Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time

A priceless riddle forms the heart of Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time.

Goldsworthy, a Scottish artist who works with sticks, rocks and icicles – found matter that he uses to create elliptical sculptures. Spiderwebs are made from twigs, circular mounds from stone and dirt. All of his work is constructed in nature, where inevitably it is altered – often immediately destroyed - by the elements. Which doesn’t irk him at all – to Goldsworthy, everything in nature is temporal, and his art operates as a reflection of this philosophy.

Directed by German documentary filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer, Rivers and Tides details a year in the working life of an eccentric genius, capturing his painstaking dedication and the unavoidable mishaps of working with nature.

Goldsworthy’s materials and placement are so fragile that they often collapse just before they’re completed. But incredibly, the man never gets angry, never bemoans his haphazard planning or blames the material for his failure. When a stone sculpture collapses – a sculpture that Goldsworthy has rebuilt twice because of a shifty surface, he simply sighs and exclaims: “I understand the stone better now.”

Goldsworthy’s simple, uncoded observations and transcendentalist approach to life seem to place him in a different age; he may as well be Thoreau tending to his bean fields or Emerson lecturing in Cambridge. He doesn’t view the vanishing of his art as a negative consequence; in fact, its dissipation in the water and wind is the key to his philosophy. Nothing in his world is ever destroyed; it’s simply sacrificed to nature.

The genius of Rivers and Tides isn’t in merely in capturing its subject’s essence. It’s in the way the film absorbs Goldsworthy’s Zen personality into its very structure. Riedelsheimer doesn’t trot out talking-head scholars to explain the importance of his subject’s work, and we never witness media attention of his exhibits. The only person who does any talking in the film is Goldsworthy – who limits his words to the work at hand. His placid determination is so unshakable that it eventually comes to define everything on the screen.

Which is where the riddle of the movie comes into play. Because Goldsworthy’s art is purposefully temporary, it poses a fundamental question about the nature of art: is the essence of a work in the act of its creation or in the observation of later viewers?

At first blush, the film would indicate the former – Goldsworthy certainly thinks so. But the only surviving evidence for much of his work is photographic, and the only way we can judge much of the work is second-hand, which would imply that the photos are the true works of art.

But, like interpretations of its subject’s art, the deeper implications are left perfectly open-ended. The film quietly dances around the topic and lets us decide for ourselves. The film’s open-ended philosophy makes this a rare gem – a biography that places the art above the artist. Goldsworthy couldn’t have made it better himself.