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Andy Goldsworthy |
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A GOOD ONE IN THE PARKER GALLERY In terms of artistic integrity and generosity, some of the works inside the museum fare better than the cairn outside. Of these, the most satisfying is an installation titled "Five Stone Drawings." To create the piece, Goldsworthy encased five roughly watermelon-sized stones in a thick blanket of clay-like material and placed them on the floor at various positions along the walls of the room. During the course of the exhibition, in the low humidity of the museum's controlled atmosphere, the blanketing clay cracks and shrinks as it slowly dries, eventually revealing the stone underneath. The effects of time and process in the work provide one of exhibition's few opportunities to directly experience the ways in which this type of Goldsworthy's art operates in the world outside of the museum, in his art's 'natural' world.
A further temporal/gestural presence in "Five Stone Drawings" appears in its slender linear elements which run across the gallery's walls and ceiling to visually link the disparate stones. In the immediate vicinity of each stone, the lines loop and curl like the trace of a bee around a flower. Goldsworthy forms these lines using Scottish rushes tacked to the wall with thorns. The result is a delightful pairing of materials, gesture and shape. It's entirely pre-industrial in character -- a further echo of the primeval sensibility in his art that helps to account for its great appeal to the urban population that comprises the art world. |
