Goldsworthy Revisited

In my previous discussion of Andy Goldsworthy’s work I explored how his practices both seem in symbolic violation of Leave No Trace ethics and simultaneously seem to encourage a discourse about respectful and harmonious human interaction with nature. A quality fundamental to his sculptures that I simplified, however, is the salience of the place and landscape upon which his works are created. Perhaps the most explicit manifestation of this is Goldsworthy’s 2007 exhibit in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which incorporates cow dung as a material applied to the wall of glass windows lining the inside space. The window seems to create a liminal space connecting the inside and the outside, as a serpentine path remains clean, winding across the wall to create a sculpted lens through which the viewer can peer out at the seemingly endless landscape of farmland.  In discussing this exhibit Goldsworthy explains that “when you see spring lambs hopping around the fields and then go round the back of the farm, there's a pile of dead lambs every year — that's the way it is... It's such an important part of the landscape; it's green and verdant because of it. So that's why I put cow shit on the window, to make you aware of it while you're looking [out]. Right in front of your face is the stuff you choose to ignore.” One must quite literally look through cow shit to see the green land beyond and is challenged to make a connection between that which is considered disgusting and best unseen, and that which is considered beautiful, a destination worthy of landscape painting; that the latter could not exist in its state of beauty without the former. Perhaps Goldsworthy is exploring the possible inherent quality in humans that draws us to nature, questioning whether we are drawn only to the aspects that are culturally constructed as beautiful. What happens when we are forced to face the less romantic parts of the landscape? The viewer in this exhibit is presented with the opportunity to see beauty, too, in the cyclical systems of death, decay, fertilization, and eventual regrowth.

While farming at Essex, within a 5 minute span of time, I gawked and widely smiled at the endearing peeps of tiny chicks and then was immediately told to dump crates of them into the coops, instructed to, for time efficiency purposes, hold the cage vertically and aggressively shake out the birds into a heaping, peeping pile on the ground. And with that, I forced myself to be blind to their cuteness, acknowledge the literal and metaphorical cow shit, and move on with the myriad of chores to be done.

Cow Dung on Window, Andy Goldsworthy, 2007