pop-culture for the people

yet another ART FOR MONKEYS article:
Pick Up Sticks - The Andy Goldsworthy Story
by Aperturius

When I was about seven or eight, my neighbor friend Tim and I tried to make a snow tunnel.  It couldn’t have been more than six feet in length and was horribly constructed, but we spent hours on it until we were soaked to the bone.  Kids do stupid things like this.  We make (and the less intelligent among us sometimes eat) mud pies and dig holes to the center of the earth – mine went down about three feet – and make stones into neat little piles.  Why?  Well, why not?  We were kids; we didn’t have anything better to do.  And when I was a kid, video games were still very rudimentary.  Punching holes in the sides of buildings and eating bathtubs in Rampage on my Atari could only entertain me for three hours – four, tops.  Then it was time to get my hands dirty.

Now imagine yourself at forty years old, performing the same childish tasks outside…for a living.  Meet Andy Goldsworthy.  I think that instead of firefighters, astronauts, or Ashlee Simpson, Goldsworthy should be every child’s true hero.  He gets to do what all kids do, and he is paid for it.  Paid WELL.  Museums and galleries all over the world are clamoring to get Andy to come to their location, look at some trees and rocks, and throw something together.  Andy recently constructed a piece on the terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, two twenty-foot spires of round river stones delicately balanced, caged in by a skeleton of split logs.  From above, they look like giant nipples of the gods.  Storm King, a gallery/commune in upstate NY for artists who like to frolic in nature, commissioned Goldsworthy to build a stone wall which marks the boundary of nothing.  It simply meanders, making S-curves around trees, sinking into a pond, and continuing on the other side.

The stone wall Andy built is one of the few pieces he has made that is permanent. A very indifferent Mother Nature destroys nearly everything else.  When your favorite art materials are leaves and dirt, your creations don’t tend to last long.  So what’s the point?  Why make art if it’s just going to be destroyed?  I’d like to see the Louvre take the Mona Lisa out of its humidity-controlled, bullet-proof case and throw it out on the lawn for a while, but it’s not gonna happen.  This whole idea of “non-permanent” art is quite new, and it brings about more of those fun artistic conundrums.  If the work isn’t meant to last, how are people expected to view it?  Viewers must either be told of the artwork and make their way to it before it’s destroyed, or the artist must take photographs of it to show people later.  Goldsworthy usually does the latter.  He has a whole room full of slides, documentation of every single work he’s done, whether it’s good or bad.  The only way to see the bulk of his work is to buy his books full of glossy, full-color photographs.

So…do the photographs themselves then count as art?  If Goldsworthy takes a picture of one of his sculptures and then the sculpture is destroyed, does the photo take its place?  Wait a minute…can Goldsworthy’s sculptures even be called sculptures??  What the hell do we call this stuff?  What part of the whole process is the actual art?

To 99% of you, the above paragraph is complete nonsense.  “Who cares?” you’re telling yourselves, and you’re right.  What you see above is the jungle of semantics that artists and art critics love hacking themselves into the middle of.  Trust me, you don’t wanna go in there, because you’ll never get out.  Whenever something new is created and becomes popular, it must immediately be defined.  Goldsworthy’s work has never been easy to classify, which means, of course, that many of his professors in art school considered him a failure.

While other art students at Bradford Art College in England spent hours in their little cubicles, Andy preferred to travel to a local beach, arranging rocks and making drawings in the sand with sticks, until the tide washed his art away.  He brought his works back to professors in the form of photographs, only to be ridiculed.  If Goldsworthy had been a weaker man – if, for instance, he hadn’t spent his youth sticking his hands inside sheep to assist in lamb birth – he might have acquiesced and joined his counterparts in the cubicles.  But he had a vision and a way of working he wasn’t about to desert just because some stuffed shirt threatened him with a failing grade.

To learn more about Goldsworthy and his work, rent the film Rivers and Tides, which is a documentary of the artist wandering around in the countryside and risking his fingers for art.  The guy has the ugliest fingertips on the planet, due to many crushing encounters with boulders.  There’s nothing confrontational about Andy’s work, unless you consider it a comment on the destruction of nature by man, which it is nothing of the sort.  He just likes being a kid, and the rest of us who are stuck in our mundane 9-5 desk jobs like to cheer him on.