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Mel Gooding, in his introduction to this book, reminds us that
the modern world has more in common with the order of being (the
macrocosm of all living things, the microcosm of individualised
humanity) as understood by the Greeks. Gooding sees modernist attitudes
as inevitably incorporating parts of earlier models that are manifestly
anachronistic for today. Yet today, as Gooding rightly claims, ‘We
contemplate how a world in which the very elements upon which life
depends - air, water and earth - are polluted, and the canopy of
our biosphere is pierced…We know now that among the endangered
species is humanity itself’. Scholarly yet clearly argued,
this publication, its introductory article by Gooding and the series
of protracted interviews by William Furlong, is exceptional through
the sheer technical quality of the photographs of the artist's works
and installations (which many publishers would have presented inadequately,
but not T&H) ironically assembled, despite the permeating sense
of foreboding, as a rite of celebration. There is here a celebration
of an inheritance which all the artists involved acknowledge, in
the fragile, timeless wonderment of nature. Gooding proclaims the
triumph of the Romantic impulse in Modernism here, as represented
by the artists selected.
In the second section of his introduction, Strategies in the
Field, Gooding boldly attempts to categorise such contemporary
artists by the procedures they have employed or deployed in the
process of 'dynamic intervention' with nature. Now indeed is the
time to differentiate those American artists, now grouped as Land
Art such as Walter di Maria and Robert Smithson, from those who
would especially in Europe recognise the fertile topsoil of Arte
Povera as their genesis. Gooding lists firstly the process of
walking actually, of symbolic intervention, including also structures
that are ‘intentionally made ephemeral’ (as Chris Drury,
Andy Goldsworthy and Peter Hutchins and including works by Bruce
McLean as well as of course Richard Long and Hamish Fulton). David
Nash too, fills this remit. Gooding clearly identifies a second
category here, with the process of gathering and assembling natural
objects indoors, in a studio and ultimately a gallery; this is much
more deliberately organised than the activity of putting together
objets trouvés. Herman de Vries and Nikolaus Lang
are examples given here. Bruce McLean's involvement, in ‘Splash
Art Sculpture’, ‘Mud Sculpture’ and ‘Floataway
Sculpture’ (1967-68), is notable. In some instances there is
a collaborative aspect to working with nature, both on the micro
and macro scales.
Gooding and Furlong have here made an important addition to the
growing list of landscape related works; timely also in cataloguing
key inspirational artists of value to all engaged in the conservation
of the fragile ecology of contemporary landscape resources.
Dr Janet McKenzie, Deputy Editor, Studio International
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