Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Art in the back yard part 2

This past summer I put almost everything on hold to focus on building myself a new studio.  This blog was put on what was supposed to be a three month break and it turned into a six month hiatus.  I'm not apologizing though, and won't bore you with excuses.  

What I am sorry about is how few art shows I have actually visited lately.  I have missed the opportunity to write about and share thoughts on some really nice shows like the Clarence Morgan show at the MSU School of Architecture and completely missed seeing shows that I wanted to check out like the Dan Piersol and Maureen Donnelly exhibition at Fischer Galleries.  I did make Richard Kelso's annual December show at Fischer, and you may still be able to catch some of it if you're lucky.  

Clarence Morgan

Dan Piersol

So I've decided that I will return to the passions of my children and their love of Andy Goldsworthy.  previous post  At some point early this past summer my 5 year old and soon to be 4 year old asked to watch the movie about "the guy who makes things".  Could any of us ask for a better title than that?  The dreams and inspiration after watching Rivers and Tides are evident in their eyes, and I am right there with them.  It never fails that after watching this documentary they are ready to create.  My son decided that we should make a stone arch like the ones Andy makes.  Problem number 1: we don't live in a rocky environment.  Problem number 2: that sounds like a lot of work, and I am going to have to do it all myself.  Problem number 1 was solved when I found some chunks of broken concrete.  Problem number 2 couldn't be solved.  So here we go...


The first arch...


 collapsed...

he was devastated...

the second arch...

collapsed...

as did the third and maybe the fourth, I can't remember now how many of them I made.  In the documentary Andy talks about getting to know the stone as you are working with it.  There is a lot of truth to that, and finally...


we (I) did it.

But the story doesn't end there.  In the documentary Andy says "the very thing that brings the work to life is what will cause its death".  In his case it is nature, and in my case it is a 5 year old boy with a soccer ball.  Apparently after two weeks our stone arch began to look more like a soccer goal than a piece of artwork.  He was heartbroken though, and there is probably a good lesson in there about how we become too comfortable and careless with things around us that we care for... be it art, religion, relationships, or whatever.  

In order to keep this blog post from being completely nostalgic I wanted to share some new thoughts on Andy's work.  There is an obvious connection between Andy's work and the environmental or land art in the United States from the late 60's and early 70's, but his aesthetic seems quite different from most Westerners.  During the same time period there was an art movement in Japan called the Mono-ha.  This movement was also environmental in nature, but the work has that certain something that Japanese work has.  A simple beauty and elegance that is indicative of the culture.  This overall Japanese aesthetic is apparently derived from traditional tea ceremonies and is called Wabi-Sabi.  In Leonard Koren's book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, he says that Wabi-Sabi is "a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.  It is a beauty of things modest and humble.  It is a beauty of things unconventional."  I think that Andy Goldsworthy may be Scottish, but he is really Japanese at heart. 


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