Many of his constructs are openings, thresholds, arches, spirals, webs, coils or lines of color in a field. He makes things of them-dazzling things, which are difficult to name or define. Many Earth artists do this, but Goldsworthy employs these materials, usually in multiples, as a sculptor would use pieces of metal and glass or organic media such as wood, bone, grasses and stone. More than anything else he is a practitioner of art-trouvé or an art of found natural objects that are not artistic in themselves-a leaf, twigs, branches, a fragment of ice, shards of slate, a boulder. Both temporary and permanent, his works leave one with a sense of the infinite possibilities for redesigning pieces of the natural world as art objects, and using the Earth as a gallery for imaginative constructions.
He uses almost no tools nor a plan for the work before he arrives on site. He embraces the natural world as a creative playground. In this, the third in a four-article series, I explore a New York work and attempt to answer that question.Īndy Goldsworthy assembles natural materials found on site to build sensuous fantasies on ground, on water and in air. Two recent events in Los Angeles prompt me to make such an assessment: the installation of Michael Heizer’s rock, Levitating Mass, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a complementary retrospective, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). However, a question arises these days about how environmentally aware and conscientious are land or Earth artists? Four major figures and four key works help us assess the evolving role of environmental consciousness in Earth art. Or it may be a form of creative play, now augmented by machines. This may signal ownership, dominance or an attempt to connect or infuse nature’s power into the human creature. That’s what human beings had done to the Earth for millennia-left their mark, indelible or not. In the early 1960s some artists abandoned the wall, the gallery and the museum for altering the landscape outside.
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