Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape

Andy Goldsworthy Concepts of the LandscapeTitle Travel constructs a fictional proportionship amongst heed and landscape (M. Auge, Non-Places, 1995 p86). Does this statement wait to you to express a central insight about landscape and prompt in the 20th cytosine? Please discuss in relation to the behave of Andy Goldsworthy.The Earth deeds art of Andy Goldsworthy challenges, firstly, a classical art-historical conception of the landscape, and can besides be implicitly responsive to the supermodern comprehend of landscape and abode, theorised by Marc Auge, in which Vocabulary educates the view, in figure of speechs the landscape1.. Goldsworthy captures the aggregate of place by and by texture, allusion to process and a coarse dependability on nature, as if to transform both the visibles of the objects and the meaning of their ofttimes banal contexts.It is immediately evident that Goldsworthys works, in general, strongly show texture and shape. Goldsworthy describes the on the job(p) process as a tactile expression, implying the occasion of a multi-sensory extension of the body, a recurring artistic intention, especially done cues signifying touch and stack. For me, looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is uncontrollable to say where one stops and another begins2.This obsession with recurring forms in nature using different materials has a ritualistic edge, where the earthworks have lose the purpose and subroutinealism of the commercial product.This tactile gaze, used as the central route of identifying the object, is further evoked by the use of text. For example, in a buck of a spherical ice ball positioned aside a unsanded Autumn bridge, his texts connotes the get wind not only in terms of its visual impact scarcely also the texture implied by its aural qualities luxurious ice sound of cracking.3The shape and texture of the river in the 1988-9 Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks 4 symbolizes its sensual form 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 glide has evolved through a need to move close to the ground, sometimes under and sometimes above, an expression of the outer spot it occupies5. Similarly, rather than use the language of signposts to repoint a river (in its non-place), the use of to a greater extent tactile cues reclaims the spectators newness of vision in Auges words, the traveller (AG) is recapturing the landscape like it is the first journeying of birththe p shoreal experience of differentiation6. duration Auge asserts that non-places exist only through the words that evoke them,7 AGs words work to finish up 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 phot o frame?Like a travel writer, a heightened perception or rediscovery of the landscape is the central tenet of Goldsworthys working process Some places I return to over and over again, sack deeper- a relationship made in layers over a wide 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, wave, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of lifetime 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 fleet vision of space, Goldsworthys immobilization and transposition of the train move through 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 this awareness is awareness that the land itself is fleeting and transforming match to environmental whim, and that the photograph exclusively represents a certain endorsement in a process.His emphasis on spontaneity and change according to environmental and climactic conditions, as well 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(prenominal) of his works in which piles of material are neatly centred with a hollow hole11, we sense their impermanence and a foreboding decay from comprehend 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 yarn 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 Durham near forcefully use the concept of environmental process to allude to the figurehead 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 statically without moving in any case fast and by being aware of its continuing narrative, rather than being dictated by the perpetual series of presents14 of those unrecognised non-places, exaggerated in Thomas Gurskys digital photos. According 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 passing acknow directgement.15 Goldsworthys works seem to reclaim that historicity of the natural object that is lost in the instantaneousness of the commercial product16, including the signs that describe and name featu res and punctuations in the land, trying to give 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 precariousness, Constable and the landscape painters of the 18th century synchronized these natural irregularities, painting the clouds and sun simultaneously and consciously at different periods and freezing the movement of the Hay wain into a stance.17In Goldsworthys work, therefore, landscape is no longer a site, implying static, but a process, implying diachronic, in which the object and its place are interdependent.Throughout th e earthworks photographs and their accompanying text, cardinal main interconnected subjectivities emerge, both of which seem threatened by the to-do 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 alongside rows of flat 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 t hat there is a tension between Goldsworthys organic creations and their technical 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 balance 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 soulfulnesss 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 traveller occupies a non-communicative, solitary 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 individuation of references24. In contrast, by allowing the serendipitous influence of nature to produce a unique 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 approach to an anthropology of supermodernity, capital of the United Kingdom Verso, 1995.Baudrillard, Jean, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Caroline Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. Autonomedia, 1988Goldsworth y, Andy, Andy Goldsworthy, London Penguin Group, 1990.Hand to Earth, Ed. Andy Goldsworthy. New York Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993.Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The heathen 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 declination 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, p414 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 Caroline 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