Rivers And Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (DVD)

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I can appreciate installation or site-specific art, but I don't understand it. Or maybe it's the other way around. That's how conflicted I am about it. On the surface, it has a lot to do with your conception of what art is. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think it goes right to the heart of an individual's personality. Could I be site-specific "earth" artist Andy Goldsworthy, a Scotsman who creates works of art in nature using natural materials? Not in a million years, and it has nothing to do with my being an American.

Allow me an explanatory anecdote: the camera focuses on Goldsworthy as he tries to create a work of art from stacked rocks on a beach, and when those rocks collapse after hours of painstaking work, he exhales, scratches his head, or simply gazes heavenward. This was, mind you, the fourth time it had happened to him, and the tide was coming in and time was running short. If I were in that same position, I would have shouted a few choice words that would have guaranteed me a spot in a much lower place, and I probably would have picked up one or two of those rocks and chucked them into the sea. I would have been fuming, but Goldsworthy was as cool as Zen-coach Phil Jackson calmly asking Kobe Bryant if he wouldn't mind passing the ball for a change. I don't have the temperament to work against nature all the time, knowing full well that nature will always win, and that whatever artwork I create will be erased the same way a snowman bites the big one when the temperatures rise. But, of course, Goldsworthy doesn't see it as working against nature. When a creation of his is reclaimed by the sun, a river, a tide, a wind, or a growth of new plants, he finds it exhilarating, this dialogue with nature, this connection, this way of understanding the relationship between nature and art, between humans and nature.

Goldsworthy could be a Zen master himself. The graying, fiftysomething artist lives for moments of synergy that result from his artistic interaction with nature. He uses pieces of wood to link garlic leaves together into a long chain and then arranges them in a spiral in a semi-agitated stretch of stream. And then, the way the wind will animate a mobile, the water uncoils that leafy spiral and sends it snaking, like seaweed salmon swimming to their eventual death, downstream. Or he'll spend hours finding iron-rich rocks in a stream, grinding them and adding water to make natural red-dye balls of clay, and then tossing them into the water again and recording this on camera. I HEAR his explanation and am entranced by the mysticism of it all—how the rock gets its redness from iron, just as our blood gets its color from iron, and how this redness, this energy, lies just beneath the surface of our skin and the skin of the earth. But I prefer my art to be hangable, displayable, a more permanent and traditional expression and extension of the self that reaches out toward immortality (however faux) rather than submitting to the flow of things.

However you feel about site-specific artists, Thomas Riedelsheimer has created a beautiful film that not only captures Goldsworthy's vision and world/art view, but also matches his quiet and mystical manner. Riedelsheimer employs time-lapse photography to show Goldsworthy's creations being gradually buried or destroyed by nature, and, in some cases, resurrecting with the spring thaw the way that other seemingly dead elements of nature have. That expansive time-view photography is blended with computer-game style ground-level camerawork which, for example, follows a river but doesn't appear to be simply floating down it. And to give a broader visual perspective Riedelsheimer includes aerial photography of some of the larger installations and the grander context of nature within which Goldsworthy works. There are close-ups as well, and 180 degree pans that, again, capture the mystical feel that nature has for the artist.

Installation and site-specific artists create works that are more often than not impermanent, and so photographs of the artwork are essential because they're the only lasting record. This film shadows Goldsworthy in a very unobtrusive way, recording his travel to commissions, his laborious work, and even interaction with locals and his own family back in Penpont, Scotland. And yet—here's the amazing part—the tone doesn't abruptly shift when the camera leaves Goldsworthy in his "natural" element, speaking quietly to the camera about his work methods and philosophies. Even in a diner, the filmmakers are able to manage a consistent tone and level of ambient sound.