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Up on the Roof
by Val Castronovo
Stone
Houses, Andy Goldsworthy’s
new installation at the Met, takes a commanding view
Don’t call British
sculptor Andy Goldsworthy an ecological artist. He rejects the
label, explaining that his art is “not
a vehicle for preaching. These are things that I feel, that are
real to me. I put my fingers in the stuff of nature.” This
time, the 48-year-old English-born artist who lives in Dumfriesshire,
Scotland, has put his fingers in the stuff of nature — specifically,
wood and stones — and put them on top of Manhattan’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art. His creation, two wooden beehive-like structures
(“domes”) that shelter two piles of rocks (“spires”),
was assembled on site in six days and marks the first time an artist
has constructed a work especially for display on the Roof Garden.
Dubbed Stone Houses (May 4-October 31, 2004), this arresting
installation derives its inspiration from Central Park and the
New York skyline.
It’s meant
to echo the two natural elements in the park that can be spied from the Roof — wood
and stones — but also to mirror the city’s architecture
and to “work
as a counterpoint to the spectacular view from the Roof Garden ... by looking
internally rather than externally, and inviting the viewer to look into the
landscape rather than at it.”
In other words, Goldsworthy wants you to look inside his constructions,
not away from them. Forget the panoramic views. He likes what he calls “interior
views” and the notion of “something concealed in such an open
place.” And
not to worry. “It’s all right to touch the wood,” he told
viewers at a slide presentation the day before the exhibition opened to the
public. “That’s the point of the sculpture. Touch it and lean
in.”
It’s a heady feeling, touching the art. Leaning in, one sees an elegant,
thirteen-and-a-half-foot-high balanced column of granite stones that hail from
the beaches of Glenluce in Luce Bay, Scotland. Some weigh as much as one-and-a-half
tons, some as little as two ounces. The stack is tapered, rising to a delicate
point and forming a kind of New Age spire. Goldsworthy “likes the sense
of precariousness” represented by the columns, though the stones fit
neatly into one another and are in no danger of toppling. The spires rest on
beds of gravel that were made from the paving stones on the Roof.
Step away and the view changes. The beehive, an octagonal dome crafted from
log-cabin-style split rails, comes into focus. It’s huge (eighteen-feet-high,
twenty-four-feet-wide) and “commands the space” in the artist’s
words, quite an achievement when one considers the space measures 10,000 square
feet. The split rails, northern white cedar from the woods of New England,
are meant to evoke agriculture, an important association for the artist who
worked as a farmer near Leeds when he was a boy.
“You’ve got a bit of Scotland coming to New York and being embraced
by American wood,” says Goldsworthy about his materials. He relishes the
cross-cultural connection; it’s a theme that runs through his works. But
he’s equally interested in exploring “the connections between things” and
thinking outside the box. An example: he conceives the stone in Stone Houses as “the more fragile partner — protected by the [guardian wood rails]
— just
as trees often hold together and protect the landscape in which they grow.”
Such paradoxes inform the work of this plein air sculptor who uses the natural
landscape as his canvas and the natural world for his materials, much of
them ephemera — leaves, snow, icicles, powder, sand, flowers, berries
and the like. He’s fascinated by the concepts of time and change, growth
and decay, the mysteries of nature. And he will go to great lengths to test
his ideas.
In 2000 he executed a Millennium project, Midsummer Snowballs. He
used refrigerated trucks to convey 13 one-ton snowballs from Scotland to
London, placed them
in the middle of the city, and waited for them to melt. At their core, they
each disclosed something different — heather, feathers, flowers, pine cones
and other natural boons.
Not all his works are ephemeral of course, but the ones that are have been
preserved in photographs and published in eight books by Harry N. Abrams
so they can achieve a permanence of sorts and be shared with the public.
The project
at the The Met is of sturdier stuff, but the stuff of nature all the same.
He’s still making the myriad connections between his latest opus and
its surroundings. Realizing this the morning Stone Houses was previewed, he
admitted to his audience “It’s hard to know what I’ve made.”
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