Goldsworthy, What Was Got in That Place

One

One photograph.

Not a painting.
There is only a photograph.

In the middle stones are stacked.
The shape of an egg.
Wide below and narrowing upward.

There is no adhesive.
The stones stand pressing one another.

Around it is tidal flat.
A place the water has left.

The color of the stone and the color of the flat are nearly the same.
They came from the same place, so they are the same.

Below the photograph a date is written.
The place is written as well.

These two lines matter.
The title of the work is in effect the date and the place.

And these stones are not there now.

The water came in and brought them down.
It happened that afternoon.

There is another photograph.

On the ground the shape of a person remains.
The place where someone lay.

Around it is wet and only that place is dry.

He lay down when the rain began.
And he got up before the rain stopped.

The place that did not get wet remained in the shape of a person.

This too is not there now.
It dried soon, and drying, it disappeared.

There is another photograph.

Pieces of ice hold together in morning light.
Icicles were joined to make a curve.

Instead of adhesive he used water.
He froze them together.

When the sun comes up it melts.
So he made it before sunrise.

The lifespan of the work is a few hours.

Two

Andy Goldsworthy was born in 1956 in England.

He grew up near Yorkshire.
As a boy he worked on a farm.

He moved stones and mended fences and stacked hay.

He later said that work was like his own.
Repeated labor, an order learned by the body, tasks fitted to the season.

Farming is not work that tries to defeat nature.
It is work that fits nature's order.

Seed is sown at the appointed time.
Miss that time and one waits a year.

This sense remains in his work.

Where he grew up there are many stone walls.
Walls that divide the fields of northern England and Scotland.

They are stacked without adhesive.
One looks at the shape of a stone and finds where it goes.

Walls hundreds of years old are still standing.
Where they collapse they are restacked as it happens.

The name of the person who made this technique does not survive.
Only a method long repeated in that land survives.

Goldsworthy is inside this tradition.
He did not invent it. He inherited it.

A person stacking a wall does not think he is making art.
He stacks it to divide a field.

And that wall is the form of that land.

Where there are many stones, stone walls come.
Where there are many trees, wooden fences come.

The oldest example of fūdo begetting form is the wall.

The wall came before the painting.

He attended an art school.
And he went to a small village in southern Scotland.

It was the middle of the 1980s.
He has lived there since.

He is an artist who stays long in one place.

This is not a coincidence.
It is a condition his method requires.

You have to watch the same land for years to know what is there and when.

Which tree's leaves redden first.
Which stream freezes when.
Which stone wall falls in which season.

Records will not tell you this.
One knows it by living.

He mostly works with his hands.
Often he uses no tools.

When the balance fails while stacking stone he starts again from the beginning.
Sometimes it stands only after collapsing many times.

Collapsing is part of the work.

There are two kinds in his work.

One soon disappears.
Ice and leaves and a dry patch.

The other remains long.
Walls stacked of stone, and cairns.

What disappears is better known.
But he keeps making what remains as well.

Disappearance alone is not his subject.
Time is his subject.

He handles the time of a few hours and the time of a few centuries together.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

Goldsworthy does not move material.

He gets it in that place.
He makes it in that place.
He leaves it in that place.

Kiefer, in the last chapter, carried the ground onto the surface.
Goldsworthy set the surface on the ground.

The opposite direction.

What changes when this is done.
Five things change.

First, the work does not come away from the place.

Those stones on that flat are that work only on that flat.
Bring the same stones to a museum and stack them the same way and it becomes another thing.

The light differs, there is no water, there is no smell.

Because fūdo is part of the work.
Not background but material.

Here the proposition of this book holds most literally.
That fūdo begets form stops being a figure of speech.

Second, disappearing becomes form.

Usually an artist wants the work to last.
Durability enters the standard for choosing materials.

Goldsworthy removes that standard.

Make it of ice and it melts.
Make it of leaves and it scatters.

He makes it knowing it will melt and scatter.

Then the work is not an object but an event.
It becomes something that happened.

Third, labor is visible.

Setting one stone and laying the next takes time.
That time remains in the result.

Done by machine it is fast and exact.
Done by hand it is slow and goes a little astray.

Where it goes astray is the trace of a person.

Fourth, failure is recorded.

What collapsed is also kept in photographs.
He does not hide the collapse.

Show only the finished and the work is a result.
Show the collapse as well and the work is a process.

Fifth, the viewer arrives late.

Almost no one is present when the work is made.
He mostly makes it alone.

What we see is always already past.

Painting is not so.
A picture waits for us.

Go a hundred years later and it is hanging in that place.

Goldsworthy's work does not wait.
It disappears first, and we arrive afterward.

Arriving late has mourning mixed into it.

But one question remains here.

The work disappears and the photograph remains.
Then what is it we are looking at.

Shall the photograph be seen as the work, or as testimony.

There is no right answer.
He would not have been known without photographs, and photographs alone do not become what was in that place.

Between what remains and what disappeared, the photograph hangs.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

If Goldsworthy made works within nature, Byun Shi-Ji called the force of nature into the surface.

The direction differs.

Goldsworthy goes out and makes.
Byun Shi-Ji brings in and paints.

Goldsworthy's work cannot leave that land.
Byun Shi-Ji's painting leaves that land and hangs in Seoul and hangs in Tokyo.

And having left, it carries the island along.

This is what painting can do.
It moves a place while preserving the place.

Look at what the two men share.

Both stayed long in one place.

Goldsworthy has lived nearly forty years in one village in Scotland.
Byun Shi-Ji lived thirty-eight years on Jeju.

He went in 1975 and died in 2013.

There is a form that does not come out without staying long.
The two men prove it.

There are two kinds of staying.

Staying where one was born.
Leaving, returning, and staying.

Goldsworthy is closer to the first.
Born in England and gone to Scotland, so not wholly the first.
But it was movement inside the same culture.

Byun Shi-Ji is the second.
He left at five and returned at forty-nine.

The eye of one who returns is different.
It sees the familiar as strange.

Goldsworthy knows which tree's leaves redden first.
Byun Shi-Ji would not have known that.

Instead he knew the wind was strange.
One who grew up there does not find the wind strange.

Knowing and being startled are not the same.

In Goldsworthy's work what is known is stacked up.
On Byun Shi-Ji's surface what startled remains.

Both are possible only after staying long.
And what remained after staying long differs.

And there is the wind.

Goldsworthy has leaned on the wind.
He made work of tilting his body and giving it to the wind.

The wind pushes him and he holds.
At some angle between the two the body stops.

Byun Shi-Ji's old man stands at exactly that angle.

One made that angle with his own body.
The other painted that angle.

The dry patch is the same.

Where Goldsworthy lay down and got up, the shape of a person remained.
There is no person and only the shape.

There are people on Byun Shi-Ji's surface.
And often there is no face.

It is absent because he is far off, or hidden because he is bowed.

In both cases it is not any particular person.
Only that a person was there remains.

The difference is clear too.

There is no sorrow in Goldsworthy's work.
He accepts what disappears evenly.

There is sorrow on Byun Shi-Ji's surface.
More exactly, there is mourning.

The old man's bowed head is the respect owed to those who did not return.

This is interpretation.
Only that standing long before the painting, it reads that way.

Many did not return to the island.
That event is called 4·3.

The painter spoke of those years in the oral history.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, pp. 241–243)

On Goldsworthy's land no such thing happened.
So his disappearing is nature's disappearing.

Byun Shi-Ji's disappearing is people's disappearing.

Standing before the same gate of materiality, if what disappeared differs, the form differs.

Five

The water comes in.

One stone moves, and then several move.
What was stacked scatters.

He steps back and watches.
He does not block it.

The stone walls of Jeju also stand by way of stepping back.
They let the wind through the gaps.

They do not block. They let through.

The two men do not know each other.
They never learned the same thing.

And they reached the same conclusion.

Endurance is not holding out.
It is letting through.

The stones scattered and the flat is as it was.
When the next tide goes out one can stack again.

Being able to stack and stacking the same thing are not the same.

The same thing does not come twice.