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Click here to read full transcript of documentary: Rivers and Tide
"The very thing that brought the thing to be is the thing that will cause its death."
Goldsworthy explains, as his elegant, spiraled constructions once again become random piles of stones on the beach. As with Andy's stones, so with our lives.
"Art for me is a form of nourishment," Goldsworthy says, and we see what he means as he begins to assemble his earthwork arrangements.
If we didn’t spend time experiencing the individual frames forming into moving images, it would not be cinema. Rivers and Tides and its subject make the argument that it’s important to enjoy what is here and now before it’s taken away.
Goldsworthy respects the processes of life and death reflected in nature. As the sun illuminates the finished sculpture, he notes, "The very thing that brought it to life, will bring about its death." This is only one of the many spiritual insights emerging from his art.
He wanders woods and riverbanks, finding materials and playing with them, fitting them together, piling them up, weaving them, creating beautiful arrangements that he photographs before they return to chaos.
He creates an igloo out of driftwood collected from the beach. When the tide comes in, the wooden structure begins to float and then drift to the sea in a slow swirl. But Goldsworthy is not attached to his art: "It feels as if it's been taken off into another plane, another world . . . It doesn't feel at all like destruction."
The artist also doesn't think in terms of success or failure. After he has spent many hours constructing an intricate mobile of twigs and thorns, the wind shifts and the piece collapses. Goldsworthy surveys the wreckage and practices equanimity. He seems to know that sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't. What's important is that the creative process itself has been manifested along with an intimate meeting with "the heart of the place." Nothing is ever lost in the universe. There is always something to be cherished in this kind of environmental art.
"I think the color is an expression of life. I am in continuous pursuit of the red — that something so dramatic, so intense, could at the same time be so hidden, underneath the skin of the earth."
These mysteries intrigue the artist who, in the end, admits that language cannot adequately convey the full impact of the delights of the natural world.
D. H. Lawrence said wonder was the sixth sense and called it "the natural religious sense." You cannot watch this documentary without being astonished again and again.
Goldsworthy opens our eyes and all of our senses to the beauty and the multiple enchantments of the natural world that we so often take for granted. He is also a spiritual teacher of play, demonstrating a child-like capacity for curiosity. He seems to enjoy kneeling down in the mud or creating something in the face of a cold stiff wind. He doesn't worry about who will see his art or whether it will stand the test of time. He accepts failure as part of the learning process and moves on to new challenges.
He knows that we can warm the end of an icicle just enough to make it start to melt, and then hold it against another icicle, and it will stick. With that knowledge, he makes an ice sculpture, and then it melts in the sun and is over.
Some of his constructions are of magical beauty, as if left behind by beings who disappeared before the dawn. He finds a way to arrange twigs in a kind of web. He makes a spiral of rocks that fans out from a small base and then closes in again, a weight on top holding it together. This is not easy, and he gives us pointers:
"Top control can be the death of a work." Often Andy will be ... almost there ... right on the edge ... holding his breath as one last piece goes into place ... and then the whole construction will collapse, and he will look deflated, defeated, for a moment ("Damn!"), and then start again: "When I build something, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance."
We have piled stones or made architectural constructions out of sand, or played Pick-Up Stix, and we know exactly what he is trying to do--and why. Yes, why, because his art takes him into that Zone where time drops away and we forget our left-brain concerns and are utterly absorbed by whether this ... could go like this ... without the whole thing falling apart.
We must re-examine the mundane in order to break through our habitual and clichéd perceptions.
What struck me was the sense of energy when you were outside of the art college. It was very secure in the art college. Soon as you made something outside, there was a sum of breathlessness and an uncertainty. Total control can be the death of a work.
-- Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides
industrialization and mass commercialization
Goldsworthy too uses the natural environment to explore histories and experiences that are quickly being rendered obsolete by industrialization and mass commercialization. He desires to "touch the heart of the place," to know it, its people, and its history intimately. But this knowledge requires a sustained time and effort that is difficult within the demands of contemporary life.
The film itself becomes a testament to the ideal synthesis between an industrialized form and its naturalist subject matter.
Goldsworthy's art persistently questions contemporary definitions of "usefulness." While constructing a stone structure on a beach with the tide quickly rising, he admonishes the camera crew,
"I think you should stop filming and collect stones instead. Do something useful."
But Goldsworthy and the film argue that the seemingly useless might provide deep insights into our surroundings and ourselves.
Goldsworthy's art demonstrates this lesson -- that one must acknowledge both life and death in order to know a place -- through its construction and design, using the processes of the present to connect with both the past and future. He locates a fishing hole that is empty of water due to low tide and takes driftwood from the shore to construct a dome, its shape emulating the circulating eddies of the river. After the piece is "completed," a local villager wanders by, explaining that this fishing hole used to be a good place to fish for carp when the villager was a child.
Goldsworthy's piece exposes the futility of asking whether he/the artist or nature is responsible for the piece's beauty, which depends on their interpenetrations, of art and nature, creation and destruction. The slippage between art and nature leads viewers to realize that the "art work" is as much a part of its surroundings as the surroundings are a part of the "work."
Yet, calling the artwork "completed" at this stage is a misnomer, since Goldsworthy had specifically designed it so that high tide would lift the sculpture into the river, where currents would reshape its structure.
This is interesting because the shapes are made using only straight pieces of wood. It is a example of 'string arts' or 'curve stritching'.
Thank you.
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