Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy | Little White Lies

Lean­ing into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy

08 Aug 2018 / Released: 10 Aug 2018

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer

Starring Andy Goldsworthy

Person standing in water with yellow plant on head
Person standing in water with yellow plant on head
3

Anticipation.

Another visitation with the artist featured in the 2001 film Rivers and Tides.

3

Enjoyment.

A gentle study of an artist just going out and doing his thing.

3

In Retrospect.

Goldsworthy makes for a warm and charismatic travelling companion.

A pleas­ant­ly stripped back and non hyper­bol­ic por­trait of a work­ing land­scape artist.

If you’ve ever been out tramp­ing in the Eng­lish coun­try­side, walk­ing boots fresh­ly slathered in Dub­bin and a nap­sack filled with light­ly bruised fruit, you’ll know that the high­lights arrive when you stop and take a moment to drink in the bucol­ic splen­dour of the rolling land­scape. Occa­sion­al­ly, you might notice some trace of human inter­ven­tion; maybe some foot­steps in the mud, or rub­bish that has blown into a ditch, or per­haps a per­son has pro­duced an ad hoc sculp­ture with the nat­ur­al mate­ri­als avail­able to them.

The lat­ter is an exam­ple of Andy Goldsworthy’s pro­fes­sion­al bread and but­ter. He is a soft­ly-spo­ken nomad who prowls the coun­try­side (and occa­sion­al­ly the city) look­ing to make a poet­ic inter­ven­tion here or there. This can involve col­lect­ing up a hand­ful of fall­en leaves that are a cer­tain vibrant hue of yel­low and using them to dec­o­ra­tive­ly wall­pa­per a series of art­ful­ly placed riv­er rocks. Or it could be some­thing big­ger, like a giant rock sculp­ture that appears as if it was left on Earth by some vis­it­ing alien race.

Thomas Riedelsheimer’s film, Lean­ing into the Wind: Andy Goldswor­thy, is refresh­ing in that it large­ly dis­pens­es with hyper­bol­ic back­sto­ry and the usu­al cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tors who are cart­ed in to affirm the subject’s sub­lime genius sta­tus. Instead, the film attempts to cap­ture the care­ful, often sim­ple process of Goldsworthy’s cre­ative habit, and as such becomes a kind of per­for­mance piece as much as it is a rich pro­file of a work­ing artist. The man him­self talks to the cam­era, some­times with stilt­ed of slight­ly fudged expla­na­tions of why he does with he does. And that’s okay, because what he does doesn’t real­ly require expla­na­tion. The title ref­er­ences his sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship with the nat­ur­al world.

Struc­tural­ly, the film is a scrap­py assem­blage of cap­tured moments, from the man him­self alone in nature doing what he loves best – lay­ing on a rock and mak­ing snow angels when it rains – to big­ger instal­la­tion and sculp­ture projects. One per­for­mance ele­ment to his work involves clam­ber­ing through bush­es, which looks both uncom­fort­able and dan­ger­ous. One fun­ny moment sees him emerge from a priv­et hedge on a busy high street in front of pedes­tri­ans who have cho­sen to use the pave­ment, and this side of his work does flaunt a con­cealed eccen­tric or exhi­bi­tion­ist streak in this most­ly meek and self-con­scious artist.

You might like