Andy Goldsworthy, 50 Years exhibition at the RSA
23-10-25. A friend from artschool,
Amanda, assumed I would have already been to the Goldsworthy
retrospective at the National Gallery. I had seen that the exhibition
was on and got as far as checking the ticket prices (£5~£19) before
I stalled. If I could have got in for £5 I'd have gone but £19
seemed a little pricey for a show that I wasn't particularly drawn
to. After all, Andy Goldsworthy (born 1956) was an Land Artist,
a person who specifically worked outside, making delightful patterns
of rocks and Autumn leaves; of sticks and piles of slate in
attractive forms built with the skill of a dry-stane-dyker and the
eye of an artist. Could his stuff really shine indoors? Or would
it just be rooms of documentary photos and videos of his early years
when you couldn't go into a Stockbridge cafe without seeing one of
his posters on the walls. There are a couple of his stone pieces in
the Botanics, and while they blend in very well, to a point of disappearing, they don't really
set the heather on fire.
I reluctantly bit the fiscal bullet,
although Amanda, who bought the tickets, hers £5, mine £19,
generously offered to split the difference and have us both pay £12.
Given the lack of entrance scrutiny, you could probably get away with
a £5 ticket no matter your circumstance, as they did not ask for
proof of pudding, but waved us in, along with the hordes visiting. I
reckoned the large positive attendance was due to all those posters back then (and possibly coffee table books although I never read any) in the 80s
and 90s. Given the exhibition had been going since late July I
reckoned we'd be going round solo, with just tumbleweeds for company,
but incredibly the place was doing a very healthy business. (You'd
probably have to be Banksy or Taylor Swift to draw a larger crowd. I
didn't know there were so many folk in Scotland interested in
art.)
The show was on 2 levels and we went up past a rather
manky woolly tapestry lying down the centre of the main staircase. I
assumed it was some student attempt at art, left over from a previous
show or maybe being displayed in another part of the gallery. I
hurried past the unseemly clumps of clarty wool.
Wool Runner
2025: cast off wool from unshorn sheep, gathered and displayed with
coloured markings farmers use to identify flocks.
(it was too dark to take a photo when I was there)
There was a screen of partially rusted
barbed wire strung across two pillars at the top. Not a warmly
aesthetic welcome to the show. I had seen the two major rooms of the
exhibition advertised and was not particularly impressed with them,
but reckoned I'd find lots of his previous (outdoors) work more
engaging. As we went from room to room I began to worry for this
highly respected and talented artist that the show was something of a
dud. It was just not doing it for me. I began to move through the
rooms more quickly looking for something to like.
One of the
first rooms had the entire floor covered with stones, from fist- to
skull-sized, and slightly larger. They had been collected from 108
Dumfries and Galloway graveyards; stones displaced due to burials.
Well that's cheerful. And here they were laid out on the floor. I
asked an attendant why the lights weren't on. She said AG had wanted
only natural light from the partly opaque skylights, not artificial
lighting. That might have worked during the Summer but here in late
October, indoors, there was insufficient light to read a book by or
to view the artwork which appeared uniformly dirt coloured and not of
any discernable quality, design or interest. Only of note because it
was indoors. It seems the artist had started collecting these stones
after burying his ex-wife in 2008. BTW I can imagine her saying “one
more shed full of barbed wire and daggy fleece and I'm out of here.”
Can we get any more gloomy?
Well yes, it seems we can. Three works
using the blood of a road-kill hare, mixed with snow and dripped onto
large sheets of watercolour paper that cockled and drove the
blood/snow mix to form small rusty lakes beside droplet spray
patterns. Visually sordid. More like the trophy of a serial killer.
And about the least pleasant way possible to celebrate a hare. Where
are the pretty leaves?
Oak Passage, 2025: Into the main rooms
and one has a corridor of bare oak panelled floor between oak
windfall branches either side. It's okay, but falls short of
spectacular. There is a signature bracken tapeworm at one end
cleverly pinned to the wall with thorns and a concentric explosion of
bull-rushes or canes at the other. All of it workmanlike, simplistic,
without making any hair stand on end. It is slightly overwhelmed by
the large interior space, uncertain if it competes or compliments.
Andy Goldsworthy in Oak Passage
photo by Staurt Armitt as are the other decent photos
I have nicked them off the internet because mine are bad and only do a disservice
In another main room, Flags 2020, a
load of dyed rectangular sheets – flags – hang across the space
like a white laundry contaminated by a red sock. There are 50 and
each was dyed with the reddest soil or minerals from each state in
the US. It was commissioned by the Rockefeller Centre in New York. 50
shades of peach. You should probably read the story behind the piece
because it is not quite aesthetically dynamic enough to shine without
explanation, which I didn't read – could not be bothered. It was
neither brilliant nor rubbish but hung in a middle ground. Neither
controversial nor hum-drum. I hoped for more.
Most of the show
falls into this middle ground. I'm not sure if it is the work, or the
space (or my mood) but I was only engaged by a couple of pieces which
came as a relief among the majority of the work which I found
medium-good or indifferent, but unspectacular. Hard not to damn it
with faint praise.
Although I am not a huge fan of Damien
Hirst, I like his idea that we should be astonished and excited when
we go into a gallery. And I like that he didn't just spend the rest
of his career knocking out animals in formaldehyde tanks. Or spin
paintings. Okay he may have produced one of the worst art objects on
the planet – that crystal skull that had all the charm of a table
lighter from Argos – but at least he mixes it up and doesn't get
stuck in a rut. A gloomy rut.
I did like the large clay wall.
And I liked it even more after seeing the video of AG collecting and
shovelling clay, then sifting out the stones out and then (with many
assistants) pounding the mush into clay and putting it handful at a
time onto the immense back wall where it dried and cracked evenly and
turned into a handsome craquelure desert-scape. Red Wall 2025: “This
earth is a vivid red because of its high iron content. Our blood is
also red because of the iron in it. It's a reminder that we are bound
to the earth.” I like its even application and craft minimalism but struggle to engage with any borderline religious philosophy about the iron in the soil and our veins binding us to the earth. That sounds like empty rhetoric and more gloomy weather. If I am trivial for preferring a pretty butterfly and a good tune then so be it.
Flags 2020 - image Stuart Armitt
Many
of the larger works did get me wondering how he moved and stored the
components involved. What were the practical considerations and did
he use a professional plasterer? Maybe the catalogue goes into that
more. The programme covered the minimum info and background, but was
required reading to understand the artist's intentions. Another pal
Colin had already given me the heads up about this. (Good tip!) I
perhaps could have been paying more attention to the programme but
was having trouble trying to hold reading specs, programme and
camera. My photos (on the tiny DJI Pocket) mostly came out rubbish
due to the low lighting. Everything looks yellow. Made me wish I'd
taken a better camera although I'd argue it wasn't a primarily visual
exhibition, so much as a metaphorical polemic on (life and) death.
Again a similar exploration of iron in stone in the
triptych video of Red River Rock where a stone in a stream is rubbed
and produces an iron red solution which flows down the river from the
rock. Like much of the documentary photography and recording of his
outdoor projects he seems to choose bleak weather to make his
recordings: okay wait till the drizzle starts before
rolling the camera. Maybe just
me. But many of the photos looked kinda dull. As if resisting the
cheap glamour of a sunny day. Or maybe he's ensuring the photo
doesn't upstage the subject - the art - that he wasn't trying to be a
photographer, just using a camera to document the process. Not trying
to make an attractive landscape photo, just record his work there. I
imagine a dour Northern English accent saying “nowt
wrong wi' a shower of rain”. Holy fuck, where are the pretty leaves
in bright colours wrapped around stones?
They were downstairs,
although I also think the damage had been done. I was now frantically
searching for anything to like. Downstairs was a selection of
greatest hits, stills and video. An early (1976?) 8mm video (since
digitised) of camera pointed down at feet walking across Morecombe
Bay rocks and greenweed was carefree, delightful and a breath of
fresh air. Less so a curious video of a horizontal Andy thrutching
and squirming through the middle of a field perimeter hedge. The
wintry hedge (above a frosty ground) is leafless and spindly, and the
brave soul is going lengthwise through several metres, slowly
swimming along, a metre above the ground, struggling to traverse a
nearly impossible jaggy tangle of unfriendly hedge. A uniquely thrawn
extreme sport, as if in search of the worst possible time you could
have outdoors.
It was slowly dawning on me that I may have been quite wrong about the artist's intentions. (Or perhaps they have evolved since his Stockbridge poster-boy years.) I had previously thought he was drawing our attention to the beauty inherent in nature by gathering nature up and re-purposing it into joyful structures or underlining it by concentrating ice, snow, petals, twigs and leaves into spaces and patterns that surprised, engaged and delighted. However this exhibition seemed more like a rumination on “life is short and brutal, and then you die.” While there may be some truth in that, I personally prefer the scenic route.
Another bit I liked and perhaps even showed a glimpse of humour was the wall of gloves. (Unless of course it was a memorial to the loss of UK industry. Which it might well have been.) It's not mentioned in the programme so I can't relate its intentions. Easily missed as you left the gift shop to return to the front door, a wall on the right was bedecked with neat rows of used and discarded work gloves. They reminded me of a 3metre tree just beyond Port Seton that fruited a dozen work-gloves very much of the same ilk. We always took photos of it when running past. (Actually more imaginative and Dada-ist than this unexplained wall of gloves.) This was similarly amusing, or at least texturally and contexturally vibrant, although lacking the counterpoint of the glove tree.
5 enhanced and nearly glamorous works for sale
with a print of the lamentable Hare Blood Snow 2004, bottom left
looking like a nosebleed hanky
The five photos on the back wall of the gift shop (presumably chosen by the marketing dept.) to promote and commemorate the exhibition, were sleek, attractive and handsomely produced. The sexier cousins of the real exhibits we'd just viewed. I'd happily hang one on a kitchen wall, even though Goldsworthy has now coloured my perception of his work with his downbeat outlook and dishwater dull gravestones. It made me feel the artist has deliberately steered away from the joyful visuals and aesthetic considerations of his youth, preferring a more downbeat prosaic cold-hands-in-the-dirt approach. This gloomy, serious-minded palaver is likely why everyone (except myself) is saying how impressive this exhibition has been.
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