akirlu | Speaking of Obsession (Reply)

Last night we saw RIVERS AND TIDES, a film documenting work and thoughts by environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. The man is bugfuck. His work is beautiful and thoughtful and fascinating, made entirely of found natural materials assembled in situ, in the environment the materials come from, mostly with just his bare hands. He uses icicles to weave sinuous, riparian curves through and around trees and stones, catching light in the most amazing ways. He builds egg-like dolmens out of slate or ice, or any stone that will shatter slate-like, in flat, plate-like flakes. He assembles ribands and streamers of long chains of leaves and just lets them go where they please in a nearby river. At least he has the good sense to be a photographer, really, so that there are records of the actual work, since so much of it is completely ephemeral. It's riveting. It's also awkward. Goldsworthy is quite obviously both a genuine introvert, and someone who doesn't think primarily in language. So the narration is punctuated by long, stretching silences and strange, stuttering dead ends, as Goldsworthy runs out of words for what he's sensing and trying to bring out. But I have to admire a man who can say things like, "It's very hard to get past the surface wooliness of sheep, to the essence of sheep. A sheep is a really powerful animal," and get me see it as both sincere and correct, as opposed to the hopelessly pretentious tosh it sounds like when written down on the page.

As a sometime pretender to art, I was just fascinated by the process.