“Sermons in Stone, Books in the Running Brooks”:

Natural Language in Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and Tides

Over the last twenty years, the work of Andy Goldsworthy has achieved great notoriety in the art world. His work is displayed in museums, office buildings, parks, forests and deserts and is created in settings that range from London streets to the North Pole. That work has been made accessible to a wide audience through luscious large format books, reviews, articles and websites describing his often sensational installations. Goldsworthy has generated an impressive progeny of collaborators, including musicians, choreographers, architects, and landscape designers. The most notable spinoff from his work is the feature length film, Rivers and Tides, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer, released to theatres in 2001 and as a DVD in 2004. At sold-out screenings in San Rafael and San Luis Obispo California, I joined the rest of the audience in gasps and oohs at many moments. The combination of homey familiarity and startling originality of Goldworthy’s inventions tempts many admirers to try their hand at similar work. Several educators and curators have developed workshops for those who are so inspired.

Although the fertility of his creations transcends categorization, Goldsworthy is known as an “environmental artist,” and one of his books is entitled Collaboration with Nature. However, a preliminary literature search in the contents of ISLE and the MLA index recovers no references to him, and the many articles by art critics rarely consider his work in an appropriate interdisciplinary context. Goldsworthy doesnt just pile rocks, stitch leaves, and dig holes in the ground. His actions are accompanied by and illustrate prolific verbal discourse—in captions and essays in his books, in a host of recorded interviews and in the voiceover soundtrack of the film. The immediate sensual pleasure afforded by his art is informed by ideas and gives rise to them.

Topics covered in these discourses are familiar to students of literature and the environment: the sense of place, temporal change and permanent pattern, solitude, immanence and transcendance, among others. I propose to explore one idea central to Goldworthy’s artistic quest: the language of communication between humans and nature. At one point in the narrative of Rivers and Tides, Goldsworthy says “...you feel as if you had touched the heart of the place...seeing something you had never seen before but you were blind to it...these are moments I live for...”

Like Wordsworth and Emerson, Goldsworthy claims that such moments of communication are “inexpressible.” But he repeatedly insists that the creation of art “in collaboration with nature,” allows such communication to succeed. It combines the language of sculpture with the languages of adventure, of scientific observation, of philosophy and of poetic metaphor.

Goldsworthy’s multisensory and multimedia “natural language” relates to conventional language in ways that normal human language—what computer scientists refer to as “natural language"--relates to machine language. Just as “Natural language understanding is one of the hardest problems of artificial intelligence due to the complexity, irregularity and diversity of human language and the philosophical problems of meaning,” so finding a language we share with non-human entities is one of the hardest problems faced by Goldsworthy and other ecoliterary artists. Rivers and Tides provides an appropriate approach to this problem through the film medium’s extended range of expression: literal reproduction, continous and discontinuous change, shifting points of view and multiple layerings of sound. In partnership with the artist, cinematographer Thomas Riedelsheimer uses this range of expression to document and interpret a representative selection of artist’s work.

My paper will present a preliminary rhetorical study of the language of nature in the work of Goldsworthy and Riedelsheimer. It will be informed by comparisons with such language in writings by Thoreau--specifically, the description of the mudflow at the end of Walden—by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, and by D’Arcy Thompson in On Growth and Form.

Steven Marx, English Dept.

Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo CA 93407

smarx@calpoly.edu