant to be accessible. And though it would seem a pity to deliver his "icicles to decay," that is exactly what it is supposed to happen. Decay is a reality.
But production of consumable works is an equal reality, and here the critics would seem to win out. As an article in The New Yorker said of his prints, "These high-color glossy images are the antithesis of the self-consciously primitive, grainy prints favored by the founders of land art, and they have been taken by Goldsworthy's critics to be evidence that he is, at heart, an ornamentalist, a glamorist of nature who has made the mistake, serious in a contemporary artist, of hunting beauty." Here he has seemed to become more of a designer than an artist working in unity with nature. Goldsworthy, in another of his diary entries, writes about placing peat on a green tree:
It is one thing to leave a work unfinished and another to try to create the feeling of it being unfinished. One happens by chance, and the other is forced. I decided to complete the work, which confirmed my view that it was a much stronger piece when fragmented. When complete it took on a designed quality...The fragmentation I introduced to the piece is something that would have come about in the end as pieces dropped off: allowing this process to happen over time would have been the strongest option. But I wouldn't have been here to see that.
Here Goldsworthy admits himself that he functions much more as a designer than as an artist. It is exactly that reproducible, marketable photography that he is looking for at the end of the day.
Unfortunately, Goldsworthy seems to be ignoring the theory upon which his work is based. Much of his work can be said to exist as a sort of portraiture of nature. We see this particularly in his sinusoidal designs, all representing rivers and streams where they do not exist. Goldsworthy would be well-reminded of Ruskin when he writes:
For as that resulted from a humility which confessed the imperfection of the workman, so this naturalist portraiture is rendered more faithful by the humility which confesses the imperfection of the subject.
In a natural world where 99.9% of all species that ever lived are now extinct, it is hardly thinkable that nature is by any means perfect. Thus, the naturalist portrait artist of nature itself must find himself subject to this imperfection, and not deny it.
Perhaps it is a fair criticism of Goldsworthy to call his work design rather than art. Or perhaps it is a mere malapropism. The converse of such criticism may be that all artwork should be critiqued by the standards of the natural world. If the fundamental truth of nature is that constancy is non-existent and that the world is in constant motion and change, then the idea of "accessibility" itself may be in danger, not the work of one artist. The question we may ask ourselves is not, "is land-art accessible?" Instead we may ask, "is art accessible?" We may find that memes, photographs, and reproducible works are hardly permanent. Ruskin himself wrote that "a picture or poem is...a feeble utterance." For if we portend that even cathedrals will some day fall, then surely a photograph cannot be said to be eternal.
Instead, we can look to Goldsworthy's need for a fixed, momentary representation of a work - as a photograph or anything else - as just another example of the imperfection of the artist, and the natural world in general. Every piece he erects still maintains Ruskin's key concepts of the most virtuous art, "the confession of Imperfection, and the confession of Desire of Change." Whether it be his river-like sinusoidal patterns in clay or on trees, or his massive stone arches, Goldsworthy seems to have struck a balance between Man and Nature. In everything he sees change and imperfection, admits it, and moves on. In that he is as successful as he could ever possibly be.
