Review: Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is monumental in every sense

The Herald Scotland

7 days ago

You could call Andy Goldsworthy the ultimate outsider artist. Not in the sense of his being untutored or self-taught, or because he inhabits the margins of the art world. Neither is true. It's simply that outside is where he is for so much of the time.
In the elements. Jumping naked into sun-dappled rivers running red with iron and peat, crawling through frozen hedges at dawn, submerging himself in a rock pool on the coast of Maine – and photographing or videoing the results.
Or else he is cutting, twisting, shaping, bending, placing and patterning leaves, twigs, stones and branches for interventions in the natural world. This has been his take on outsider art for half a century, a fact reflected in the simple title of this extraordinary show of his work at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA).
Accordingly, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is monumental in every sense. In scale, ambition, time span covered, themes broached, questions asked and – perhaps most important of all – in emotions triggered as a result. It's hard to ask more of art than this, and rare to be delivered of anything as powerful.
The downstairs galleries tell Goldsworthy's back story with a collection of older works and cases featuring archive photographs and sketchbooks. But as much as it is a retrospective, the show is also a rich source of recent works and of others newly created for the space.
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The first of these, Wool Runner, greets visitors at the entrance to the RSA. It's a carpet of discarded wool fleeces, marked here and there with the colours farmers use to identify their flocks. You can even smell the lanolin.
Upstairs in Room Two, another new work titled Skylight. Few artists offered the chance to create site specific work in the vast galleries of the RSA respond to the height of the rooms or turn the lack of natural ambient light in some of them to their advantage. Goldsworthy does both. With Skylight he creates a sort of chapel made from bull-rushes which reach high up to the grimy skylight.
Gravestones is the most affecting work. (Image: Sam Drake) Next door, in the room holding the show's most affecting work, is a partner piece titled Gravestones. Here, in the half-light, the eye is drawn down rather than up, to the stones which fill the space. They were collected from 108 cemeteries in Dumfries and Galloway, where the Leeds-born artist has lived since 1985, and the work was inspired by a visit he made to the grave of his ex-wife.
The stones are essentially rubble removed by gravediggers as they prepare the ground for a burial. But for Goldsworthy they are a powerful symbol of transference and meaning: their removal to make space for a human body gives them a tremendous power. They become solemn objects, to be treated with respect.
Resistance is a common theme, which seems odd at first for a land artist. This is work, after all, which deals often with natural spaces, open landscapes, weather, chance, time, the circle of life and the environment. But it is also work made in places which are quite literally fenced in.
Permissions and rights of way are a constant concern for Goldsworthy – he is often asked to leave, not always politely – so the materials used to enforce and protect them inevitably find their way into the work. The most explicit example is Fence, another new, site-specific work. It greets visitors in the Sculpture Court. Wound round the two mighty pillars on either side of the main entrance to the main galleries – and blocking it – is what looks like a pretty trellis. Come closer, though: it's a forbidding barrier of rusted barbed wire.
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More obvious a theme is the earth and what it contains in terms of minerals. Iron is a favourite, also an important component of human blood. In Flags, which cuts across Room Three, Goldsworthy has collected the reddest earth he can from all 50 US states and made 50 flags in various shades. In 2020 they were flown on some of the 200 flagpoles outside the Rockerfeller Centre in New York. Iowa is the one which most closely resembles dried blood, others appear orange or pinkish.
Elsewhere, more blood, only the real stuff this time. Driving home one night in 2004 Goldsworthy hits a hare. He scoops up the body, guts it, fills the head with snow and hangs it up. As the snow melts, drips and mingles with the blood, he captures the resulting patterns on large pieces of paper. This is Hare Blood And Snow, a beautiful (if gruesome) triptych.
The works made from wood, stone, ferns, bull-rushes and other natural materials do dominate but the photographs and video works featuring Goldsworthy shouldn't be overlooked or their importance ignored.
Yes, they are performative to an extent, but that isn't their chief aim. For the artist, they are simply adjuncts to the important experiential aspect of his art. In that rock-pool in Maine, for instance, his primary focus was not on the footage he would collect but on his own body: how he felt submerged under the seaweed as crabs nibbled his ears and his feet, as a rock under his back became increasingly uncomfortable. Then the sense of dislocation as the tide came in around him and floated his body clear.
Goldsworthy himself is there for the opening, a sprightly 68-year-old dressed in T-shirt, jeans and hiking boots, a faded tattoo visible on one muscled forearm. At one point he mentions the philosopher and humanist Jacob Bronowski and quotes his famous dictum that the hand is the cutting edge of the mind. 'I think through my hands,' he adds. 'I get ideas through my hands and the world makes sense through my hands.'
So go on, touch the work of Andy Goldsworthy – perhaps not literally, though it's unlikely he would care. But do it by wandering the halls of the grand old building on the Mound, where for a few months the outside has come inside to remind us of its elemental qualities – and where, guided the artist's eyes, work and yes, his hands, we can perhaps make our own sense of it all.
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years opens at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh on July 26 (until November 2)