California Dreaming: Andy Goldsworthy

A colleague read my post on the de Young Museum's landscaping and correctly observed that I must have loved Andy Goldsworthy's cracked granite boulders and paving at the entrance. Well: half-love anyway. If I weren't married, I might consider my investment in AG books as my dowry.

So, in theory, I think the world of his amazing creations, how he has fused his artist self with nature. He is a giant! However, I wasn't terribly moved by his installation at the de Young. The crack (more delicately described as a "winding fissure") was my favorite part: my local Berkeley friends and tour guides especially liked how the it leaps up onto one boulder and then snakes back around just before running into the building's skeleton.



But for me it's too contrived and I don't respond to the harsh man-sculpted forms of the boulders. It's the same, although reversed, as why the exterior landscaping doesn't succeed in my eyes. The building is very modern and while Goldworthy's art is too, his best work seamlessly integrates man and nature. That balance is askew here.

Maybe that's what he intended? But I believe there is that paradox about artists getting so successful that their commissions have to satisfy more and more demanding consumers. Apparently he had the boulders brought from a quarry in England which, even if we ignore the low sustainability quotient, may speak to him, but did not have much meaning for me. The problem is I have such high hopes for AG since I consider him one of the world's best artists.

His creation process on-site seems the the most interesting factor to me. Perhaps I will include it in my talk at the Chicago Botanic Garden on March 23rd: "Being Present in Your Garden." Then, "Rather than just viewing the garden as product to be maintained, we will discuss how to design and inhabit the landscape as a process in four dimensions." Or at least I will try.

I did indeed love a piece of Goldworthy's I saw in Scotland five years ago: look to my next blog.