Andy Goldsworthy

I just watched "Rivers and Tides," a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy by Thomas Riedelsheimer. I am very impressed by both Goldsworthy's work and Riedelsheimer's film. I find something very appealing about embracing ephemerality and creating art which is meant to exist just for a while at a specific time and place and then exist no longer. I also see in Goldsworthy's work the conflict between the two desires of interest to me: the desire to understand and the desire to communicate. There is the desire to create something site-specific, something that you only experience and fully understand, knowing that you will never be able to fully share this experience with anyone else. The work itself will disappear and to understand it fully is to see it through the whole cycle from creation, through climax, to disappearance. But there is also the desire to communicate; the desire to share with others what we understand. Goldsworthy takes photographs of his works and communicates those, that is what we know of those works. In most ways, experiencing the photographs bears little resemblance to experiencing the sculptures in their environments. Video record at least adds the time component, yet we still must imagine the moisture in the air, the air's coldness, the texture of the soil underneath, and the knowledge that it is all changing and about to disappear--one cannot rewind time.

We want to understand, so we create tings which we know we will not be able to share with other. But we also want to communicate with others, so we create things that will be communicable, even though they are only splinters of our understanding.