Worthy look at Goldsworthy
In 2002, enthusiastic Bay Area audiences helped spur a worldwide sensation. When Bill Banning of the Mission District art house Roxie Theater found Thomas Riedelsheimer’s documentary “Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time,” he saw something that every major American distributor had missed.
Playing to big crowds at the Roxie — which helped save the theater during a dark time — the film went national through Roxie Releasing, playing to hundreds of thousands of American filmgoers across the United States, grossing $2.3 million. Eventually, it played more than two years at the Roxie.
Flash forward 16 years, and Riedelsheimer revisits Goldsworthy and his art in “Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy.”
Goldsworthy, a Scotsman, is known for creating large-scale outdoor sculptures and artworks out of natural materials, such as mud, wood, ice and stone. The idea is to create a natural harmony and spirituality in the physical world.
He also has permanent installations, often commissioned, which brings nature to an urban environment. His works in the Presidio, “Spire,” “Earth Wall” and “Wood Line,” are visited in the new documentary. (FYI, “Drawn Stone,” not in the documentary, is an ode to earthquakes and tectonic plates and resides outside the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.)
However, most of his canvases are temporary, ever fleeting. That work is preserved through photography and video.
Goldsworthy, 61, says he’s still ever the striver, the learner.
“I’m still just trying to make sense of the world,” he says, although his artwork “does make sense of my life.”
Leaves are a medium of choice in this film, especially yellow and red. They not only enhance his work in nature, but also in his urban works, in which he can operate more like a Banksy-like tagger, except with nature as his graffiti.
There are also more permanent works — “Stone Sea,” a stunning series of stone arches aligning a courtyard at the St. Louis Art Museum, for example, or “Sleeping Stone,” a series of five tomb-like indentations in different locations.
Of “Sleeping Stone,” Goldsworthy said, “the idea of a person sleeping in stone is a very powerful one. It’s sleeping in the landscape, seeking refuge there.”
The globe-trotting film takes us from Brazil to Gabon, Scotland to San Francisco. Perhaps most enigmatic is its artist. We don’t know much about him, except that he grew up working on a farm and learned to appreciate stones and landscapes there, not in art school; his daughter Holly, his assistant, brings an added human dimension. Left unsaid is — who is funding all this work?
Such pesky details might ruin the meditative worldview of the film; “Leaning Into the Wind” asks us to appreciate art for art’s sake, and that’s not a tough ask at all.
It even achieves a poignancy in the idea of impermanence, and the artist is very aware of his own.