Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Photo by Nicholas J.R. White, from Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” in the February 16 & 23 New Yorker, profiles British landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Mead visits him at his home in Penpont, Scotland. She hikes with him and a party of visitors to the site of his 1989 stone wall called “Give and Take Wall.” She goes on an outing with him to view the site where he intends to install a project called “Gravestones.” And she tours some graveyards with him. 

It’s an absorbing, beautifully written piece. But as I read it, I found myself resisting its charms. One thing that put me off was Mead’s mention that Goldsworthy used ten thousand cattails to create one of the works in his “Fifty Years” exhibition at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy. Maybe I’m overreacting, but the removal of ten thousand cattails from their fragile natural habitat (marshes, bogs, wetlands) strikes me as appallingly destructive. What’s the point of it? This question touches on the other aspect of Mead’s piece that bugs me – the lack of any clear rationale for what Goldsworthy is doing. Mead mentions “the sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s work.” Okay, but what if your idea of beauty is a landscape unblemished by any manmade objects? What if you prefer, as I do, natural beauty?

Mead’s piece is illustrated by a wonderful photo of Goldsworthy sitting on a green-gold grassy hillside (see above). The photo is by Nicholas J.R. White. Under the photo, there’s a caption that says, “Goldsworthy, near hilltop where his work ‘Gravestones’ will be installed.” I look at the photo and think what a pity, because here’s what Goldsworthy has in mind for that hill: “four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.” This is Goldsworthy’s idea of beauty. Is it valid? I’m not sure. 

I thought about Goldsworthy’s stone walls as Lorna and I cycled the back roads of Tavira, Portugal. The roads are lined with ancient stone walls. Many of them are cased in aged white plaster. Here and there, the plaster has cracked open. You can see the old ochre stones inside. These walls are phenomenal to look at – their form, composition, color, and texture. My eyes devour them. I constantly stopped to take pictures of them. Each one is different. To me, they are found works of art. The impulse to photograph them and describe them in words is, to me, understandable. If I were a painter, I’d want to paint them. And if I were a sculptor like Goldsworthy, I’d want to try my hand at building my own stone walls. 

There was a day when these Portuguese stone walls were new. In the centuries since they were first built, they’ve crumbled and eroded. Time and weather have worn them down. They’ve melded with their natural surroundings. The landscape has absorbed them. I recall the phrase “part of nature, part of us” from my readings of Helen Vendler’s book of the same name. It refers, if I remember correctly, to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It’s an excellent description of those old Portuguese walls. It applies to Goldsworthy’s art, too. Mead, in her piece, mentions how Goldsworthy’s “Give and Take Wall” had a “dense covering of moss.” Nature is taking it back. Time and weather are doing their work. Transience is all.