‘Red. Water. Line. London, England’
CONCRETE. ASPHALT. Double yellow lines. This is not the natural habitat of British artist Andy Goldsworthy. Francis Bacon, yes. Damien Hirst, yes. Easy to imagine them sharking down dark London streets, admiring the lights, looking for somewhere that’s still serving. But Goldsworthy?
If you know his work, you’ll be thinking of towers of pebbles on remote Scottish beaches, serpentine whorls of loam and sand, fragile convocations of bark and leaves and thorns. Goldsworthy borrows his materials from the earth and is content for the earth to reclaim them. When he raises domes of stacked dry slate, or breaks off icicles and uses spitballs to glue them into many-pointed stars, he knows that the results won’t endure forever. He’s a land artist. Nature is to him what Gilbert is to George. So what does a land artist do in the middle of London’s congestion-charge zone, where nature is tamed, and the land is buried?
Cities are not entirely out of bounds to him. Goldsworthy once spent a long time lying down in Times Square, making rain shadows with his body. (It went quite well until the wind blew over his camera and a passing tourist requested a selfie.) This photograph comes from a sequence of six taken on Drury Lane, in London’s Covent Garden. Neon gas burns inside its glass trap on the side of the Theatre Royal. (Follow that arrow, and you’d end up in the queue for 42nd Street.) The ghosts of people pass. But the true protagonist of the picture is that line of water snaking over the pavement. Where is it going? Off, perhaps, to find one of the streams or gulches in a more customary Goldsworthy work, like an old eel nosing its way back to the Sargasso Sea.
“It’s a very dangerous position,” Goldsworthy said in 2015, “to think that the city is not nature too.” What’s the danger? A hubristic one. To live believing in the permanence of human culture and not acknowledge that our works, like Goldsworthy’s, will one day melt like icicles or topple like a pile of pebbles on a windswept beach.
WHAT DOES A LAND ARTIST DO IN THE MIDDLE OF LONDON?