Recently, I gave some friends on facebook a challenge: If earthworks artist Andy Goldsworthy, who creates elaborate ephemeral works of art out of twigs, leaves, rocks, etc., spent much of his time in a Manhattan office building, what might he create? The goal was to create theoretical projects using "natural" office resources-to create a whimsical work of art (complete with faux artistic rationale) that will start the day intact and be naturally worn away.

Here are some Goldsworth works, fyi.

























My idea--a silver screen made out of paper clips that covers the elevator entrance on my floor. Yes, employees must fight their way through it to get to work. Sure, you could see it as sending a hostile message, but, viewed another way, what says “I’m eager to get to work!” better than actually having to pry apart a barrier in order to get to your job?!


Marion responded by saying that "This reminds me of one of my daughter's art school projects: a "human trap." It consisted of a frame covered with opaque black plastic that had the same dimensions as the interior of the school elevator. On exhibition day, she set it up so her class walked out of the elevator and into the trap.

I don't know what I could think of that could top that, unless it was a pillar of Post-Its bearing phone messages, which I would entitle "Lot's Wife."

Edit Updika came up with this: "I think mine would be an electronic installation, perhaps an email that automatically replies to itself, creating an endless looping message that gets longer and longer and longer until it eats up all the bandwidth in the universe. Or until the sysops kill it.

This represents the boundless cycle of life, reproduction and growth ending in Armageddon, with or without (a) god(s)."

And Rachel weighed in with this: "I think that mine would be to take the utensils and napkins and affix them together as one unit and do this over and over and over again until i had enough for the next step...then I would take these units and build them into various symbols attached to one another with rubber bands and some of the various sticky stuff you've offered... there could be peace signs and butterflies and other images that suggest something other than the mess that this world mostly finds itself in...once it's done, people could remove the the utensil units and use it to eat with or whatever.

It would be utilitarian becomes arts becomes utilitarian once again representing the various dimensions of everything that we encounter but the cyclical nature of life."

What would you create?

Happy Goldsworthy

The perfect Goldsworthian holiday picture!*












*You might not want to break the ethereal mood by sharing the title: "Icicles, joined by saliva."

Student earthworks projects

What do the nation's students come up with when they go out into nature and emulate environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy? A project I'd like to do in my spare time is to compile examples of such work. One Christmas five or so years ago, the Austin Art Museum paired a Goldsworthy show (photos of a project he'd done for a wealthy family in Texas) with a Goldsworthy day at a park and also invited museumgoers to create their own earthwork arts and send in photos. It was a great way to draw the community into the museum.

What would emerge if NYC artists were asked to work with their native materials, whatever they considered them to be (okay, I'm thinking of the Goldsworthy faux-project I wrote about on this site earlier, using cigarette butts, metro cards, entrance tags from the MET, etc.) and then a show was built around their works? If Goldsworthy himself would work with "urban" materials it would be even more fascinating. Here's a recent story on student work from the Dallas News:

Students create art from nature at Arboretum

11:29 PM CST on Sunday, November 12, 2006

By ELIZABETH LANGTON / The Dallas Morning News

Their gallery was a secluded, wooded area of the Dallas Arboretum. Instead of clay or metal, they sculpted with leaves, flowers, branches and rocks.

They worked all day, creating more than a dozen pieces.

NATHAN HUNSINGER/DMN

Rose Martin arranged flowers around a spiral column of mud at the Arboretum on Nov. 8.

And then they left, abandoning the art for nature to reclaim.

"I prefer it that way," said student artist Laura Hall of Carrollton. "Because I know later on I won't enjoy the piece as much as the instant I made it."

Laura and 44 other students from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts participated Wednesday in an experiment.

Students enrolled in Advanced Placement 3-D design were tasked with creating site-specific art using only materials indigenous to the arboretum. Painters and photographers assisted with construction and then documented the work.

Their abstract creations hung from trees, balanced atop rock piles and sunk into the earth.

"I really liked it, getting out into nature," said junior Judge Rucker of Old East Dallas. "It helped me create pieces I thought I could never do."

The field trip culminated the students' study of the earthworks art form and artist Andy Goldsworthy, who is known for creating landscape-sensitive outdoor sculptures. Though some of these works are meant to be permanent, others last only as long as the weather conditions.

Judge said he felt no remorse about the eventual demise awaiting his sculpture of cornhusks, bamboo and flowers.

But he wonders how Mr. Goldsworthy can leave every piece he makes.

"If I did this every single day and all my pieces were like this, I wouldn't be able to do it," he said.

This was the first time the school attempted the project, which the Junior League of Dallas supported with an innovative teaching grant. Art teacher Paige Furr said they hope to make it an annual outing.

"It's a creative problem-solving experiment," she said. "It's an assignment that colleges do a lot. And they are doing work of a college level."

Once arboretum officials understood that the students had no plans to cut flowers in the garden, they got excited about the partnership, said Amy Winkelmeyer, who works in the arboretum's education program.

"It's fascinating," she said. "I was over there several times today. I'm just amazed at the ability and imagination they have to have to even come up with the ideas."

Senior Amber Campagna of Old East Dallas said she felt intrigued by the concept of making art from materials that surround her every day.

"It's not a piece of artwork that you can sell," she said. "It's something you just create for people to enjoy."

Leaving the art to nature makes creating it more interesting, said senior Alex Hamrick of Old East Dallas.

"It changes the sculpture but it doesn't change the quality," he said. "You can't take it out of the environment, so that makes it easier to let go. But if we hadn't gotten pictures of it, and I knew right now it was being washed away, I'd be thinking 'Oh, no.' "

Junior Suzanna Weeks of Old East Dallas, a painter, was intrigued by the idea of art abandonment.

"In a way, it must be really freeing to do a piece and leave it," she said. "When I do paintings, I come back later and say, 'I should have done this or that.' "

The students worked in an area off-limits to arboretum visitors. But they plan to exhibit the drawings and photos in the spring at school and next fall at ArtScape, the arboretum's fine arts show and sale.

Arboretum officials call the garden a living museum. ArtScape, held for the first time in September, draws on the link between nature and art, Ms. Winkelmeyer said.

The student project solidifies the connection, she said.

"It's a perfect marriage and it was an accident," she said. "They didn't even know we had an art show."

--end--

Director of "Rivers and Tides"

The Google Alert I have set for environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy sends me all sorts of stuff about stray Andy Goldsworthys around the world--have to work on that--but also provides some stray Goldworthy-related stuff that sends me off in unexpected Goldsworthian directions. A case in point is the item below that mentions a new and very different effort by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides." You can find the full writeup on this site (sorry, but you have to scroll down a bit to find it). Apparently there's a film festival in San Fran this weeekend, the 3rd I Film Festival, and the film mentioned below is just one of a host of interesting films, including a great-sounding one from Sri Lanka, that the site describes. The Riedelsheimer one (if I have to type that name again, and type it wrong five times again, I'm going to scream) is not the most interesting one described, in my opinion, but Riedelsheimer's work (AHHHHH! Sorry. It's been a long morning) on the Goldsworthy documentary was so amazing that it seems worth checking out other work he's done/does, Anyway, here's the writeup:

"Originally, I wasn't planning to see Between the Lines: India's Third Gender. Over the years I've seen a number of features and documentaries about the hijiras of India (most of them at the Frameline festival), and thus wondered if I really needed to see one more. Between the Lines, however, happens to be photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of the exquisite Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides. So yes, I do need to see this one, too. Praised by Variety's Jay Weissberg as representing "the best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch," Between the Lines casts its focus upon three of these marginalized beings as they guide renowned photographer Anita Khemka through their singular world."