Andy Goldsworthy Art

On my birthday last Saturday, Priscila and I and the kids were going to go to an
outdoor art museum (Storm King) in upstate New York but the weather decided
that we weren't going to go and so we didn't. The reason I wanted to go to this
'museum' is to see a piece by Andy Goldsworthy.
I was first introduced to Goldsworthy's art by way of a class at BYU about the
Humanities and the Environment. We watched a sort of documentary about his
art, which I later purchased, and it still fascinates me to think about how he relates
his drive to create with his drive to relate to the physical world. Perhaps this is
because I too have performed similar pieces of art as I've 'doodled' with the objects
in nature, though I've never taken it to such extremes. Goldsworthy's art
however, isn't simple 'nature doodling.' His art shows me several important things
about art, nature, and about the artist with regards to nature: art doesn't have to
be displayable or even reproducible; art can be fleeting and spontaneous - in
harmony with nature (the inherent irony in my comments is noted: the artist's
'spontaneity' and the art's 'irreproducibility' are forever cemented and reproduced
in the documentary, not to mention this blog and perhaps many more commentaries,
classes, and discussions on the subject - but the point is that art can be the above
things); the artist must know his or her materials in order to push his or her art to
the point where it truly becomes his or her 'art.' And when this art has to do with a
relationship with nature as nature, the artist's knowledge of the materials takes on
a unique, even phenomenological dimension.

In any case, below I've put a clip of clips, which I took from Youtube, of the
documentary. Someone has taken snippets from the documentary (promoted
at the end of the video) and has put it to some electronic music but you still
should be able to get the point. The wall on the video that winds in and out
of trees and down in and up out of a pond is the piece that is at this 'museum'
in New York that I wanted to visit.

I should mention that Goldsworthy creates his art from things that are site-specific.
For example, what looks like red paint in the stream is actually crushed stone from
under and around the stream (the clip when he throws the clay into the air and it
splashes red in the stream shows this). The stone wall that he build was build by
taking stones that were there from the site where a older wall had existed previously.