‘Sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es’ Karl Marx
A bright fringe of red shining leaves around heavy boulders, a row of leaves changing from greeny white over yellow to dark green, pebbles concentrically arranged from big to small and from dark to light around a black hole, icicles frozen together into a spiral: this is only a pick at random from the meanwhile very popular creations of Goldsworthy.

TECHNICAL BEAUTY
Goldsworthy’s creation is governed by the principle of the elementary. Elementary is already his choice of the materials. Goldsworthy processes ‘raw materials’ in the literal sense of the word: materials as they are found in nature. That has certainly been, in primeval times, the starting point of human production as such. But gradually nature itself is processed before being subject to further manipulation. No longer the fleece of the sheep is washed and cut: it is the wool that is sheared, combed, spun before entering the fabric as a thread. The same goes for trees, that are sawn up into planks before being transformed into a piece of furniture; for the grain, that after having been submitted to cultural selection is previously ground to flour before being baked into bread; for the clay that is previously moulded into the shape of bricks and baked before entering the masonry. Not so with Goldsworthy: his colours are not just squeezed out of a tube. It are the very colours you just find like that in an autumn forest. They are all over the place. Just like sticks, pebbles, plumes, icicles and all the other materials Goldsworthy is using. Found materials, thus, that deserve an equally elementary processing. In most cases Goldsworthy limits himself to the selecting, displacing or rearranging of leaves, pebbles, sticks and boulders. When he uses instruments at all, then equally ‘found’ instruments: the stick wherewith he scrapes the sand, the thorns wherewith he sticks the leaves together. More often, he lets nature work on its own without the intervention of any instrument: as when he lets icicles freeze together. And also in this cases the forces of nature are not previously isolated and boosted, as is the case with the heath of the fire in an oven. Goldsworthy rather lets his clay dry in the sun. Sometimes the processing is negative: as when man-made stones of sand are dismantled through the tide, or when a snowball collapses when melting, or when the clay enveloping boulders bursts during the process of drying. And equally minimal is, finally, the composition created by Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy replaces the variegated chaos of leaves in the forest or pebbles on the beach with a progression from one colour to another, from light to dark, from big to small, or with a coordination in identity. He replaces sticks fallen at random on the ground with a circle, or a line. What is laying down on the earth - the ultimate fate of everything susceptible to gravity - Goldsworthy piles up to cones, towers, or even arcs, domes and eggs struggling against gravity. Sometimes the same effect is obtained through a mere shift of the direction in which nature had formed her materials: icicles pointing vertically in the skies or protruding horizontally from a rock face – or turning around themselves in a spiral. Thus contrasted as found versus created order, Goldworthy’s creations profile themselves as artificial figures against a natural background. But the new order is not unnatural as such, it is so only in the given context. Lines, cracks, meanders, spirals, concentric forms or chessboard patterns, star-shapes, spheres and eggs: these are all compositions that can be found in nature, but applied to other materials in other contexts. Goldsworthy himself reminds us of that when his composition explicitly refers to other natural phenomena: as when he imposes the spiral-shape of the nautilus shell on leaves. Sometimes Goldsworthy’s composition is so deceptively natural that we might inadvertently pass it by. That something has been photographed, makes us suspect that there is something to be seen: a mere crack running right through a whole series of pebbles. Until it dawns on us that single pebbles may well crack, but possibly not an entire row! Only then do we realise that the supposedly natural crack is in fact a composition borrowed from nature and imposed upon a series of broken pebbles. In all cases, Goldsworthy realises a maximal effect, precisely by refraining from isolating his creations from their natural soil. Precisely the untouched virginity of the environment makes the creation visible as a disturbance. That is why nature is not only the provider of raw materials, techniques and processing, but foremost the natural biotope of Goldsworthy’s creations. Transported into an artificial environment, they would lose all their charms. Also in this sense do his creations remain bound to nature by an indissoluble tie. And that brings us to the meaning of such creation. Goldsworthy is not out at the mere production of a useful object, let alone an object that should please man for its sole beauty. He wants rather to embody the beauty of the act of creation in an exemplary intervention. That is why the often irresistible charm of his work does not derive from the final result, but from the beauty of its creation, the deed to which its owes its existence and that remains visible in the end product. This kind of creation strikes the all too often disturbed chord of harmony with nature: man is allowed to intervene, to bend to his will, even to disturb, but not to rape, let alone to saw off the branch of the tree on which he is sitting. The technical beauty of Goldsworthy’s work can be read as a silent criticism on the industrial and post-industrial way of production, which no longer processes materials that have been found in nature, but materials that have been submitted to an often endless series of transformations for them to subdue without any resistance to the forces of nature unleashed by man in super-instruments and machines. As when the laser cuts thick steel plates without any resistance, not to mention the silent violence wherewith in the digital dimension quantities measured in megas and gigas are digested in fractions of seconds. Precisely the astounding ease wherewith every resistance is eliminated beforehand, results in the scaling-up that, already from the pyramids onwards, foreshadows the ultimate tower of Babylon: it is the awe-inspiring ugliness of many a architectural giga-project, that in its monstrous proportions is knocked up in a few months or of the hideous vehicles that in many a science fiction film are released in space. Goldsworthy’s silent criticism is all the more charming since it speaks through the work itself and is not added to it through some external symbolism. No references to Indians, Zen or yin and yang come to spoil or fun.

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