The best artist is a silent artist

Follow the fissure to the new de Young -- Andy Goldsworthy will lead the way.

"I'm trying to find the right blow that will produce the crack,'' said Goldsworthy, the British sculptor known for the wondrous open-air works he makes with natural materials found on the spot. He's spent the past few weeks in San Francisco painstakingly breaking and piecing together sandstone pavers to form a winding fissure that "should feel as if it comes from within the stone, rather than externally.''

Couldn't he simply he do it rather than pontificate?

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Comments (to this post below) prompt me to expand.

It seems to me that Goldsworthy falls into the "man is not natural" fallacy, that we are somehow outside nature, that nature knows better and that if only listen better we will be more in-touch and integrated. The quote above (and of course that's why I chose it) says pretty explicitly that the source of art is not humans but nature, that the art actually existed "in the stone" before the artist took hammer to hand, that the artist is merely a bystander. That's all very modest but I don't believe it; the rock is sitting there until Goldsworthy comes along and picks it; moreover it partakes of an Adam-and-Eve original sin view of humans in which the less we do the better. As a lover of man-altered landscapes -- I like the pastoral landscape as much as I like wilderness, for example -- I reject a view which puts man outside of nature. We are part of nature -- a leading part indeed -- and the only issue is do we a good job? 

Now I myself may be intellectualizing Goldsworthy's words far beyond his own intention. But you see that's what happens when an artists talks too much.

Comments

[cracker]

He does do it, and he does it well.
The SF Chronicle seems to suffer from the American obsession with process and exposé, however.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Kind of a cheap shot, no? Goldsworthy doesn't notably pontificate more than a lot of artists, and meanwhile he gets a lot of real work done.

Much of which genuinely delights many of us weary of most modern "public art."

[David Sucher]

No I don't think it's a cheap shot at all though my point may not have been as clearly made as it should have been and I thank you for pointing that out. And maybe I should have characterized his verbalisms as "precious" and"pretentious" rather than "pontificate."

I like his work OK -- maybe a bit more than OK -- but it his attempt to add "ideas" to his work -- to make them more than they are or can be -- which I hear as insufferable and even embarassing.

The issue is related to the one raised by Levinson in her critique of Eisenman's Berlin Memorial (i.e. can an abstraction carry the weight of commemoration?) The larger issue is how does the viewer takes meaning from a work of art?

With Goldsworthy the specific issue is whether pleasant-enough pieces of art (OK some even more than merely pleasant) are enhanced by the artist's own explanations? I say no, they are in fact diminished because Goldsworthy's verbalisms are so inane and trivial and for me actually cast a pall on looking at the work. He adds nothing, to my view, to the discussion of the relationship of nature and humans but confuses it with treacly sentimentality.

Now obviously, it is his creation. But someone -- me, now, here -- ought to tell him that his works would grow in stature in his own silence.

[Chris Burd]

Give him a break, David. Since the rise of the curator as the Prime Mover in the art world, all artists have to do the theory thing. As one of the Blowhards pointed out, most of them (being sensory/visual rather than verbal/logical types) aren't very good at this, so they have to fake it.

[David Sucher]

Why give him a break, Chris? He's a very acclaimed artist. Is he now immune from criticism? All I am saying is that for me his words get in the way of appreciating his art. His words about man and nature are so lacking in insight -- cheap, hippie "nature is good" -- that they detract from his work. Your explanation -- "Since the rise of the curator as the Prime Mover in the art world, all artists have to do the theory thing. -- simply condones a bad situation. That's not my job.

[joe o]

>He'd planned to crack the pieces by simply dropping them, but that produced a very straight crack. He got a pile of stones and practiced breaking them in order to learn how to get a line that wasn't straight.

>"I wanted a crack that had a certain energy and movement to it, in contrast to the straight edges of the pavers,'' Goldsworthy said. "I found that by hitting it from behind with a hammer, it imparted energy and unpredictability to the line.'' It's a balance of chance and control. "I'm very demanding of what I want, but the stone's very demanding, too. That's what creates the tautness and tension of the line. ... I'm enjoying the delicacy, the precision of this, the line. They're qualities you don't often associate with stone.''

I don't think he is bullshiting. The way I read it is that he originally wanted to drop the stones on the pavement but that created a clean straight break. The statement that it "should feel as if it comes from within the stone, rather than externally.'' just means he does not want a clean straight break. The clean strait break would make people think about or be seen as being metaphorical of human intervention in nature. That isn't what he wants. It is ironic that in order to avoid the appearence of human intervention he has to intervene alot more than he would otherwise, but there you go. Art is artificial, even nature art.

[tommer peterson]

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

[Hal O'Brien]

"The quote above (and of course that's why I chose it) says pretty explicitly that the source of art is not humans but nature, that the art actually existed "in the stone" before the artist took hammer to hand, that the artist is merely a bystander."

Hm. That's strange. Because here's what the quote you used actually says: That he's trying to create, "a winding fissure that "should feel as if it comes from within the stone, rather than externally."" (Emphasis added.)

That's not a small distinction. I read that as saying that, yes, he's doing this human activity, and imposing his will upon his materials... But he still wants it to appear as if that's not what happened.

Perhaps it's because I've had acting experience, but this reads to me very much like how some actors take the approach of performing in a way so the audience sees their actions as if they're wholly natural, and taking place in an improvisational way, moment-by-moment.

It's a fantastically difficult thing to do. Imagine an audience, either of paying customers or of techies (or both), with sound hookups, make-up, etc... And then you get the command from the director, "Be yourself." Any quick memory of either home videos or photography should show how amazingly rare it is that anyone is "themselves" when the audience is watching.

In the same way, aiming to make a work of art appear as if it was a natural phenomenon seems a very high barrier for success.

As to the "why talk, rather than do," question... Hey. It was an interview. You'd prefer a Garboesque silence? It generates great buzz, but makes for lousy reading. (Let alone, I'm somewhat with Tom Wolfe on this one -- since WWI, almost all art recognized by cultureburg exists to be illustrations for the catalog anyway, so theory almost always trumps the actual objects.)

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Hal O'Brien nails it. Goldsworthy's esthetic is all about trying to create artifacts that mimic the emergent complexity of nature. He doesn't claim that nature is somehow more virtuous than artifice; indeed he's all about artifice. His aesthetic reaction to "nature" is about nature itself, not about some program for how humans should behave toward nature. It's goshwow, not hectoring.

Frankly, I wonder if demanding that artists not "talk too much" doesn't reflects a dualism more insidious than the humans-vs-nature riff you're (I think mistakenly) attributing to Goldsworthy. Sure, artists who talk about art risk sounding dumb. So does everybody else. Art isn't some kind of Precious Magic that requires its practitioners to be especially remote and gnomic. Would Rembrandt's work be less powerful if it turned out that Rembrandt himself was a tiresome chatterbox? If you find that's true, I suggest that the person making too much of verbalization isn't the talkative artist.

[David Sucher]

Look, if you guys like his words, great. Interesting that people are so defensive about him. The blogosphere is a critical medium and I see no why anyone should try to turn things around and say I am making too much of what I think is significant. (Of course go ahead if you like -- I'll just ignore it!) I have no opinion on the vast majority of things and strong opinion on very few. One of the very few is artitists whose words get in the way of appreciating the work.

Btw, I saw one of his videos -- blogged on it here -- and I don't like his holier-than-thou attitude -- it casts a terrible pall for me on his work. He may be a very fine guy -- I just can't stand the "nature is holy" business which is the big message that I hear.

As to Rembrandt, yes it would in fact effect his work adversely. External factors to the objects themselves of course do influence the way we see them.