Hanging Stones

Land Art by Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy is an exceptional artist. His work is meditative, elegant, and in many cases, fleeting. It is also often grueling to create because he doesn’t use a huge staff to create the pieces. The scale of his work is still human, unlike the work of Christo & Jeanne Claude who absolutely had to use a crew to create their pieces. This article in the New York Times caught my attention this morning talking about completing a 10 year, six mile project called The Hanging Stones. I have never wanted to do a six mile walk, but I do now.

There was a period when I made large scale installations based on architectural archetypes, but there was only one piece I made that referenced earth art, and it was influenced by Walter de Maria’s Dirt Room in New York City. The dirt room breathes and when I saw it, I was in awe. It smells of rain and wet earth. It’s made up of an insane amount of dirt taking up an entire NYC loft space painted white, separated from viewers by a glass barrier. The dirt and the barrier are only about waist-high. While it’s open to the public, its existence isn’t advertised. It has been maintained by the DIAFoundation since 1977. It’s the best kept secret in New York, a complete installation in the heart of some of the most expensive real estate in the country. It’s meditative, and very funny. If you don’t know about it, you probably won’t see it. When I saw it the first time, I went because I’d heard about it and had to see it for myself. I’ve seen it three times but it was the first time when I knew I wanted to explore contradictions, humor, meditation, all of which come when you look at something familiar but it has been upended because something doesn’t make sense: a giant loft filled with acres of dirt, for example.

Most outdoor earth art is difficult to find, but exists in photographs taken by the artist. Some of the pieces are ephemeral and disappear over time. Some pieces, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty come and go, depending on conditions. Spiral Jetty is in Utah’s Great Salt Lake and is affected by lake levels; currently it’s visible. When I visited it was partially submerged.

None of this work makes sense, but it makes perfect sense. All of it influenced my work, but I never made earth work. All of this work challenges the viewer by the elegance coupled with a kind of absurdity - an 11 ton slab of rock suspended in a restored cottage doesn’t make sense, this is danger in a familiar living structure but it’s incredibly beautiful, and absolutely funny, and you can either turn your back on it and say this is shit; or you can breathe with it, try and accept the discomfort of it.

I think there’s a level of honesty in land art that helps me understand what’s happening around us (me) today. We’ve had a system of government that we (thought we) understood that is suddenly unfamiliar and something is off. Unlike land art, there’s nothing elegant or remotely meditative, there’s only fear and rage. For me, it’s imperative that I look at the beauty and truth of land art in order to find the strength to be active and resist the hate surrounding us rather than succumbing to the apathy that can come from contradictory messages.