Deconstructing Styles: Collaborating With Nature

 In the second half of the 20th century, artists became more conscientious of the environment and natural world, whether to raise concerns on its deterioration, or to get a better, closer understanding of it. For Andy Goldsworthy, it was the latter. His site-specific works of environmental art are known for their fleeting natural beauty--such as one installed on a beach made of sand, only to be swept away by waves, or one created somewhere so remote as the North Pole to be weathered by gale force winds. Utilization of material at site-specific locations and creating sculpture is known as Land Art, one of many kinds of installation art that involves an environmental approach and redefining artistic conventions.

Taking the environmental approach to the most extreme, in 1989 created four huge snow rings at the North Pole. Titled Touching North, the rings indicate magnetic north, though the rings do not indicate direction, as the direction will always be south. Though the temperatures are cool enough to minimize melting of the snow rings, the erosion from winds is nearly incessant, contributing to the transience the sculptures embody. The material and simple design marks Goldsworthy's Minimalist touch, and is produced on site with the use of an Inuit snow-cutting/packing technique that makes up the whole of this sculpture.

Another display of Andy Goldsworthy's short-lived works, and one of his first that formed his blossoming career, is, or was, Stones Sinking in Sand (1976). Utilizing small rocks on a beach in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, Andy Goldsworthy lines them up perfectly and watches as they affect the tides, the people on the beach, and as nature "completes the piece," so to speak, as a co-creator (Artstory, 2021). The lifespan of the work is again emphasized as it was just until high tide the piece is altered and never the same, and the co-creation of the work between man and the elements elicits man's oneness with nature. 

                                                    

I selected this piece because it was an earlier work of Goldsworthy's I hadn't seen before, was one of his firsts, and in high school I created a slightly similar work involving a path of snow in a dark wintery wood for our Andy Goldsworthy unit in my humanities class. I marked the deterioration of the path to note the constant alteration of all paths in nature. 

Another artist who took art outside and co-created alongside nature was the American sculptor Robert Smithson. Influenced by minimalism and conceptual art that involves the passage of time and its deteriorating effect, his most recognized work, Spiral Jetty (1970), also shed light on the environmental harm taking place on site. The northern section of the Great Salt Lake, had been cut off of fresh water supply for the installment of railroad, and as a result there were algae blooms that discolored the surrounding waters of the spiral jetty. The symbolism of the spiral was meant to evoke an era of a bygone epoch, as time marches unabated and rocks and structures are slowly eroded and transformed.

Smithson was greatly influenced by earth sciences, earth's natural systems, and ideas of natural deterioration just as Goldsworthy is. Apparently a fan of science fiction as well, this particular Earthwork, or Land art, makes the beach seem alien and far removed from humankind. 

Asphalt Rundown (1969), was Smithson's first Earthwork, to be experienced out of the gallery and was referenced by the artist as the ''crystalline structure of time'' (Holt/SmithsonFoundation, 2021). He argued time didn't pass so much as it built upon itself. Though not the same idea as deterioration, the idea of constant alteration and lack of predictability is. Smithson captured his ideas of randomness and crystallized time in the act of pouring hot asphalt down a steep embankment in a quarry. The resulting effect can be interpreted as time frozen as it settles and hardens into another of earth's layers of sediment, which can be seen earth's own metric of time.

Smithson was taken by the idea of entropy, or a thermodynamic law that dictates energy into work, and indicates the efficacy of dynamic systems and their failure. A lack of predictability within these thermodynamic systems characterizes entropy, and shows through the flow of asphalt as its poured down the steep face. Though I'm not a big fan of pouring huge amounts of asphalt onto the ground, the visual and conceptual effect is pretty stunning.

Departing from the manipulation of the environment and the transience of a moment, Hungarian American Agnes Denes' conceptual environmental art and relationship with nature are more practical eco-centric. Her art projects are often large in scale, for the betterment of the environment/ecological landscape, positively affecting nature, and span years or lifetimes. In 1982, seeds of wheat were sowed in a New York city landfill created after the construction of the Twin Towers. Titled Wheatfield--a Confrontation, this four month long creation involved ploughing, sowing, tending to, and reaping half a ton of wheat that would be displayed in an exhibit held to combat world hunger. The exhibition was displayed internationally, and at events seeds of wheat were shared to visitors to the exhibit to be planted globally. The dispersement of seeds among thousands of attendees, while calling attention to the ecological harms of manmade structures, highlight the efforts of Denes and her expansion of what environmental art means. 

A similar effort--first conceived in 1982--was engineered and in construction between 1992-1996, involving the planting of fir trees. A manmade forest was created upon another wasteland in Ylojarvi, Finland as part of a land reclamation project that required 11,000 people from around the world to plant and, during their lifetime, care for a fir tree. The land and fir trees upon Tree Mountain are protected for four centuries, and responsibility for their care lies with those selected to care for them, and their future generations. 

Tree Mountain--A Living Time Capsule, embodies Denes' ideology of recorrecting the course nature would have otherwise experienced on account of mankind. The mathematical nature and spiral pattern atop a elliptical cone of this land art piece is meant to couple man and nature, cementing their union in a historic effort that places environmental restoration at the forefront. Works involving such efforts from the public and government domain reimagines the role of art in our life, and results in coordinated engagement between cultures and countries. 

Works Cited

“Asphalt Rundown | Holt/Smithson Foundation.” HoltSmithsonFoundation, 2021, holtsmithsonfoundation.org/asphalt-rundown.

"Andy Goldsworthy Sculptures, Bio, Ideas.” The Art Story, 2021, www.theartstory.org/artist/goldsworthy-andy.

“Agnes Denes Artworks & Famous Paintings.” The Art Story, 2021, www.theartstory.org/artist/denes-agnes/artworks.