Land Artists-Andy Goldsworthy,David Kemp and David Nash.
SCULPTURE need not be a bronze statue of a town
councillor or a marble figure of a goddess, respectfully plinthed in gallery
or plaza; or a curvaceous wooden form strung like a harp which we gaze at in
dumbfounded silence. These days, it may well be a drystone wall winding between
trees before burying its end in a lake, like the great Norse serpent for ever
drinking the world's waters dry. Or a cairn on a Highland headland with a fire
flaming inside it. Or a longboat made of stakes and stones and turf, grounded
in the undergrowth of a forest.
These works often use materials that have come to
light in the place itself – leaves, rubbed red stones, dry sticks, thorns, the
dark fluid from mushroom gills, stones picked from scree, blocks of snow and
slivers of ice, earth, deer-dung, scrap iron, fern fronds, spruce thinnings and
off-cuts. In this, the land artists are following the footsteps of the original
Australians, who ground their ochres from earth in rock holes next to the
overhangs which they adorned with fish and birds and lizards and
spirit-figures. They are also working as nearly as humans can to the processes
of nature itself. If you look at the photographs by Paul van Vlissingen taken
monthly from one August to the next at Rudha Cailleach, or Witches' Point, on
the north shore of Loch Maree, you find you're watching a mobile image,
pregnant in each of its 13 stages, the more so because it alters so much as the
winds and currents urge and reposition the four types of stone that compose
the spit.
Now it resembles the tail of a ray or skate, now it's a sea-tangle
head, now it's a hand whose forefinger points westward. Sometimes it settles
down as the head of a bear with an eye and snout that look east in July, west
in the second August. If the images were printed on successive pages of one of
those tiny flick-books, the tongue of shingle would lash to and fro like a dog
shaking a rat.
Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which
Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It's
more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually,the
one in its shape, the other in its invisibility.
Indeed, Salt Lake rose recently
and drowned the jetty. At some stage in the submersion it must have become a
tapering tongue,until finally,a mere stub.
Smithson,an adventurous character
(who was killed when flying a light aircraft to look at one of his works from
above), might have welcomed the flood – he was working with the dirt and gravel
of the desert and knew his work was exposed to weathering. The land artists are
at ease with change. They go beyond Henry Moore's pleasure in the greening of
his bronzes by oxidation (especially near the sea). Talking to John Fowles in
1987, Andy Goldsworthy came out with this wonderfully relaxed notion: 'Ten
years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still there, buried
under the sand, unseen- All my work still exists, in some form.'That is of
course true of all matter: particles from the canvas and pigment of the Mona
Lisa will blow about the world some day.
The difference is that the land
artists usually garner their materials from the place where the work finally
blossoms; and they process these thorns, stems. stones and feathers as little
as possible before embodying them in their works_ Chris Drury's Whale Bone
(1993), illustrated in his recent Silent Spaces, is 'simply' a pilot-whale
vertebra with 13 ochre lines etched into each of the twin tines where the upper
bone structure forks. The symmetry of its -"wings". the converging
ridges in its 'face', the meerschaum shadings of boney stuff itself are
untransmuted. Goldsworthy's sea-urchinlike icicle cluster, made in the winter
of 1987, consisted of icicles 'with their thick ends dipped in snow then water,
held until frozen together. He arranged the ice daggers-That is all.Their
ribbing,their smoothness or roughness, are as the freezing of water moulded
them.
All that is left of the natural material used by
Picasso or Michaelangelo is some salient property-the hard white sheerness of
marble, the egg-yellowness of chromate. The materials of the land artists — the
bush, the tree, the moor from which the material has cropped up — retain their
fibrousness or graininess, dirtiness or translucency, as nearly as can be in
their natural state.This already typifies, even stereotypes, the land
artists too much. They are not a school or group, although later it will be
worth considering why so many artists tended this way at this time. What does
link them, inside their luxuriant variety? The most austere among them, Richard
Long, makes his works by walking,
shuffling, treading. Many of them have probably been seen only by his camera. He
fashioned a circle in the gibber-desert of the Hoggar region of the Sahara by
clearing the gravel and shingle, leaving the dusty sand. He also made a
straight line pointing towards a blunt tusk of mountain — the result is a
minimal artefact, forming as distinctively human a trace as Man Friday's
footprint on the beach.
Probably the circle and line are gone now,overlaid by
sifting minerals. The (usually) black and white photographs complete Long's
obsessional ritual. Near my home in Cumbria, Sally Matthews has worked very
differently. In A Cry in the Wilderness (1990), two hounds jump over a ragged
drystone wall in the permanent twilight of Grizedale Forest. Their colours are
rendered in the black of peaty mud, the bronze of stripped branches. Although
the artist used fondue cement on a rabbit-wire armature to firm up the
crumbliness of the earth, the details are crafted from found materials. The
tendon behind one dog's hind leg is created by a minor root springing from the
taproot that makes the limb. Follow the dogs over the dyke and down the bank to
a beck and you see a third dog trailing a deer made from branches, twigs,
withered grasses, peat. The drab stems and blades that make her coat precisely
imitate the look of a hind starving after a hard winter. They remind us that
deer make and remake themselves by ingesting grass.
Matthews is a consummate figurative artist. When my
Doberman Cross jumped over the wall beside her work, the likeness was exact —
the athletic thrust of the hind leg, the avid jut of the head. Long is at the
other end of this gamut, a devotee of abstraction, of number and geometrical
form. What links them is that both work with the components of the place, in
the place, labouring outdoors for many hours at a time and leaving the work
where it was made, to take its chance among the rotting and the blowing.
These artists delight in the growing and slow forming
of things,they ease themselves into the happening of nature and try to work as
its processes do.Stones settle,water freezes,buds unfurl into leaves. On the
plateau of the Cairngorms in Central; Scotland,which is virtually an Arctic
island in a temperate zone,prolonged extreme cold has formed patterns like
pointilliste paintings or weaving on the mountainous moorland. You would swear
as you looked out over the ribbed and scalloped surfaces,the marled blue greys
and browns and olive greens,that they had been designed.
Freezing and
thawing have sorted and heaved large boulders and soil into gelifluction lobes.
as the naturalist Adam Watson puts it. Nothing could be less purposeful.
This beautiful marking of the land, which works on the planes of colour, relief
and texture, has simply come about. Coming nearer to the animate: according to
the research of an inspired zoologist at Glasgow University called Mike
Hansell, several quite different animals craft the ground, in the course of
their nest-building, into remarkably regular patterns. The stubby earthen
nests of Gentoo penguins are evenly spaced and sized, like circular tesserae
with channels between them. Mole-rats and termites in Southern Africa also
build consistent patterns of circular mounds, called mima prairie. Scrub fowl
do the same in northern Australia, making a terrain which looks so deliberately
planned that their nests have been taken for Aboriginal middens.
These animals
don't intend to create symmetry, let alone delight in it. The spacing probably
flows from their need to be at a convenient distance from their neighbours. Coming finally to the conciously created;we know that
human activity constantlly and typically creates patterns that give is
pleasure, as they are meant to,through their consistency-the repitition of
pattern across a carpet,or hoops and stripes across a knitted fabric. (Metre,
rhyme and recurrent melody appeal to the
same pleasure in recurrence, and in variations on it). The mountain, the mole
rat, the weaver and the poet, all act,whether aware of it or not,in a way that
gives rise to forms we rejoice in because they are not chaotic.
Goldsworthy has said that 'the way my walls are made,
stone upon stone, is like growth.' An installation he made out of broken
branches in spring last year for an exhibition curated in Glasgow by Mike
Hansell looked like a nest built by a bird from dried-out, crooked, knotty
twigs and branches, without following a plan, letting the hands (or claws and
beak) weigh up and the eye assess, until the outcome felt right. That this is
one of Goldsworthy's preferred forms is clear from Time, his first major
publication for four years, which includes a chronology of his career.
If you happen on a real nest, or a clutch of eggs laid
by a wayward hen well away from the farmyard, the stoup of delight that goes
through you is a recognition of order achieved in the midst of what sometimes
seems like the general stramash — the shattered stone of scree, the litter of
splintered and rotted debris on the floor of an unmanaged forest, the spongy
black jets on a river bed. Among all this, there it, calmly perfect: the bundle
of hay-wisps knit into circles, making a cup, the four or five eggs, rounded
and intact. If we're lucky, we come on a piece ofland art with the same sense
of surprise. Grizedale Forest Park, in a leafy dale between Windemere and
Coniston, teems with amazing works in wood and stone. When I first walked about
in it twenty years ago, there was no leaflet listing numbered pieces, and as we
walked along foresters' tracks, there, unexpectedly, was a channelled tree
held horizontal on stilts, with water running down it. Was' it a relic of old
woodcraft or a necessary drain? It was Wooden Waterway (1978) by David Nash.
What delighted me was the slender pour of the translucent water, and the way
the thing looked almost like an accident of nature, a fallen sapling become a
duct. A little further on, perched on a pair of 'goalposts' straddling a dip
in the track were a dozen crows, made from the offcuts of pointed fence-posts.
Creosoted black, the little toys with two wedges for wings and two more for the
head were so crow-like that they reminded us of the sinister flock that gathers
on the school climbing-frame in The Birds. A little further on a horizontal
timber was loping through a clearing on four branch-legs; perfectly mobile-perfectly
still. Nash's Running Table (1978).
Now works of monumental presence look out at you from
between the trees. Lifelike boars and wolves and elephants. A group of older
men with rounded shoulders, huddled in conversation. Wooden axes uncurling
from the ground like seedlings. David Kemps' Ancient Forester (1988) twenty
feet high,leaning on his axe above the car park with antlers growing
through his green hat and bunions on his toes bulging out of the wood.
Goldsworthy's massive Sidewinder (1984-85),an anaconda of pinned together
spruce trunks, swerving off between the boles of the still-living trees.
Families cycle through the forest, tracking down the pieces, laughing at Andy
Frost's Red Indian Chief (1985) with smoke signals puffing up from his headdress,
wondering at Golds-worthy's Seven Spires (1984) that taper finely from the
forest floor almost to the needle canopy. (They're now collapsing, as he had
anticipated.)
This tribe of creatures. poised between organism and
artefact, can be found where now, in Kielder Forest in Northumberland and the
Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and Loch an Eilean in Speyside,on the banks
of the Eden upstream from Carlisle and the south bank of the Tyne in Gateshead
and on an islet in the middle of the Teign in Devon, in woodland on Silkstone Common
west of Barnsley and on a landscaped spoil-heap near Stanley in County Durham,
on the shore of a lochan in North Uist and in a dewpond on Malling Down in
Sussex. Old materials being recycled into
half-familiar forms David Kemp's massive idols, an iron-master and a miner, made out of transformer castings
from Northern Electric's works in Newcastle, Goldsworthy's cone built of flat
scrap iron pieces on the Gateshead bank of the Tyne.
People use them. They climb
onto the knees of Kemp's idols to be photographed. They leave heartfelt
messages. On Tyneside-near the soaring slim piers of the new railway bridge,
Colin Rose has made a great arc of silver-white alloy with a sphere ' at its
zenith – Rolling Moon. In felt near its base I read "I will always love my
beloved boyfriend for eva-12-5-91'
Is this vandalism?
According to the recently retired maestro of Grizedale; the forester
Bill Grant, only one thing has ever been destroyed there: the crows, which were
trashed by a school party in the late 1980's.
By and large it is nature which puts a term on these
things.In time wood rots from the ground up.Wind topples trees, onto walls, metal oxidises, moss and fungus
infest and blear, water rises, submerges, effaces. The Running Table has been
renewed three times but the present manager of Grizedale, Adam Sutherland, is
dubious about this policy and knows that immaculate gardening is hardly
possible —it took ten men a week to clean forty tons of fallen pine needles off
a piece of Donald Urquart's. laid out in chips of radiant-white Skye marble.
Goldsworthy's Spires may well be left to decay where they they lie, and the
artist himself is unworried about this. Such things ask to be neither conserved
nor restored. They don't live by exquisite patina, precise nuance of colour,
minute detail or the like. A certain roughness, as of a field stone or the bark
of a tree, is of their essence, however much skill is involved in their
making. Peter Randall-Page's Granite Song (1991), on the Teign near Chagford,
is a Dartmoor boulder sawn in half, each facet carved with his characteristic
symmetry and finesse into a tubey, intestinal figure.
No roughness here (except
in the husk of the stone). What makes it kin to the other works I've mentioned
is the effect of nature having blossomed into a brand-new form. Land artists
seem singularly free of ideological baggage,tending to talk practically about how they make their
works — how the available materials suggested a shape or feature, prompting a
new outgrowth from their accustomed styles. When Matthews writes about Cry in
the Wilderness that animals have 'senses and a reality that we have lost or
never had', or Kemp writes about Ancient Forester that 'he lives in responsible
husbandry with nature, and seeks a symbiotic relationship with his environment
and its renewable resources 'we recognise notions from green thinking.
The
dismaying findings of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring are ingrained in us now.
So positively,are Dawins' demonstrations of how life works,how it 'self
developing energies' unfold, in that unobtrusive phrase from his diary which
at once disposes of all that is supernatural and plants us in the world as it
really is. Atomic nuclei are split, genes are inserted into or removed from organisms
—such exquisite fingerings into the pith of matter are now potent in our world,
for ill and for good. The land artists don't look beyond, to gods or demons;
they deal with the trees, the rocks, the waters as they are, drawing material
from them, returning it to them.
The work of Goldsworthy's that has most found me is
one he doesn't distinctly remember making. His book Hand to Earth contains a
black and white photograph called Bow Fell, Cumbria: May 1977. Four big, rough
flakes of rock balance on a crevice in the face of a sunlit crag. The rock is
grainy as pumice. It's photographed so that infinite thousands of feet of
cliff might as well stretch above and below this poised structure. The flakes
must have gone long since, destabilized by ice, snow, gravity, even one of our
occasional earth tremors, which have shaken cups off hooks in Carlisle and
shuddered a huge chunk out of a rock-climb on Kern Knotts, Wasdale, called (unbelievably) Sepulcher. This work of Goldsworthy's finds me because I learned to climb on
Bow Fell and I know what it is to cling by toes and finger-ends to the
hundred metre face of its eastern buttress.
Touch, balance, friction, leverage,
precarious equipoise, height, drop: all climbing is embodied in those four
stones. The doyen of Scottish
rock-climbers, Cubby Cuthbertson, who made the first ascent of
Britain's most imposing route, the colossal Atlantic-facing arch on the
Hebridean island of Pabbay, remarked while filming the climb that what he loved was aesthetic, the textures of the rock.
I have no
idea whether Goldsworthy had to climb to make his Bow Fell sculpture, but what
it does, in its rough,transient,apparently abstract way,is to compress into one
knot of stone the complex of sensations and thoughts which
seethe in me as I occupy the focal points on the face of the earth.
David Kemp's Wooden Whaler
David Craig.First published in the London review of Books.December 2000.
