MAn vs. Nature: Temporary Installations
Due February 3rd, 2017
Objective 1: Use materials only found on site to create a temporary installation. Focus on Line, Shape, Color, Texture, Movement, Contrast, Balance.
Objective 2: You will take photographs documenting the deterioration of your installation.
Objective 2: You will take photographs documenting the deterioration of your installation.
Because he works outdoors with natural materials, Goldsworthy is sometimes portrayed as a modern Druid; really, he is much closer to a latter-day Impressionist. Like those 19th-century painters, he is obsessed with the way sunlight falls and flickers, especially on stone, water and leaves. Monet—whose painting of a sunrise gave the Impressionist movement its name—used oil paint to reveal light's transformative power in his series of canvases of haystacks, the Rouen Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament. Goldsworthy is equally transfixed with the magical effect of natural light. Only he has discovered another, more elemental way to explore it
Throughout the 20th century, artists struggled with the dilemma of Modernism: how to convey an experience of the real world while acknowledging the immediate physical reality of the materials—the two-dimensional canvas, the viscous paint—being used in the representation. Goldsworthy has cut his way clear. By using the landscape as his material, he can illustrate aspects of the natural world—its color, mutability, energy—without resorting to mimicry. Although he usually works in rural settings, his definition of the natural world is expansive. "Nature for me isn't the bit that stops in the national parks," he says. "It's in a city, in a gallery, in a building. It's everywhere we are." Goldsworthy's principal artistic debt is to "Land Art," an American movement of the 1960s that took Pollock's and de Kooning's macho Abstract Expressionism out of the studio to create giant earthworks such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake of Utah or Michael Heizer's Double Negative in Nevada. Unlike Smithson and Heizer, however, Goldsworthy specializes in the ephemeral. A seven-foot-long ribbon of red poppy petals that he stuck together with saliva lasted just long enough to be photographed before the wind carried it off. His leaves molder, his ice arabesques melt. One work in which he took special joy, a sort of bird's nest of sticks, was intended to evoke a tidal whirlpool; when the actual tide carried it into the water, its creator marveled as it gyrated toward destruction. Read more: http://visualmelt.com/Andy-Goldsworthy Process1. Choose a site. Make sure you have plenty of materials to work with!
2. Use your found materials to make a simple form. Circles, squares, spirals, pathways, etc. 3. Photograph your progress daily. Photograph the completed sculpture and document it's deterioration over the next week. Warning: You are outside. Pay attention to your surroundings: rusty objects, glass, trash, insects, snakes, spiders & stray dogs. Be safe. |
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Requirements
Photographs of site and sketch of installation.
Daily progress & finished installation photographs.
5 post completion photos documenting the deterioration of the installation.
Materials
Found materials, camera, paper pencil.
Photographs of site and sketch of installation.
Daily progress & finished installation photographs.
5 post completion photos documenting the deterioration of the installation.
Materials
Found materials, camera, paper pencil.