Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape

Andy Goldsworthy Concepts of the LandscapeTitle Travel constructs a fictional human relationship between wish and landscape (M. Auge, Non-Places, 1995 p86). Does this statement seem to you to express a exchange insight about landscape and travel in the 20th century? Please question in relation to the work of Andy Goldsworthy.The Earthworks art of Andy Goldsworthy challenges, firstly, a classical art-historical conception of the landscape, and can also be implicitly responsive to the supermodern sense of landscape and get into, theorised by Marc Auge, in which Vocabulary educates the wish, informs the landscape1.. Goldsworthy captures the essence of place through texture, allusion to process and a mutual dependability on nature, as if to transform both the textiles of the objects and the meaning of their a lot banal contexts.It is immediately evident that Goldsworthys works, in general, strongly accentuate texture and shape. Goldsworthy describes the working process as a hapt ic expression, implying the involvement of a multi-sensory extension of the body, a recurring artistic intention, especially through cues signifying touch and vision. For me, escorting, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where superstar stops and another begins2.This obsession with recurring forms in nature using different materials has a ritualistic edge, where the earthworks have lost the purpose and functionalism of the commercial product.This tactile gaze, used as the central way of identifying the object, is further fired through the use of text. For example, in a photo of a spherical ice bullock block positioned aside a bleak Autumn bridge, his texts connotes the image not precisely in terms of its visual impact but also the texture implied by its aural qualities voluptuary ice sound of cracking.3The shape and texture of the river in the 1988-9 Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks4 symbolizes its sensual fo rm in a way which still identifies it as relating to a river, but without the non-abstracted seamless visual art representation of a river. Goldsworthy describes this process The snake has evolved through a need to move close to the ground, sometimes to a lower place and sometimes above, an expression of the space it occupies5. Similarly, rather than use the language of signposts to designate a river (in its non-place), the use of more tactile cues reclaims the spectators newness of vision in Auges words, the traveller (AG) is recapturing the landscape like it is the first journey of birththe primal experience of differentiation6.While Auge asserts that non-places exist only through the words that evoke them,7 AGs words work to clarify the gaze rather than condense it to a unified vision.But what constitutes this gaze? When we refer to his earthworks, are we referring only to the symbolic object, or the whole space inside the photo frame?Like a travel writer, a heightened percepti on or redisc everywherey of the landscape is the central tenet of Goldsworthys working process Some places I return to over and over again, going deeper- a relationship made in layers over a long time.8 There is a suggestion by AG that site or context affects and, to an extent, has a significant role in generating the features of his objectsWhen I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around itThe energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within9While the train, for Auge, is one of the greatest culprits behind the spectators fleeting vision of space, Goldsworthys immobilization and transposition of the train track and its practical function to a snaking in the Lambton earthworks?, is a way for AG to recapture the essence of the landscape, to shift its perceptual status from non-place to place Staying in one place makes me more aware of change10.However, part of t his awareness is awareness that the land itself is fleeting and transforming according to environmental whim, and that the photograph merely represents a certain moment in a process.His emphasis on spontaneity and change according to environmental and climactic conditions, as advantageously as his own sense of navigation, is significant because he is able to evoke the history of the object through capturing a synchronic moment in its processes. If we look at several of his works in which piles of material are neatly centred with a hollow hole11, we sense their impermanence and a foreboding radioactive decay from seeing their present formal cohesion. A Cambridge earthwork with leaves is accompanied by this awareness in text, where a materialistic description of the object is transformed into a annals of it Torn Hole/horse chestnut leaves stitched with stalks around the rim/moving in the wind12.Perhaps more than these smaller-scale earthworks, the earthworks in County shorthorn mos t forcefully use the concept of environmental process to allude to the movement of travel, not only through their obvious association with trains, but through the movement implied by the object, as ripples from a thrown stone13. Freezing these processes is a way of reawakening the senses, by both seeing the object nonoperationalally without moving too fast and by existence aware of its continuing narrative, rather than being driven by the perpetual series of presents14 of those unrecognised non-places, exaggerated in Thomas Gurskys digital photos. accord to Auge, the language of signposts etc. does not heighten the spectators perception of a place, but merely substitutes their relationship to it as a mere ephemeral acknowledgement.15 Goldsworthys works seem to reclaim that historicity of the natural object that is lost in the immediacy of the commercial product16, including the signs that describe and name features and punctuations in the land, trying to wee-wee it a sense of place.Challenging the prescriptions of discourse on our subjectivity, however, has always been a preoccupation in landscape art. Constables landscape paintings, for example, could represent a different challenge to the supermodern construction of landscape into a fleeting non-place, through his holistic, static, formalist and panoramic vision of the land. While Goldsworthy reconfigures the landscapes gaze beyond the static to an awareness of its morphology, materiality, unpredictability and riskyness, Constable and the landscape painters of the 18th century synchronized these natural irregularities, painting the clouds and sun concurrently and consciously at different periods and freeze the movement of the Hay wain into a stance.17In Goldsworthys work, in that locationfore, landscape is no longer a site, implying static, but a process, implying diachronic, in which the object and its place are interdependent.Throughout the earthworks photographs and their accompanying text, two main interconnected subjectivities emerge, both of which seem threatened by the dislocation through the non-place organic nature and Goldsworthy, who is simultaneously a conscious manipulator of natures autonomous processes as well as driven by the manipulations of nature itself.The larger scope of his County Durham Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, encourages a more structural and slightly cartographic gaze. A disused railway track becomes the site for a snaking sand track photographed aerially on board rows of monotonous houses. Their juxtaposition, their mutual encroachment on one another and the snaking imprints echo of movement, in one sense seem to re-establish the inter-dependency of urban structures and nature, and the similarities in the way we perceive them despite serving different functions. In this sense, it allows greater insight to its organic qualities by its association.In a technical sense, it could be argued that there is a tension between Goldsworthys organic crea tions and their technological control by the intrinsic features of the photograph. However, any hint of the artists exploitation, evoked in works such as Snowball in trees18 or in references to the name of the excavator driver in the Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, is balanced out, in exchange, by their precarious existence in nature, where a rock could be precariously balanced on a boulder.19This relationship between nature and its manipulations is significant because it represents a reappropriation of our relationship with those places, designated by the artists symbols rather than the symbols of industry with which individuals are supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but moral entities or institutions20. Goldsworthy navigates and finds his non-prescribed place, by being led by climactic and environmental factors rather than such moral entities.21Auge defines non-place in detail against the anthropological concept of place, where the travelle r occupies a non-communicative, alone(p) space with the language of ticket machines and train timetables.22 Accordingly, these public facilities and structures give the spectator an image of their individuality, or a distanced simulated familiarity,23 by discursively framing and displacing the gaze and the individual essence towards a simultaneous collective individuality, through the individualization of references24. In contrast, by allowing the serendipitous influence of nature to produce a alone(predicate) result on each object, each of the processes in the Earthworks produces individual objects, which, not over-prescribed by images and signs, evolve in partial autonomy.BIBLIOGRAPHYAuge, Marc, Non-Places introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, London Verso, 1995.Baudrillard, Jean, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Carolean Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. Autonomedia, 1988Goldsworthy, Andy, Andy Goldsworthy, London Penguin Group, 1990.Han d to Earth, Ed. Andy Goldsworthy. New York Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993.Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC Duke University Press, 1991.Rosenthal, Michael, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987Rosenthal, Michael, The Victorians and Beyond, British Landscape Painting, Oxford Phaidon Press Ltd., 1982Footnotes1Marc Auge, Non-Placesintroduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, 1995 Verso, London , p1082Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Goldsworthy, 1990Penguin Group, London , p13Andy Goldsworthy, Stacked ice sound of cracking, Hampstead Heath, 28 December 19854 Andy Goldsworthy, Leadgate and Lambton earthworks, County Durham, Winter-Spring 1988-95 Goldsworthy, p36 Auge, p847 opcit, p958 Goldsworthy, p19 ibid10 ibid11 For example, Bracken, Borrowdale, Cumbria, 13 February 1988 Slate, Stonewood, Dumfriesshire, Summer 1987, Plane Leaves, Castres, France, 19 October 1988.12 Cambridge, 24 July 1988613 AG, p4 14 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC Duke University Press, 1991.15 Auges, p9716 Jean Baudrillard, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Carolean Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. Autonomedia, 198817Michael Rosenthal, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 19871819 Rock on boulder work20 Auge, p9621 AG, p122 Auge, p107-823 Auge, p10624 Auge, p109