In the time it takes to read this sentence, Andy Goldsworthy’s moment may well have come and gone.
The artist in Goldsworthy manipulates his environment with the understanding it will be undone by time. He builds, labors and obsesses on baron shorelines and in lush fields, a lonely audience to rock piles and puzzles of leaves and twigs. They are brought together as oddities in natural contexts, and no matter how methodically he tunes his natural instruments, the end product of these delicately executed means always remains the idea of creation itself.
Director Thomas Riedelsheiner provides Goldsworthy a quasi-permanency in “Rivers and Tides,” a film of extraordinary patience that allows the artist’s work a motion his books, though striking documents, only suggest. We’re brought alongside Goldsworthy’s gentle hands composing desolate pieces of driftwood into a whirlpool-shaped community, and then left to stutter for a reaction when it’s stolen away by the tide. We’re present as he threads together chains of leaves that unfurl and crawl along the rivers that consume him. He repeats the importance of their symbolic presence as a mantra throughout the film, time and again reminding us of the flow, of the veins apparent in all of life, and the relationship between man and nature that his work humbly accentuates.
“When I build something, I often take it to the edge of its collapse, and that’s a very beautiful balance,” he says in a touching moment, sitting underneath a curtain of twigs he’s woven by hand and planted from the limb of a tree. A moment later it collapses, and the audience – as it does at all such moments throughout – audibly gasps. It’s unpretentious high-drama, and Goldsworthy greets such temporary defeats with reserved sighs and a slouching posture. Four times we see him fall back onto a pliable shore and study the ruins of a rock sculpture until his understanding of it is enough that he succeeds; the tide washes in and the egg-shaped mound, fully submerged, maintains its poetic reserve.
Goldsworthy studies his landscapes with a quiet appreciation – “I need the land” – and Riedelsheiner does the same with his direction. Often we’re left with the still-image of the artist deep in thought, or alone with his works long after he’s left them to simply be. Riedelsheiner’s camera is elegantly uprooted in these moments, gliding along like much of Goldsworthy’s work, shooting intimately and revealing in increments – over time and physical space – the methods by which his art unravels.
The film also takes us home with Goldsworthy to Penpont, Scotland, revealing the artist as a reserved installation in his own family, and throughout the streets of his modest village as he collects material and conversation from neighbors. A later scene in the South of France, during the construction of a museum piece, shows the artist wiping away the final imperfections of a large, clay wall. The material comes straight from the earth and is bound by human hair collected from the floors of his village barbershop. “This way, my village is in my work,” he says. He is, of course, absolutely correct; every step his art takes both nudges a preconceived boundary away and turns him around toward home, where he returns to gather his greatest inspirations.
“Rivers and Tides” is an extraordinary slideshow of natural contradictions and human dedication. It appeals to our instincts because Goldsworthy chooses to work where many of us spent our childhoods desiring to be; by rivers and in trees, with rocks under the rain and outside in the snow. He’s tempted by the uncertainty of the moment, of all moments, and lures us in on the same mercurial ticket. It’s a strong narrative that needs little dialogue and no plot – just the simple beauty of always Being There.
