Rivers and Tides
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
This is a film about and starring artist Andy Goldsworthy, but also starring his work. We don't learn much about the man and what brought him to a place to have the luxury to spend hours, days, weeks afield assembling magical constructs from nature, but we do get to see them in the contexts that no museum could replicate. His visual themes are winding, swirling, looping, natural movement of nature through nature; he imposes only the order of a continuous line or a contiguous structure.
I was far from being the most sophisticated visual art audience member there, (as will be evidenced by this review) but at least I stayed awake through the whole thing - his soft voice and long lingering shots of the tide and rivers was very soothing. Very interesting, very beautiful photography captures feats of immense patience and design, feats most of us could and would never take the time to do. "It's too fragile to bother with" or "the tide will just come in and ruin it." For him, his works are made to be fragile. He puts it thus: "The very thing that gives it life causes its death." Delicate ice works glow with the fire of the sunrise, but that same source of beauty reduces the work to a puddle, a memory, and a film negative. After so much calm patience and quiet, solitary care, it is frustrating at first to see the work eliminated so easily. Goldsworthy seems to take it all in stride.
Goldsworthy is a wee Scotsman, with an expressive face that recalls Ian Holm. His fingers are damaged from all the fine work he does with any materials in nature. He goes to the place, surveys it briefly, and begins his work. It is clearly a compulsion to do this kind of work, this collecting of objects and careful, artful placing of them in new ways. The only people who can also live in such a world of calling forms into being as they are sensed within the patterns of normality tend also to be under the age of 3 or locked away somewhere. Yet here is an adult, channeling that pure instinct and, happily, making a career of it. I admired his dexterity and wondered at what happened between his ears, or when he was forced to go back to four-cornered society. Did his wife let him put away the dishes, or did she worry he would make them into a new thing that would then be smashed by its own weight?
He is a future archaeologist's dream; he must have participated in the original crop circle hoax (perpetuated in Southampton, England, around 1976, and admitted in 1991) which is the closest pop culturally publicized manipulation of nature to approximate how he does what he does. His stone cairns and long, winding looping fences, will entrance the Anthropology students in 2443. I leaned over to one of my companions and said, "that dude is crazy" when he was trying to explain what was happening in his mind when he set out to start a new piece. It was like he was trained by handlers to say "piece" to make it into "art" so people could access it, rather than the clearly very personal, internal thing that it appears to be. She muttered back, "crazy like a fox," and I countered, "crazy like a fox with OCD." Perhaps he is mad, perhaps he is a genius; many times those are one and the same. The end results, viewed as they are meant to be viewed, in nature and in the full environment that inspires them, are beautiful nonetheless.
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These reviews (c) 2003 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at: http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
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